168 The Swiss and Their Neighbours, 1460–1560
force, in the struggle against Savoy, its erstwhile overlord, with the Small Council
of Bern, alert to the wider geopolitical implications, playing a restraining role, lat-
terly against the wishes of many of its citizens as enthusiasts for religious change,
and certainly to the chagrin of Geneva itself, whose accusations of foot-dragging,
coupled with Bern’s unremitting insistence on financial compensation, drove
both cities to the brink of rupture.
Should, therefore, the occupation or annexation of the Vaud be regarded as a
separate issue from the relief of Geneva, and what part did religious solidarity, as
opposed to territorial expansion, play in each? Or were the motives inextricably
linked? These questions require answers which give due weight to the differing
interests of Bern and Fribourg. If we begin with Bern it is because its actions are the
best documented and its intentions the supposedly best understood. At one end of
the spectrum stand Karl Bittmann and Bernhard Stettler. Although Bittmann’s
achievement in laying bare the precise chronology of the instigation of the war
against Charles the Bold in 1475 is beyond doubt, his apodictic verdict that Bern
was bent upon ‘annexation, status, and expansion’,818 which it only fulfilled sixty
years later, rests upon a misreading of the altogether defensively worded entry in the
Bern council minute-books of late 1475, which makes clear that Bern was alarmed
at the prospect of the Vaud being laid waste by its Swiss neighbours to the east.
Moreover, it takes Bern’s policy as self-evident and self-explanatory, a standpoint
about which even that diehard Bern historian Richard Feller expressed reservations.
Sadder to relate, Bittmann is followed by Bernhard Stettler, one of the most
insightful and circumspect of modern Swiss historians. Stettler speaks of the
‘conquest’ of the Vaud as if it were coterminous with ‘occupation’.819 Yet there are
good reasons to think that Bern’s policy towards the Vaud had different aims.
The tergiversations in the wake of the Treaty of St-Julien and the deed of arbi-
tration at Payerne in late 1530—accorded in traditional historiography far too
much weight since they were ‘Confederal’ achievements—make plain that (aside
from Duke Charles II’s continued duplicity and refusal to ratify the agreements)
Bern was concerned above all to hold the Vaud as a pawn, literally and figuratively.
Why seek to control or administer a territory, therefore, when the ultimate aim—
to neuter Savoy—could much more easily and cheaply be achieved by a lien on
the Vaud’s principal fortresses (the Öffnungsrecht contained in the various deeds
of submission)—which is precisely what Bern had proposed in May 1533 out of
chagrin at the failure of St-Julien and Payerne treaties to get anywhere—and the
milking of a rich landscape’s revenues through ‘ransoms’, mortgages, and, not least,
control of the lucrative toll-posts on Lake Geneva? Had Bern been concerned
radically to recast the Vaud after its conquest in its own territorial image it is
hard to see why it left its administration largely untouched until much later in
the century.
818 Bittmann, Memoiren, 299: Drang nach Ausdehnung, nach Annexion, nach Geltung und
Erweiterung....
819 Stettler, Eidgenossenschaft, 247.