56 The Swiss and Their Neighbours, 1460–1560
boundaries as such but the will of God manifest in the deeds of a valiant people.336
If Zwingli had a perception of the Swiss as morally superior to other nations, then
he saw their virtue threatened by foreign pensions, foreign mercenary service, and
attendance at imperial diets which had become alien and degenerate.337 As he con-
cluded, having any truck with foreign lords would bring disgrace upon the Swiss.338
Before the Swiss War, even during the years of mutual name-calling, the Rhine
was not regarded as a frontier. The Basel canon, Johannes Knebel, for whom the
river was a daily fact of life, in his chronicle begun around 1460 treated the Rhine
as a topographical point of orientation, not as a boundary.339 The question is whether
the experience of the Swiss War fundamentally altered that perception. Some, not
least Austrian historians,340 have argued that it did indeed help to create a boundary,341
though others prefer to speak of a gradual distancing342—corresponding to Helmut
Maurer’s estrangement (Auseinanderleben) which half a century of vilification and
attrition had wrought. For Karl Schib the Swiss War was only important inasmuch
as it brought Basel and Schaffhausen into the Confederation; the delineation of
separate sovereignty was not accomplished until 1815.343
The reason for these discrepant judgements lies mainly in an imprecise use of
language. Leaving aside the venerable belief in natural frontiers344 or the canard
that they were created by topography—rivers or mountains above all—the modern
perception of boundaries which can be plotted areally or spatially as surface meas-
urements is quite inappropriate to an age in which consolidated territories with
uniform jurisdictions and subjects were the exception, not the rule. Nowadays,
political geographers distinguish between boundaries and frontiers. Boundaries
may mark off territories from one another, but frontiers denote zones not of separ-
ation but of contact, areas of transition between homelands, pays, or Landschaften.345
That was especially the case on the Upper Rhine, where the alluvial plain positive
encouraged cross-passage,346 though it may be less true of the Hochrhein above
Basel, where the river was flanked by deep banks and cliffs. Yet even on the
336 I owe these reflections to Professor Guy Marchal.
337 Zwingli, Ein gottlich Vermanung, 24, 28. See Guy P. Marchal, ‘Über Feindbilder zu
Identitätsbildern. Eidgenossen und Reich in Wahrnehmung und Propaganda um 1500’, in
Niederhäuser and Fischer (eds), ‘ “Freiheitskrieg” ’, 106–7; Marchal, ‘Eidgenossen’, 75.
338 Zwingli, Ein gottlich Vermanung, 29.
339 Sieber-Lehmann, Spätmittelalterlicher Nationalismus, 169.
340 Bilgeri, Geschichte Vorarlbergs, 2, 248; Niederstätter, ‘Schwaben- oder Schweizerkrieg’, 69.
341 Carl, ‘Eidgenossen und Schwäbischer Bund’, 217; Albert Baumhauer, ‘Die deutsch-schweizer-
ische Grenze in der Schweizergeschichte’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 11 (1960), 193–211,
here at 206–7.
342 See Karl Mommsen, Eidgenossen, Kaiser und Reich. Studien zur Stellung der Eidgenossenschaft
innerhalb des heiligen römischen Reiches (Basler Beiträge zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 72) (Basel, 1958).
343 Schib, ‘Geschichte der schweizerischen Nordgrenze’, 13 and passim.
344 See, mockingly, Marchal, ‘Eidgenossen’, 77.
345 See Tom Scott, Regional Identity and Economic Change: The Upper Rhine, 1450–1600
(Oxford, 2007), 23.
346 Odile Kammerer, ‘Le Haut-Rhin entre Bâle et Strasbourg: À-t-il été une frontière médiévale?’,
in Les Pays de l’entre-deux au Moyen Âge. Questions d’histoire des territoires d’Empire entre Meuse, Rhône
et Rhin (Actes du 113e Congrès National des Sociétés Savantes (Strasbourg, 1988), Section d’histoire
médiévale et de philologie) (Paris, 1990), 171–93, here at 172.