The Occupation of the Thurgau 17
imperial knights submitted to Austrian overlordship; that is, they recognized the
supremacy of the Nellenburg territorial court.44
Wilhelm Baum has argued that Archduke Sigismund’s plans went much further
than Swabia, but he certainly made his presence uncomfortably felt in the region.45
His designs upon the abbey of Weingarten drove the abbot to seek a ten-year pro-
tective alliance with Zürich in 1478.46 That paled in comparison with his assault
upon the imperial city of Lindau at the eastern end of Lake Konstanz from 1462
onwards, despite (or perhaps because of ) its treaty of protection with the Swiss. In
1468 he imposed a trade embargo on the city which, for all its efforts to forge
defensive alliances with its neighbours, was forced to succumb to Austrian protec-
tion ten years later.47 That was only the crassest of several attempts to undermine
the Swabian imperial cities. In the longer term, as we shall see, the greatest threat
was to the independence of Konstanz, a city paralysed by its inability to decide
whether to throw in its lot with the Habsburgs or else seek to ‘turn Swiss’ by join-
ing the Confederation.
For Schaffhausen as an associated member of the Confederation up to 1501, the
Austrian landgraviate of Nellenburg was undoubtedly a handicap to territorial
expansion,48 but it was not the only one. To the west the city was hemmed in by
the lordship of the counts of Sulz in the Klettgau, which it failed to seize even
when occupied by Swiss troops in the war of 1499.49 Not until the sixteenth cen-
tury was Schaffhausen able to acquire a string of bailiwicks in the Klettgau, many
in the hands of its own patricians or ecclesiastical foundations, especially after the
introduction of the Reformation.50 Only in the 1520s, moreover, was it able to
wrest the long cherished villages of Neunkirch and Hallau as enclaves from the
bishop of Konstanz,51 yet at the same time squandered the opportunity of buying
Tengen from its counts (who were massively in debt to Schaffhausen), which
passed instead under Austrian control.52
Nevertheless, the Austrian presence in the Hegau provided a cloak for the
sustained feud against Schaffhausen waged over twenty-seven years by a Hegau
44 Herbert Berner, ‘Die Landgrafschaft Nellenburg’, in Friedrich Metz (ed.), Vorderösterreich. Eine
geschichtliche Landeskunde, 2nd edn (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1967), 613–36, here at 624; Kurt Bächtold,
‘Beiträge zur Verwaltung des Stadtstaates Schaffhausen von der Reformation bis zur Revolution’ (Diss.
phil. Zürich, 1947), 29 [this work is cited from the extended draft in SASH, HZA 68]. Conflicts
continued, however, and were not finally resolved until the Treaty of Konstanz in 1584.
45 The Perpetual Accord of 1474, he asserts, allowed Sigismund to contemplate election as Roman
king, renewal of the duchy of Swabia, enfeoffment with Burgundy and Milan, purchase of the county
of Montbéliard, and much more. Baum, Sigmund, 394. In 1486 he was successful in his claim to the
imperial bailiwick of Swabia, a title of considerable symbolic significance. Baum, Sigmund, 276.
46 Bilgeri, Vorarlberg, 242.
47 Baum, Sigmund, 218; Bilgeri, Vorarlberg, 246. This protective pact was subsequently renewed.
In 1477 Wangen under similar pressure allied itself with the city of St Gallen. Bilgeri, Vorarlberg, 247.
48 Bächtold, ‘Beiträge’, 28. 49 Schib, ‘1291–1501’, 16.
50 Ernst Rüedi, ‘Schaffhausens Erwerbungen im Klettgau’, in Franz Schmidt (ed.), Der Klettgau
(Bretten, 1971), 219–53, here at 220–5.
51 Rüedi, ‘Schaffhausens Erwerbungen’, 227–31.
52 Karl Schib, Geschichte der Stadt Schaffhausen (Thayngen/Schaffhausen, 1946), xx.