After 1500 relations between Austrians and Swiss were channelled into calmer
waters. The Swiss War, for all its undoubted horrendous cruelty and devastation,
offers only a partial explanation. Rather, a process of adjustment was already
under way from the 1470s, with the Perpetual Accord, the Treaty of Basel, and
the Hereditary Agreement as milestones on the road to an accommodation.
Subsequently, the turmoil of the Kappel Wars—as much a political as a religious
struggle—caused the Swiss to look first to their own affairs. Yet they could not
afford to ignore the Empire entirely, for one of their associated members, the
distant Black Forest imperial city of Rottweil, faced a new hazard with the restor-
ation of Duke Ulrich to his duchy of Württemberg under the terms of the Peace of
Kaaden in 1534.
Rottweil was one of the few south German imperial cities which decisively
rejected the Reformation. There was certainly evangelical unrest among the com-
mons, particularly in the weavers’ and smiths’ guilds, but in 1529 the council
expelled 450 sympathizers since it feared losing its privilege as seat of the imperial
court of justice. By the 1530s relations between Rottweil and Bern and Zürich had
reached their nadir; the Catholic cantons seemed at too much of a remove to be of
much assistance if help were needed.322 Against that background, the feud launched
by Hans von Landenberg against Rottweil after 1538 takes on an especial piquancy.
Von Landenberg had supposedly infringed Rottweil’s sovereignty in the so-called
Freie Pürsch (‘Free Stalk’), that is, an ancient Hohenstaufen royal chase to which
rights of capital jurisdiction and escort were attached.323 On their way home from
the Confederal diet in Baden in 1540 Rottweil’s magistrates seized von Landenberg
and held him prisoner for six weeks. Swiss attempts at mediation were hampered by
the fact that Rottweil was Catholic and von Landenberg Protestant. Although a
compromise was reached, Hans’s son Christoph, who had sought refuge with Duke
Ulrich, flouted the agreement (despite Hans himself and two other sons sticking
to it) and set about ransacking Rottweil’s territory.324 When the V Catholic cantons
322 Wolfgang Vater, ‘Die Beziehungen Rottweils zur Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft im 16.
Jahrhundert’, in Stadtarchiv Rottweil (ed.), 450 Jahre Ewiger Bund. Festschrift zum 450. Jahrestag des
Abschlusses des Ewigen Bundes zwischen den XIII Orten der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft und dem
zugewandten Ort Rottweil (Rottweil, 1969), 26–63, here at 29, 32, 36.
323 Jörg Leist, ‘Reichsstadt Rottweil. Studien zur Stadt- und Gerichtsverfassung bis zum Jahre
1546’ (Diss. phil. Tübingen, 1962).
324 Vater, ‘Beziehungen’, 38–40; SABE, Allgemeine Eidgenössische Abschiede, 33 II, pp. 169–74.
The XIII cantons to Duke Ulrich of Württemberg, 28 Aug. 1540.