176 The Swiss and Their Neighbours, 1460–1560
character as a series of leagues. How, therefore, did the Confederation operate and
how did it survive?
We have previously stressed the growth of the Confederation through a series
of bilateral leagues or alliances; these bear comparison with the Hanseatic League23
or the Dutch United Provinces,24 whose collective political decision-making
rested with the Hanseatic diet or the States General, respectively. But the Hansa
had no institutional framework while the provinces of the Dutch Republic were
in theory sovereign states, but in practice only Holland could realistically aspire
to true independence. In Switzerland it was the variety of Burgrechte which
counted: it enabled them to be deployed in different circumstances and to address
different needs, latterly including their role as instruments of territorial expansion
and consolidation, thereby overcoming the danger of fissiparity.25 Then, during the
fifteenth century the establishment of common lordships contributed to a sense of
collective purpose, not simply because their administration required frequent con-
sultation in the diets, but also because they involved an annual financial account-
ing.26 Though there are useful essays on the administration of the common
lordships it is regrettable that little has been written on their wider political
impact.27 While stressing their role in promoting cohesion and integration André
Holenstein admits that they also gave rise to conflicts.28 The Thurgau, as we have
seen, is the test case par excellence. It is also clear from the occupation of the county
of Neuchâtel between 1512/14 and 1529 that no principle of communality inhered
in the common lordships: they could just as easily be temporary expedients born
of political or military emergency. And the confessional divide after the late 1520s
certainly put an end to the prospect of new common lordships governed by the
XIII cantons as a whole.
It is therefore unwise to search for the key to Switzerland’s survival primarily in
institutional advances, for it is hard to disagree with Schwinges’s verdict that
the Confederation embodied ‘a backward-looking concept of statehood’.29 It is
equally important to stress that Swiss Confederation was not erected upon or
informed by any particular political theory of republicanism; rather, it grew out
of a struggle against the Habsburgs driven by a practical assertion of communal
23 Tamara Münger, ‘Hanse und Eidgenossenschaft—zwei mittelalterliche Gemeinschaften im
Vergleich’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 119 (2001), 5–48.
24 Holenstein, Maissen, and Prak (eds), Republican Alternative.
25 Speich, ‘Burgrecht’, passim; the variety is also stressed by Münger, ‘Hanse und
Eidgenossenschaft’, 26.
26 Andreas Würgler, ‘ “The League of Discordant Members” or How the Old Swiss Confederation
Operated and How It Managed to Survive for So Long’, in Holenstein, Maissen, and Prak (eds),
Republican Alternative, 29–50, here at 32.
27 Randolph C. Head, ‘Shared Lordship, Authority, and Administration: The Exercise of Dominion
in the Gemeine Herrschaften of the Swiss Confederation, 1417–1600’, Central European History,
30 (1997), 489–512; André Holenstein, ‘Die Herrschaft der Eidgenossen. Aspekte eidgenössischer
Regierung und Verwaltung in den Landvogteien und Gemeinen Herrschaften’, in Lukas Gschwend
and Pascale Sutter (eds), Zwischen Konflikt und Integration. Herrschaftsverhältnisse in Landvogteien und
Gemeinen Herrschaften (15.–18. Jh.), Itinera, 33 (2012), 9–30.
28 Holenstein, ‘Herrschaft der Eidgenossen’, 14.
29 Schwinges, ‘Solothurn und das Reich’, 455.