78 The Swiss and Their Neighbours, 1460–1560
Chablais, and Lake Geneva. The conquest added another 1400 km2 to Valais’s
already sizeable territory, making it at the time the largest associated member of
the Swiss Confederation.102
Duke Charles the Bold took his time in responding. He was quite prepared to
enter into peace negotiations with the Swiss, since his true goal was the recovery
of the Outer Austrian lands recently mortgaged to him. But Bern insisted that its
allies, the Lower Union and Archduke Sigismund of Austria, be party to the talks,
which took place in Neuchâtel.103 As a result, the talks stalled. Hostilities
commenced in January 1476 when Count Jacob de Romont at the head of a
Burgundian detachment stormed Yverdon. Only then did Charles the Bold bestir
himself from his headquarters in Nancy and head south, descending the Jougne
pass in early February, recapturing Grandson a week later. A surprise attack at the
beginning of March led by Bern, Fribourg, and Schwyz—the Confederal diet had
at last agreed to send troops—threw Charles’s army into disarray, The Italian mer-
cenaries bringing up the rear took to their heels, with the bulk of the army in their
wake. In their camp they abandoned an extraordinary trove of booty, which
became the stuff of legend.104
The Swiss used the defeat to mount an attack on Romont at the end of March,
but the well-fortified town held out.105 By June Charles had assembled a fresh
army in the Vaud and was preparing to besiege Morat, a long-standing ally of
Bern’s which lay dangerously close to the city. That was enough to prompt the
other cantons to send reinforcements without awaiting formal agreement at a
Confederal diet. On the day of the battle Duke Charles the Bold made a fatal mis-
calculation by delaying his attack. The Swiss overran the Burgundian army, driving
many soldiers into Lake Morat to drown. Then Bern took what in the light of its
earlier caution must seem an ominous and foolhardy decision: it instructed part of
the army to harry the Vaud as punishment for the enthusiastic support with which
the inhabitants had greeted the return of Count Jacob de Romont.106
The Swiss victory at Morat had been aided by support from Duke René of
Lorraine, and it was the latter’s troops which helped bring the overarching vision
of Duke Charles the Bold to a sanguinary end, as he lay dead on the field of battle
of Nancy in January 1477.107 His death left behind another ‘winter landscape’ in
the Vaud, just as occurred along the Rhine in the Swiss War a generation later, and
in both instances each side must share the blame.108
102 Meyer, ‘Geographische Voraussetzungen’, 339–41. Savoy only formally ceded the Lower Valais
in 1528.
103 Feller, Geschichte Berns, 1, 396.
104 Feller, Geschichte Berns, 1, 400; Stettler, Eidgenossenschaft, 250.
105 Feller, Geschichte Berns, 1, 402. 106 Feller, Geschichte Berns, 1, 411.
107 Stettler, Eidgenossenschaft, 250.
108 Sieber-Lehmann, Spätmittelalterlicher Nationalismus, 330, and see the discussion on the land-
scape of the Vaud at the very end of Chapter 14, this volume.