62 The Swiss and Their Neighbours, 1460–1560
those lands led to the Burgundian Wars, in which the struggle for control of the
Franche-Comté played a crucial role. With his death on the battlefield of Nancy in
January 1477 the free county of Burgundy was occupied by France, but in the
wake of King Maximilian’s marriage to Duke Charles’s daughter Mary the follow-
ing year it was sold to Austria for 150,000 fl. Given Maximilian’s inability to raise
the asking price, the king of France then bought it back for the same figure.2 It was
not until the Treaty of Senlis in 1493 that the Franche-Comté finally came under
Austrian sovereignty.
Already it can be seen that the number of European powers who had a stake,
directly or indirectly, in the fate of the Romandie and its borderlands was consid-
erable. To them should naturally be added the Swiss Confederation, for it was
precisely in the second half of the fifteenth century that Switzerland reached its
apogee as a military power, undergirded by French pensions from 1475 onwards,
paid either collectively to the cantons or individually to leading politicians.3
France’s interest in harnessing Swiss mercenaries to its service did not, however,
preclude the French crown from casting a covetous eye eastwards across the Jura
mountains to the county of Neuchâtel, whose rulers had close ties to the French
court.4 Margrave Philipp of Baden-Hochberg, the second of that middle-ranking
dynasty on the Upper Rhine to rule the county, spent several years in the 1480s in
French military service,5 and after his death in 1503 was succeeded by his daughter
Johanna, who the following year married Louis d’Orléans, duke of Longueville,
grand chamberlain of France (see Map 3).
The majority of the German-speaking cantons may have evinced little interest in
the Romandie, regarding it as both remote from their heartlands and as linguistic-
ally and culturally alien (it was here that the divisions between tútsch and welsch
were supposedly played out),6 but they could not afford to turn a blind eye to the
westwards outthrust of Bern, already in terms of area the largest germanophone
canton at over 3000 km2, whom they suspected of seeking to construct a city-state
so vast that it would dwarf and dominate the rest of the Confederation. Yet Bern’s
supposed aggression should not conceal that it had a partner in crime, namely its
long-standing (and predominantly francophone) ally Fribourg, whose territory
bordered the Vaud. Fribourg harboured expansionist designs of its own, not least
the dream of reaching the shore of Lake Geneva.
Fribourg had thrown off the shackles of Austrian overlordship in a long struggle
between 1448 and 1452, which left it so exhausted that it was driven for protec-
tion by the promise of debt cancellation into the arms of Savoy, the very power
whose encirclement it had vainly sought to break in a disastrous short campaign in
2 Stettler, Eidgenossenschaft, 253–4.
3 Stettler, Eidgenossenschaft, 266; Sieber-Lehmann, Spätmittelalterlicher Nationalismus, 228–9
(with copious references). The French pensions substituted for Austrian pensions, whose payment had
ceased with the conclusion of the Perpetual Accord in 1474.
4 Meyer, ‘Geographische Voraussetzungen’, 234.
5 Gisèle Reutter, Le rôle joué par le Comté de Neuchâtel dans la politique suisse et dans la politique
française à la fin du XVe siècle et au début du XVIe siècle. Histoire diplomatique et militaire 1474–1530
(Geneva, 1942), 230.
6 A verdict ridiculed by Sieber-Lehmann, Spätmittelalterlicher Nationalismus, 303–8, 328–9.