The Occupation of the Thurgau 15
allegiance was their preferred means of affirming overlordship. For its part,
Konstanz had no compunction in continuing to acquire lower jurisdictions in
the Thurgau, though it had to abandon its earlier practice of granting citizen’s
rights to country dwellers.28 The most the Swiss could hope to achieve was the
suppression of feuds and freebooting, and a ban on appeals to foreign courts
(except, of course, to the ecclesiastical courts and to Konstanz’s Landgericht).29 It
was a paltry outcome.
In any case, territorially the Swiss collectively did not gain full possession of the
area which constituted the Thurgau. Quite apart from Konstanz’s uninterrupted
control of half the lordship of Weinfelden,30 in the west Zürich had already suc-
ceeded in incorporating the county of Kyburg into its contado after 1442 as a
mortgage from Austria. In the east, the abbacy of St Gallen laid claim to several
lower jurisdictions (as well as buying Toggenburg in 1468), though its assertion of
capital jurisdiction, for instance in Wil, brought it up against Konstanz as holder
of the Landgericht, rather than the Swiss.31 These quarrels were not resolved until
after 1500.32 The bishop of Konstanz’s scattered possessions on the south bank of
Lake Konstanz, above all his castles, were temporarily occupied during the Swiss
War but otherwise untouched, with the exception of the strategically crucial castle
of Gottlieben. After 1500 only Arbon and Bischofszell were exempted from swear-
ing an oath of allegiance.33
Any benefit of the Thurgau as a potential launching pad for further Swiss expan-
sion beyond the Rhine was limited, moreover, by the remarkable reassertion of
Austrian power in Swabia. What the Habsburgs lost in Switzerland was more than
compensated by gains stretching westwards from Vorarlberg to the Hegau, not
least the acquisition there of the landgraviate of Nellenburg in 1465, hard on
the heels of the Swiss conquest of the Thurgau. By the late fifteenth century the
Habsburgs had made great strides—despite humiliation at the hands of the
Swiss—in expanding their Tirolean power base to encompass much of Vorarlberg,
notably the Bregenz Forest and Montafon. Almost all the gaps that remained—the
town of Bregenz itself, the Little Walser Valley, and the county of Sonnenberg—
were subsequently bridged by Archduke Sigismund between 1451 and 1474.34
Sonnenberg was the last such acquisition, securing access from Lake Konstanz over
the Arlberg to Tirol.35
28 Meyer, ‘Durchsetzung’, 148; Maurer, Konstanz, 75–7. 29 Meyer, ‘Durchsetzung’, 146.
30 Maurer, Konstanz im Mittelalter, 72. The city had acquired the half-bailiwick in 1431 and held
it without a break until 1542. In 1447 it had also bought the Raitgericht, which covered lower juris-
diction along the ridge of hills overlooking Lake Konstanz, from Hans von Klingenberg. In 1471 it
added half the bailiwick of Eggen, and the bailiwicks of Altnau and Buch. These were all retained until
- Peter F. Kramml, Kaiser Friedrich III. und die Reichsstadt Konstanz (1440–1493). Die
Bodenseemetropole am Ausgang des Mittelalters (Konstanzer Gechichts- und Rechtsquellen, 29)
(Sigmaringen, 1985), 163, 186.
31 Kramml, Kaiser Friedrich, 169, 172.
32 Meyer, ‘Thurgau’, 7–8, 108; Giger, ‘Gerichtsherren’, 27.
33 Meyer, ‘Durchsetzung’, 152. 34 Baum, Sigmund, 110–11, 122–4.
35 Baum, Sigmund, 336–7; Bilgeri, Geschichte Vorarlbergs, 239.