46 The Swiss and Their Neighbours, 1460–1560
annual recognition payment of 1000 fl, but in addition 123 citizens (an arbitrary
number?) were pressed into his service and required to take an oath of loyalty to
Austria, not to the city.269 Konstanz was stripped of its right to conclude foreign
treaties and had to remain an open city for the Empire at all times, not just in war.
As Helmut Maurer has observed, its status as an imperial free city was fatally com-
promised.270 A parallel treaty was concluded with the bishop of Konstanz, effect-
ively confirming his rights within the city, though the clergy lost much of their
fiscal immunity: henceforth they must pay the wine excise and an inheritance tax
should they be bequeathed property by a citizen.271
It is clear that for Maximilian the emasculation of Konstanz was a precondition
to his signing the Hereditary Agreement. If relations with the Swiss were to be put on
a stable and lasting basis, then Konstanz, as a source of potential destabilization—
the possibility that it might ‘turn Swiss’—had to be hobbled. Because the agree-
ment was signed by Maximilian as archduke of Austria, it has been dismissed as
little more than a neighbourhood treaty, intended to prevent conflicts spilling
across the Rhine.272 That verdict is not quite accurate. Maximilian signed not only
on behalf of Tirol and Outer Austria but as ruler of the Franche-Comté as well. Its
scope reached westwards, so that it had implications for the Romandie as well
as for northern Switzerland.273 That is why emperor Charles V at the start of his
reign in 1519 instructed his brother, Archduke Ferdinand, to adhere strictly to the
terms of the Hereditary Agreement, since any transgression would immediately be
exploited by France.274 Ferdinand complied; he increased the annual pension paid
to each canton by 800 fl from 200 fl to 1000 fl,275 a step which the emperor sub-
sequently endorsed.276
269 Dobras, ‘Konstanz zur Zeit der Reformation’, 25. Their pay was often late. By 1527 4½ years’
arrears had accumulated. Hans-Christoph Rublack, ‘Die Außenpolitik der Reichsstadt Konstanz
während der Reformationszeit’, in Bernd Moeller (ed.), Der Konstanzer Reformator Ambrosius Blarer
1492–1564. Gedenkschrift zu seinem 400. Todestag (Konstanz/Stuttgart, 1964), 56–80, here at 59.
270 Maurer, Konstanz im Mittelalter, 270. To say that Konstanz was de facto reduced to an Austrian
territorial town is perhaps to go too far: that is what finally occurred in 1548! Peter-Johannes Schuler,
‘Bischof und Stadt vor Beginn der Reformation in Konstanz’, in Josef Nolte, Hella Tompert, and
Christoph Windhorst (eds), Kontinuität und Umbruch. Theologie und Frömmigkeit in Flugschriften und
Kleinliteratur an der Wende vom 15. zum 16. Jahrhundert (Spätmittelalter und Frühe Neuzeit. Tübinger
Beiträge zur Geschichtsforschung, 2) (Stuttgart, 1978), 300–15, here at 301. De jure the Hereditary
Agreement could not be invoked against Konstanz precisely because it was still an imperial free city.
Braun, Eidgenossen, 277–8.
271 Maurer, Konstanz im Mittelalter, 271; Dobras, ‘Konstanz zur Zeit der Reformation’, 26;
J. Jeffery Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City. The Episcopus Exclusus in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Germany (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 72) (Leiden/Boston, MA/Cologne, 1999),
75–6. Tensions over clerical taxation can be observed from 1500 onwards. Schuler, ‘Bischof und
Stadt’, 311.
272 Braun, ‘Habsburger und Eidgenossen’, 130.
273 It did, however, exclude Lower and Inner Austria and the Low Countries. Braun, ‘Habsburger
und Eidgenossen’, 130; Braun, Eidgenossen, 240.
274 Braun, Eidgenossen, 280. 275 EA III, 2, 1140–3 (no. 772: n) (1519).
276 EA III, 2, 1184 (no. 790) (1519). These sums were still much smaller than the pensions offered
by the French crown in 1515, totalling 2000 francs. Braun, Eidgenossen, 269.