Conclusion to Part I 57
Hochrhein what stands out from the High Middle Ages onwards is the number of
bridges, with corresponding bridgehead settlements on the opposite bank.
The current consensus is that the Rhine, including the Hochrhein, after 1500
did not constitute a boundary,347 or else that any such distinction was largely
ignored.348 But ultimately this semantic debate ignores the reality that the north-
ern march between the Swiss and the South Germans became a buffer zone.349
Within it, lords were concerned to prevent disputes spreading like wildfire into an
uncontrollable regional conflagration: they had learnt their lesson from the Swiss
Wa r.350 That was all the more intelligible because local lords, feudal or patrician,
Swabian or Swiss, had estates, rights, revenues, and jurisdictions—not to mention
family and clientage connections—which transcended any supposed frontier.
Bernd Marquardt describes the Thurgau as a ‘hinge’ (Scharnierzone), opening on
both sides.351 And in defiance of an almost ineradicable strain of popular Swiss
historiography which stylizes the Confederation as a republic of peasants and bur-
ghers, the nobility, ecclesiastical and secular, survived in the Thurgau (as in other
parts of Switzerland):352 the presence of the Gerichtsherren, as we have seen,
remained a thorn in the flesh of Confederal officials.353 Indeed, in the course of the
sixteenth century most local lords in the Thurgau banded together in a nobles’
Estate (which also included prelates) of their own.354
That does not mean that subsequent adjustments or arrondissements were impos-
sible; rather, they could be contained or thwarted. The classic instance is the
Fricktal, Austria’s sole surviving lordship south of the Rhine. The Fricktal was lar-
ger than canton Zug and almost as large as the city-state of Geneva.355 As noted
earlier, Bern successfully blocked Solothurn from gaining control of a district
which was economically important, for the Fricktal contained rich iron-ore
deposits.356 Karl Meyer once hazarded that if Basel had ‘turned Swiss’ earlier, it
would have been able to absorb the Fricktal into its city-state which measured no
more than 460 km2, a view which no longer commands acceptance. In any case,
after 1501 it faced opposition from the V Catholic cantons who feared not only
347 Stettler, Eidgenossenschaft, 208; Peter Niederhäuser, ‘Kleriker, Kirchenfürst und Kunstmäzen—
eine Annäherung an Bischof Hugo von Hohenlandenberg’, in Niederhäuser (ed.), Feiner Fürst, 15–42,
here at 30.
348 Marchal, ‘Eidgenossen’, 75; Niederhäuser, ‘Kampf ums Überleben’, 11.
349 Niederhäuser, ‘ “Kriegs”-Geschichte’, 173; Bernhard Stettler, ‘Reich und Eidgenossenschaft im
- Jahrhundert’, in Niederhäuser and Fischer (eds), ‘Freiheitskrieg’, 9–27, here at 19.
350 Carl, ‘Eidgenossen und Schwäbischer Bund’, 236–7.
351 Marquardt, Alte Eidgenossenschaft, 302.
352 See Peter Niederhäuser, ‘Verdrängung, Mobilität oder Beharrung? Adel im 15. Jahrhundert
zwischen dem Aargau und Tirol’, Argovia, 20 (2008), 18–32; Niederhäuser, ‘ “Kriegs”-Geschichte’,
174; Peter Niederhäuser and Natalie Kolb Beck, ‘Gratwanderung zwischen Habsburg und der
Eidgenossenschaft—Thurgauer Adel um 1500 am Beispiel von Heinrich Lanz von Liebenfels’,
Thurgauer Beiträge zur Geschichte, 141 (2004), 141–60; Maurer, Schweizer und Schwaben, 82.
353 Niederhäuser, ‘Rückzugsorte’, 107–8. 354 Marquardt, Alte Eidgenossenschaft, 304.
355 Karl Meyer, ‘Geographische Voraussetzungen der eidgenössischen Territorialbildung’, in Karl
Meyer, Aufsätze und Reden (Mitteilungen der Antiquarischen Gesellschaft in Zürich, 37 [= 116.
Neujahrsblatt]) (Zürich, 1952), 215–354, here at 327 n 1. [Originally in Mitteilungen des Historischen
Vereins des Kantons Schwyz, 34 (1926), 29–224.]
356 Karl Schib, ‘Die vier Waldstädte’, in Metz (ed.), Vorderösterreich, 375–99, here at 388.