Any dispassionate view of the administration of the Thurgau as a common lordship
must conclude that it bristled with difficulties, even before the fissures brought
about by the spread of Reforming doctrines. In comparison, the other common
lordships—the Aargau and the Rheintal—witnessed few ructions, apart from
some shots across the lower stretches of the Alpine Rhine in the late 1510s.333 The
reason lay in the impact of Konstanz, not simply in the claims of jurisdiction over
the Thurgau which it doggedly refused to give up, but also in its geopolitical situ-
ation as a bridgehead or a gateway, according to perspective. A satisfactory solution
to the problem of Konstanz was never found until Emperor Charles V stripped it
of its status as an imperial city in 1548 and reduced it to an Austrian territorial
town, thereby rendering the issue otiose. The common lordship of the Thurgau,
moreover, exposed the resentments between those cantons who had fully shared in
its administration after 1460 and those latecomers who demanded a share after
- Proposals for a territorial division of the Thurgau never amounted to more
than a makeshift; even if it had eventuated it is doubtful whether it would have
withstood the strains of the 1520s and 1530s. It is certainly striking that Huldrych
Zwingli planned to abolish the common lordships as part of his scheme to recast
the Confederation into two (Protestant) power blocs, Zürich in the east (to which
the V Catholic cantons would be accountable!) and Bern in the west.334
Zwingli also uttered the famous dictum that the boundary (Letzi) of the
Confederation was no longer to stop at Arth or Näfels (gateways to the Catholic
Inner cantons): the Rhine was now the boundary.335 Zwingli was writing in the
wake of the Swiss War which for many writers then and now marked the Rhine as
a visible frontier. The import of his dictum, however, requires teasing out. Zwingli
was using the boundaries as metaphors to describe the increase of the Confederation
from its small beginnings as a sign of God’s favour: what mattered was not the
333 EA, III, 2, 1087–8 (no. 730) (1517); 1090 (no. 732: a) (1517); 1101–4 (no. 740: d) (1518)
(danger of villages being flooded by Feldkirch’s dam). Zürich and Glarus were quickly called in to
mediate.
334 Edgar Bonjour, H. S. Offler, and G. R. Potter, A Short History of Switzerland (Oxford, 1952), 161.
335 Huldrych Zwingli, Ein gottlich Vermanung an die eersamen, wysen, erenvesten, eltisten Eidgnossen
zů Schwytz, daß sy sich vor frömbden Herren hůtind und entladind (Zürich, 1522), in Ulrich Zwingli:
Hauptschriften, 7, ed. Fritz Blake, Oskar Farner, and Rudolf Pfister (Zürich, 1942), 28; Karl Schib,
ʻZur Geschichte der schweizerischen Nordgrenzeʼ, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Geschichte, 27 (1947),
1–35, here at 14.
12
Conclusion to Part I
Frontiers Mental and Physical