Introduction 3
passage to Italy,7 its course and consequences were greatly complicated by the
tensions which existed on what came to be regarded as Switzerland’s northern
frontier. Yet behind the animosity and aggression lay, I suggest, a search for accom-
modation between neighbours—not a friendship but a modus vivendi—which came
to regard the Rhine not as a boundary but as a buffer zone, within which future
conflicts might be contained.
The second case study focuses on the prehistory of the conquest of the Vaud
(under the guise of the relief of Geneva) by a Bernese army in 1536. By then Bern
was already by far the largest of the Swiss cantons, and its seemingly relentless
expansion westwards and southwards has been taken as the hallmark of Bernese
policy from the 1470s, driven initially as a response to (if not immediately caused
by) Burgundian ambitions under Duke Charles the Bold to seize territories on the
western fringes of the Empire. By the 1530s, however, any assessment of Bernese
intentions is complicated by the city’s adoption of the Reformation in 1528 and its
efforts to proselytize the new faith throughout the Romandie (the francophone
districts to the west and south). In this light, Bern’s relief of Geneva from belea-
guerment by the house of Savoy (which asserted jurisdiction over the city) has
traditionally been seen as a deliberate attempt to rescue the inchoate Reformation
in Geneva from dilution or defeat.
While this account may possess superficial plausibility, it ignores too many
thorny issues: Bern’s ability—specifically the policy considerations of the city’s
Small Council, always alert to the wider diplomatic implications of any out-
thrust—to act in defiance of the other cantons (especially the Catholic ones); its
relations with its long-standing neighbour Fribourg, which remained resolutely
Catholic but which became the beneficiary, neither unwillingly nor unwittingly, of
the conquest of the Vaud; the geopolitical horizon of Bernese foreign policy which
stretched as much westwards into the Franche-Comté (its indispensable supplier of
salt) and north-westwards into Alsace (a regular source of grain) as it did south-
westwards or south-eastwards; and the looming presence of France, which had
long harboured designs upon both the Franche-Comté and even Neuchâtel east of
the Jura mountains, and which saw an opportunity of exploiting Geneva’s predica-
ment to invade Savoy and Piedmont, to drive Duke Charles II into exile, and to
resurrect its vision of freeing northern Italy from Spanish Habsburg hegemony. In
the end, this welter of competing considerations curbed Bern’s aggression and
obliged it, too, to seek accommodation with its neighbours.
Swiss historiography in the period under review has concentrated quite under-
standably upon two themes: externally, the Italian Wars, the involvement of Swiss
mercenaries, the payment of pensions (chiefly by the French, permanent allies after
1516/21), and the acquisition by the Inner cantons of the so-called transalpine
bailiwicks south of the Alps controlling military and commercial routes into
Lombardy, which were administered as common lordships; and internally on reli-
gious divisions within Switzerland between supporters of the old faith and adher-
ents of the new evangelical doctrines, a conflict which brought the Confederation
7 Marquardt, Alte Eidgenossenschaft, 52.