Although Konstanz had been able to keep its distance during the hostilities of the
Old Zürich War, the Thurgau, its hinterland to the south which it had long hoped
to make the core of a city-state, was harried by both Zürich and Austrian troops,
as well as by irregulars from the Inner Swiss cantons. In 1458 an incident at a
shooting competition in the city led five citizens of Luzern to declare a feud against
Konstanz. It seems that some Konstanz citizens had openly mocked the plappart,
a small Bernese coin worth half a groschen, as a ‘cow-plappart’ (the connotations
of which we have noted in Chapter 1). Thereupon freebooters from the Forest can-
tons made ready to plunder Konstanz to avenge the insult, only to be bought off
by the city council for 3000 fl (admittedly a sizeable sum). Whatever the origins of
the affair—rather grandly styled the ‘Plappart War’—it appears that Swiss anger
was in this instance directed not at Austria but at the imperial cities strung out
along the northern shore of Lake Konstanz, keen to rub their imperial loyalty
under the noses of the Swiss.17
Nevertheless, the prospect of easy pickings remained. Under the pretext of
answering a call by Pope Pius II to place Archduke Sigismund of Austria under the
ban for a supposed affront to his authority in South Tirol (the pope had been
bishop of Bressanone), bands of young men from Unterwalden, Luzern, and
Rapperswil (where the real source of the conflict with the Habsburgs lay) irrupted
into the Thurgau in 1460 and seized control of the Austrian bailiwick, including,
after a siege and with reinforcements from Bern and Schaffhausen, the small town
of Diessenhofen.18 This raid received retrospective sanction from the Confederates,
with the Thurgau henceforth designated as a common lordship under the rule
of VII cantons (excluding Bern). Swiss troops, now under Zürich’s firm control,
then marched eastwards to occupy the bailiwicks of Nidberg, Freudenberg, and
Walenstadt. These districts, together with the county of Sargans, sold to the VII
cantons by the counts of Werdenberg-Sargans in 1483, came to constitute a third
common lordship on the left bank of the Alpine Rhine.19
17 Helmut Maurer, ‘Formen der Auseinandersetzung zwischen Eidgenossen und Schwaben: der
“Plappartkrieg” von 1458’, in Peter Rück (ed.), Die Eidgenossen und ihre Nachbarn im Deutschen Reich
des Mittelalters (Marburg an der Lahn, 1991), 193–214.
18 EA II, 309–10 (no. 486); Helmut Maurer, Konstanz im Mittelalter: Vom Konzil bis zum Beginn
des 16. Jahrhunderts (Geschichte der Stadt Konstanz, 2), 2nd edn (Konstanz, 1996), 105.
19 Wilhelm Baum, Die Habsburger in den Vorlanden 1386–1486. Krise und Höhepunkt der habsburg
ischen Machtstellung in Schwaben am Ausgang des Mittelalters (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar, 1993), 413–14;
Benedict Bilgeri, Geschichte Vorarlbergs, 2: Bayern, Habsburg, Schweiz—Selbstbehauptung (Vienna/
Cologne/Graz, 1974), 248.