Between 1520 and 1540 southern Germany and Switzerland were convulsed by
political, social, and religious upheaval. First, Duke Ulrich’s expulsion from his
duchy of Württemberg by troops from the Swabian League in 1519, followed by
an Austrian government of occupation, together with his attempts from exile to
recruit mercenaries in Switzerland to recapture his territory; then the mass uprising
of the common man in the Peasants’ War of 1524–6, whose origins were on the
Hochrhein in the county of Stühlingen; and lastly the spread of evangelical doc-
trines from Zürich under its preacher Huldrych Zwingli, which not only split the
Confederation but embraced the precariously poised city of Konstanz—all these
could have served as the pretext for outright war engulfing both banks of the
Rhine. Indeed, rumours of war were rife. Yet the antagonism which had soured
relations during the preceding hundred years did not lead to a fresh conflict
between ‘Swabians’ and Swiss. Some of the invective which had accompanied that
hatred was in fact displaced onto the emerging conflict between Protestant and
Catholic cantons: in 1524, for example, some Zürich subjects mocked the Forest
cantons as ‘cow-straps’ (Kuhkammen, that is, the cords to which cowbells were
attached).282 In the same year the innkeeper at Töss by Winterthur was reported to
have declared that the ‘cow-muzzles’ and ‘cow-tails’ (that is, the Inner cantons)
should embrace the true Christian (evangelical) faith.283
Although Duke Ulrich had a Burgrecht with the Confederation, the cantons
made it clear that they had no intention of intervening militarily on his behalf.284
Luzern and Solothurn may publicly have expressed their solidarity with Duke
Ulrich, but that was as far as it went.285 During Ulrich’s attempted recruitment of
mercenaries in 1522 from his stronghold of Hohentwiel castle in the Hegau,
Schaffhausen was given strict instructions to keep any signs of a Bundschuh—the
laced boot as a symbol of peasant-armed resistance which Duke Ulrich had appro-
priated—at bay.286 In the Peasants’ War itself Ulrich sought recruits in the Thurgau
and the county of Baden, but both Zürich and Schaffhausen sent envoys to the
rebels in the Klettgau ordering them to desist from inciting support among their
subjects.287 Duke Ulrich’s march northwards in February 1525 collapsed as his
282 EA IV, 1a, 369–71 (no. 167: 4) (1524). An earlier incident in 1522 of a Thurgau subject being
abused as a ‘cow-muzzle’ and having a cow’s tail waved at him in Konstanz does not seem to have had
any religious import. EA IV, 1a, 231–5 (no. 107: g) (1522).
283 EA IV, 1a, 371–80 (no. 168: to q 5, 5) (1524). 284 EA III, 2, 1253–4 (no. 835: c) (1520).
285 EA III, 2, 1257–60 (no. 840: a) (1520). 286 EA IV, 1a, 253–9 (no. 120: aa) (1522).
287 EA IV, 1a, 569–80 (no. 244: f ) (1525).