Setting the Scene 9
southern Germany, detested and derided since its crushing defeats at Sempach and
Näfels in 1386 and 1388, has dominated Swiss historical writing until very recent
times. It has been reinforced by the propaganda war between the ‘cow-Swiss’ and
the ‘sow-Swabians’ which developed after 1450. This war, largely waged by their
enemies, pitched the republican and godless Swiss who rejected the divinely
ordained authority of the Empire, monarchical and feudal, against pious and
obedient subjects of the Habsburgs, as the two sides grew increasingly apart. The
campaign, in pamphlets and verses, was marked by scatological vituperation in
which the Swiss as a nation of herdsmen and stock-breeders were repeatedly
accused of bestiality.4 The hatred between Swabians (here understood as the inhab-
itants of southern Germany as a whole) and the Swiss discharged itself in the
so-called Swabian or Swiss War of 1499, which some have regarded as a civil war
fought along the length of the Rhine from Alsace to Vorarlberg with unprece-
dented brutality and savagery against both persons and property, leaving the
borderlands, in Peter Niederhäuser’s memorable phrase, devastated as a ‘winter
landscape’.5 Thereafter, it is argued, the Rhine became the effective frontier between
South Germany and Switzerland: the former under Habsburg tutelage, particu-
larly with the establishment of the Swabian League in 1488, which became a
vehicle for Emperor Maximilian’s dynastic aspirations; the latter comprising first
VIII, then after 1481 X, and finally by 1513 XIII members, at last identifiable as
a distinct and coherent polity.6
This picture has in recent years been subject to considerable retouching. The
present essay will argue that the Swiss conquest of the Thurgau in 1460, which was
to become the Confederation’s second common lordship, although customarily
seen as the last nail in the coffin of Habsburg power south of the Rhine, in fact
posed more problems than it solved for the participating cantons. Far from being
the capstone of Swiss expansion northwards it ushered in decades of awkward
negotiations between the cantons themselves over its boundaries, administration,
and jurisdiction which inhibited (but did not preclude) further territorial aspir-
ations and which led to a palpable reorientation in Swiss foreign policy. Gradually,
despite the smoke and thunder of the propaganda war, the ingrained hostility
between the Swiss and the house of Austria yielded to a search for an accommoda-
tion which found expression in the so-called Perpetual Accord (Ewige Richtung) of
1474, intended not as an alliance of solidarity but as a modus vivendi between
4 Helmut Maurer, Schweizer und Schwaben. Ihre Begegnung und ihr Auseinanderleben am Bodensee
im Spätmittelalter (Konstanzer Universitätsreden, 136), 2nd edn (Konstanz, 1991).
There is, however, a clear distinction to be made between mockery of the ‘cow-Swiss’ as peasants
and stigmatization of the Swiss as cow-sodomizers, which implied heresy. Matthias Weishaupt,
Bauern, Hirten und ‘frume edle puren’: Bauern und Bauernstaatsideologie in der spätmittelalterlichen
Eidgenossenschaft und der nationalen Geschichtsschreibung der Schweiz (Nationales Forschungsprogramm,
21: Kulturelle Vielfalt und Nationale Identität) (Basel, 1992), 46–7 n 87.
5 Peter Niederhäuser, ‘ “Uns aus der Notdurft in die Gegenwehr schicken”—Winterthur, das
Weinland und die angrenzenden Gebiete im Schwabenkrieg von 1499’, Zürcher Taschenbuch auf das
Jahr 2001, 119–70, here at 130 ff.
6 On the consolidation of the Swiss polity in the 15th century see fundamentally Bernhard Stettler,
Die Eidgenossenschaft im 15. Jahrhundert—Die Suche nach einem gemeinsamen Nenner (Zürich, 2004).