Setting the Scene 11
Swabian imperial city of Lindau, both in 1458.12 Stein am Rhein, another diminutive
quasi-imperial city on the north bank of the Rhine, was obliged to accept Zürich’s
protection the following year, having failed to raise the colossal asking price of
45,000 fl to purchase its freedom from the barons von Klingenberg.13 Then, in
1463, the Swabian city of Rottweil, a long-standing ally of Schaffhausen, which
was the seat of the imperial court of justice (Hofgericht), the supreme appellate
court for southern Germany, signed a fifteen-year treaty of associated membership
with the VIII cantons, which thereafter was regularly renewed.14 Several powerful
noble dynasties also contracted themselves to Swiss service in these years.15
It is immediately obvious that these alliances conformed to no overarching
pattern or purpose, yet in geopolitical terms they demonstrate that for their neigh-
bours to the east and north the Swiss exerted a growing attraction, without that
pull implying from the outset that the Swiss were harbouring notions of wider
territorial expansion. Rather, there is good reason to think that the Swiss deliber-
ately eschewed the admission of more full members in order not to perpetuate the
tensions in the balance of power which had inflamed the Old Zürich War, or more
specifically to tilt the balance towards the urban cantons. Bernhard Stettler has
characterized the two decades from 1450 to 1470 as ‘overlooked’ in Swiss history,
marked by unforeseen consequences, a lack of coherent policy, and abrupt changes
of direction.16 Among these nothing was more dramatic than the cantons’ seizure
of the Thurgau in 1460 and its recasting as a common lordship. The reasons for
their coup de main and its consequences, not least for the city of Konstanz and for
its bishopric, remain to be explored.
12 It had been repeatedly harassed by Archduke Sigismund, and later in 1478 it was obliged to
enter into a 5-year protective alliance with Austria. Wilhelm Baum, Sigmund der Münzreiche. Zur
Geschichte Tirols und der habsburgischen Länder im Spätmittelalter (Schriftenreihe des Südtiroler
Kulturinstituts, 14) (Bolzano, 1987).
13 Peter Niederhäuser, ‘Zwischen Konkurrenz, Partnerschaft und Unterordnung. Das Verhältnis
von Grafen und Herren zu Städten im späten Mittelalter’, in Kurt Andermann and Clemens Joos (eds),
Grafen und Herren in Südwestdeutschland vom 12. bis ins 17. Jahrhundert (Kraichtaler Kolloquien, 5)
(Epfendorf am Neckar, 2006), 71–95, here at 85.
14 Stettler, Eidgenossenschaft, 222. The alliance was intended to provide regulated access to the
imperial court of justice.
15 Stettler, Eidgenossenschaft, 217. He instances the lords of Sax-Hohensax and Werdenberg-Sargans.
16 Stettler, Eidgenossenschaft, 208.