Calm amidst the Storm 49
hired Swiss troops melted away like snow on the news of Emperor Charles V’s vic-
tory over the French at Pavia, which left the Swiss to deal with a revived Habsburg
Austria. In truth, his campaign was doomed from the outset since he had, as it
transpired, no money to pay his mercenaries.288
Zürich’s involvement in the peasant uprising was politically fraught. The city
had felt obliged in October 1524 to send a detachment of 170 men, supposedly
volunteers, to help defend Waldshut, the Forest Town on the Hochrhein which
had fallen under the spell of Balthasar Hubmaier, a radical evangelical who
embraced Zwinglian doctrines (only to espouse Anabaptism as the rebellion
unfolded). In the face of imminent attack from Austrian troops Waldshut had
appealed to the Black Forest peasants for help; they did indeed rally to the town
but were induced to withdraw by the threat of dire reprisals. Zürich’s default
position in the rebellion was to offer mediation, not to foment further unrest on
its own doorstep, since it was well aware of Archduke Ferdinand’s minatory
demand that failure to withdraw from Waldshut might lead to a regional war
(Landkrieg).289 It is most unlikely that its magistrates lent any active support to
Count Rudolf von Sulz’s Klettgau subjects—apart from encouraging enthusiasm
for evangelical doctrines—since both Count Rudolf and the abbot of St Blasien
in the Black Forest, another hotbed of unrest, were signatories to Burgrechte with
the city. In any case, the rights and revenues which Zürich’s citizens possessed in
the Klettgau gave the city a vested interest in upholding seigneurial obligations,
not in hastening their abolition.290
By September 1525 a truce had been arranged on the Hochrhein, though there
were rumours that Zürich’s rural subjects were keen to lend support. Some of the
city’s peasants from the lordship of Eglisau north of the Rhine did indeed join
their Klettgau neighbours in a last defiant stand, but they were defeated by
Austrian troops, with Count Rudolf von Sulz at their head, at Grießen. Zürich and
Schaffhausen’s effort to avoid the impending bloodshed came too late.291
With Schaffhausen, its situation north of the Rhine made it harder for the council
to isolate its territory from the surrounding rebellion. Disturbances centred on the
villages of Hallau and Neunkirch, where Schaffhausen had not yet succeeded in
wresting control from the bishop of Konstanz.292 Moreover, the unrest was unfurled
under an explicitly evangelical banner. Yet the rural revolt in Schaffhausen, remark-
ably, discharged itself, not in efforts to forge links with its Austrian neighbours
288 Tom Scott, ‘Reformation and Peasants’ War in Waldshut and Environs: A Structural Analysis’,
in Town, Country, and Regions in Reformation Germany (Studies in Medieval and Reformation
Traditions, 106) (Leiden/Boston, MA, 2005), 3–56, here at 40; Tom Scott, ‘From the Bundschuh to
the Peasants’ War: From Revolutionary Conspiracy to the Revolution of the Common Man’, in Town,
Country, and Regions, 125–48, at 135–8, 145. Swiss efforts to support Duke Ulrich in his efforts to
assert full control of his outlying western territory, the county of Montbéliard, will be considered in
Part II.
289 EA IV, 1a, 504–18 (no. 218: vv 4) (1524).
290 Scott, ‘Reformation and Peasants’ War’, 26–7.
291 EA IV, 1a, 689–99 (no. 285: nn; rr) (1525). The villages of Rafz, Wil, and Hüntwangen rallied.
SAZH, A 192, 1, nos 184, 185, 186; Scott, ‘Reformation and Peasants’ War’, 51 and n 187.
292 EA IV, 1a, 175–8 (no. 74: q) (1522); 198 (no. 87) (1522).