towns to the original confederation—Lucerne in 1332, Zurich in 1351,
Zug in 1352, and Berne in 1353—and the purchase by thousands of
peasants of outburgher rights. Switzerland was forged from a network
of alliances between the towns and valleys for the protection of their
separate liberties, and for the keeping of the peace, especially on the
roads to the vital Alpine passes.^120
In the fourteenth century Landfrieden, now generally in the vernacu-
lar, came to register the political standing of king, princes, and towns in
relation to each other: the peace of each region took on the character of
a confederacy of the estates made and remade with royal approval as
the political situation demanded. The princes saw the advantage of
Landfrieden to themselves, but were generally suspicious of urban
associations, to which royal attitudes were ambiguous.^121 The Emperor
Charles IV’s famous Golden Bull of 1354 was an embryo constitution,
defining the electoral college and regulating its proceedings, but it also
had elements of a Landfriede. A lengthy opening section ordered the
protection and provisioning of electors and their retinues on the way to
Frankfurt for the election of a king. Any who neglected their responsi-
bilities in this respect should be counted as acting ‘against the common-
wealth and the state and dignity of the empire’. On pain of losing their
liberties, the citizens of Frankfurt, ‘of whatever dignity, condition or
state’, were to give protection to the electors, each of whom was to
come to the town with no more than two hundred horsemen, only
fifty of them armed. The rest of the document was concerned with the
status and jurisdiction of the electors, whose unity and concord was
vital for the ‘happy state’ of the empire. All the electors were given
exclusive rights to exploit mineral deposits within their territories. From
Bohemia, no one ‘of whatever state, dignity, pre-eminence or condition’
might be cited to appear outside the jurisdiction of the king of Bohemia
for any cause, criminal, civil, or mixed. The same privilege was
extended to the ecclesiastical electors and then to the other lay electors,
except that complaints of denial of justice could be brought to the
emperor. The constitution broadened out to a general prohibition of
unjust wars and law-suits, and most strikingly of ‘conspiracies’, that is
sworn associations of cities or persons ‘of whatever dignity, condition
or state’, beyond ‘those confederations and leagues which princes and
106 The Spread of the Organized Peace
(^120) Peter Blickle, ‘Das Gesetz der Eidgenossen: Überlegungen zur Entstehung der Schweiz
1200–1400’, Historische Zeitschrift, 255 (1992), 565; id., ‘Friede und Verfassung’, 18–42;
T. Scott, ‘Liberty and Community in Medieval Switzerland’, German History, 13 (1995),
103–4, 109–10; Constitutiones et Acta Publica Imperatorum et Regum 1313–24, ed.
J. Schwalm, MGH Legum Sectio 4, v (Hanover, 1909–13), 718.
(^121) Angermeier, Königtum und Landfriede, 220–5; Arnold, Princes and Territories, 278;
Deutsche Reichstagsakten[DRTA] (repr. Göttingen, 1956– ), i (1376–87), 315–25, 335–49,
for the making of the Rhine Landfriedeof 1382.