16 The Swiss and Their Neighbours, 1460–1560
In Swabia proper the county of Hohenegg bordering the Allgäu had fallen to the
Habsburgs in 1454,36 but the acquisition of Nellenburg marked a direct challenge
to the Swiss in general and Schaffhausen in particular. It came about in rather
unusual circumstances. In February 1461 Archduke Albrecht VI, of the Carinthian
line of the house of Habsburg, who had persuaded his brother, Emperor Frederick III,
to grant him rulership over the Outer Austrian lands in the west notwithstanding
the prior rights of his cousin Archduke Sigismund from the Tirolean line, began
negotiations to acquire part of the landgraviate from an impoverished branch of
the counts of Tengen. The asking price was 8000 fl, with another 4000 fl for the
fishpond at Blindenhausen, but to these were to be added Count Johann’s debts
totalling 7000 fl.37 That proved to be beyond Albrecht’s means. Four years later
Archduke Sigismund completed the purchase for 37,905 fl, a sum he was only able
to raise by taking out loans from Austrian towns.38 The landgraviate thereafter
remained a patchwork of variegated jurisdictions—cameral lordships, estates held
by nobles and convents, or towns, with outliers and enclaves, the source of unend-
ing boundary disputes. The seat of government in Castle Nellenburg was at the
end of the century moved to Stockach. Originally, the landgraviate did not embrace
the county of Tengen itself, a compact territory to the west, which was owned by
another branch of the family; it was only sold to Austria in 1522 and incorporated
into the landgraviate twelve years later.39 The result was that the district of the
Hegau became divided equally between Austria and Schaffhausen, a situation
which prevailed until 1805.40
At first glance, a revived Austrian presence may not seem to have offered much
of a threat to the Swiss. The landgraviate of Nellenburg was the victim of territo-
rial-jurisdictional claims by the duchy of Württemberg, the bishop of Konstanz,
and the counts of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, not to mention the Swiss cities of
Schaffhausen, Zürich, and Stein am Rhein, which between them held nearly
thirty villages in the Hegau.41 Moreover, the territory was pockmarked by the
estates of imperial knights, that is, the association of the Knights of St George’s
Shield which in 1422 had been granted the privilege by Emperor Sigismund of
forming alliances throughout the Empire. Thereafter these knights, organized
into so-called cantons, maintained their fiscal and military autonomy.42 The
Hegau canton, one of six in Swabia, embraced over a dozen such knights (includ-
ing the bishop of Konstanz on behalf of two Hegau villages), its headquarters
from 1427 onwards being situated in the Austrian town of Radolfzell.43 By the
end of the century, however, under the terms of the Hegau Treaty of 1497 the
36 Baum, Sigmund, 110–11.
37 GLA 8/17, 9 February 1461. It has been impossible to establish the significance of the fishpond
in a village now disappeared, or why it alone should have been valued at half the purchase price! Baum,
Habsburger, 428–9 is erratic on the purchase.
38 Baum, Sigmund, 276–7.
39 Herbert Berner, ‘Die Landgrafschaft Nellenburg und die Reichsritterschaft des Kantons Hegau-
Bodensee’, Hegau, 10 (1965), 57–86, here at 64.
40 Baum, Habsburger, 436. 41 Berner, ‘Landgrafschaft’, 67–8.
42 Berner, ‘Landgrafschaft’, 74; Baum, Sigmund, 277. 43 Berner, ‘Landgrafschaft’, 74.