68 The Swiss and Their Neighbours, 1460–1560
gradual shift from a Mediterranean to an Atlantic economy.35 Duke Charles II’s
mounting harassment of Geneva from the 1510s onwards, which included
economic blockades, undoubtedly compounded the city’s difficulties.
From the north, trade from the Upper Rhine flowed via the river Aare or over the
Hauenstein pass to the Swiss Midlands, where it could either take the undulating
land route or be transported by ship up the river Saane/Sarine to Fribourg,36 or else
sail through Lakes Biel and Neuchâtel to Yverdon, leaving only a short stretch to be
completed over land to Morges on Lake Geneva. Commerce travelling westwards
over the Jura mountains, by contrast, had few routes to choose from.37 The most
frequented pass was from Les Clées up the col de Jougne to the plateau around
Pontarlier. Though little more than a defile, it was passable by both carts and wagons,
mostly the former; nevertheless, Duke Charles the Bold did manage to lead his artil-
lery down it during the Burgundian Wars. Goods travelling eastwards over the pass
were almost all destined for the Geneva fairs.38 Although a wide variety of goods
traversed the Jougne pass, including textiles from Flanders, France, and Venice, as
well as pig iron and metal goods,39 it was gradually bypassed by routes leading more
directly to Geneva. Yet in one respect it was a lifeline for the population of western
Switzerland, for it offered access to the brine pits of the Franche-Comté.40
As the Swiss economy switched increasingly to pastoralism in place of tillage, and
indeed from sheep farming to cattle-rearing41—Switzerland became a Hirtenland,
a country of cowherds, or rather, of cattle ranchers, exporting on a large scale over
the Alps to Lombardy—the supply of salt was an existential imperative, both to
supplement grass as a nutrient in the feed of beef cattle and to enable dairy farming
to turn milk into butter and cheese.42 In Part I we alluded to its constraining role
in the Swiss War of 1499.43
35 Bergier, Genève, 11.
36 The upper reaches of the Zihl and Saane were navigable further than they are today. Jeanne
Niquille, ‘La navigation sur la Sarine’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 2 (1952), 206–27.
37 From north to south they were Col des Étroits, Col de Jougne, Col de la Givrine, and Col de la
Faucille. See map in Jean-François Bergier, ‘Péages du XVe siècle au Pays de Vaud’, in Hermann Aubin,
Edith Ennen, Hermann Kellenbenz, Theodor Mayer, Friedrich Metz, Max Miller, and Josef
Schmithüsen (eds), Beiträge zur Wirtschafts- und Stadtgeschichte. Festschrift für Hektor Ammann
(Wiesbaden, 1965), 286–95, here at 290.
38 Hektor Ammann, ‘Der Verkehr über den Paß von Jougne nach dem Zollregister von 1462’, in
Mélanges offerts à M. Paul-E. Martin (Mémoires et Documents publiés par la Société d’Histoire et
d’Archéologie de Genève, 40) (Geneva, 1961), 223–37, here at 231.
39 Bergier, ‘Péages’, 286–95; Antony Babel, Histoire économique de Genève. Des origines au début du
XVI siècle, 2 (Geneva, 1963), 358.
40 Bergier, Genève, 169.
41 For Fribourg see Hans Conrad Peyer, ‘Wollgewerbe, Viehzucht, Solddienst und
Bevölkerungsentwicklung in Stadt und Landschaft Freiburg i. Ue. vom 14. bis 16. Jahrhundert’, in
Hermann Kellenbenz (ed.), Agrarisches Nebengewerbe und Formen der Reagrarisierung im Spätmittelalter
und 19./20. Jahrhundert (Forschungen zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 21) (Stuttgart, 1975),
79–95, here at 89–90.
42 Roger Sablonier, ‘Landwirtschaft, Transportgewerbe und Viehhandel: Wirtschaftsformen und
wirtschaftliche Beziehungen’, in Achermann et al. (eds), Innerschweiz und frühe Eidgenossenschaft,
111–204, here at 133–7. See fundamentally Jean-François Bergier, Une histoire du sel (Histoire au
Quotidien, 1) (Fribourg 1982). On the increasing importance of hard, fatty cheese production see
Barbara Orland, ‘Alpine milk: Dairy Farming as a Pre-modern Strategy of Land Use’, Environment and
History, 10 (2004), 327–64.
43 Carl, ‘Eidgenossen und Schwäbischer Bund’, 230–3.