Conclusion 173
as lying on the fringes (Randlage) of the Empire.5 But this view disregards the num-
ber of imperial cities on Swiss soil, who proudly affirmed their loyalty to the
Empire throughout the early modern period.6 That status was not merely a badge
of honour or prestige; it acted as a guarantee of inner stability, as Rainer Schwinges
has argued for Solothurn.7 The detachment of the Confederation from the day-to-day
workings of the Empire (which did not imply severance) did not preclude appeals
to the imperial court of chancery, though it did mean that Switzerland no longer
paid imperial taxes, contributed to imperial armies, or was included in the matrix
of imperial circles (Reichskreise).
Within the Confederation itself the conquest of the Vaud remains highly
controversial. Leaving aside the debate over Bern’s purportedly anterior intentions,
it was by any standard an extraordinarily bold act by a city which was already
exceptional in its size and outthrust within the Swiss polity. The fact that it did not
lead to the disintegration of the Confederation through civil war or secession is all
the more remarkable since it came a mere five years after the cessation of hostilities
over the introduction of the Reformation which had indeed brought Switzerland
to the brink of collapse. Part of the explanation is, of course, purely pragmatic:
Bern was simply too large to be cowed, even by concerted opposition from the
other cantons; its control of the Romandie was of peripheral interest to the eastern
germanophone cantons, regardless of confession; and the city was the beneficiary
of flanking cover from the Valais communes, from Fribourg, and indirectly from
Solothurn, all of whom were Catholic. Nevertheless, the ability of the Confederation
to survive and not be capsized by such a geopolitical imbalance in turn offers
important insights into the nature of Switzerland as a ‘league of discordant members’,
which will be explored later in this Conclusion.
Before that, however, we need to set sixteenth-century Bern in its wider European
context. It is unfortunate that Martina Stercken’s valuable survey of the Swiss city-
states stops in 1500,8 while the third volume of the massive new history of Bern
covering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries9 has little to say about the character
of Bern as a city-state in comparison with other city-states of similar size and
power, namely in central and northern Italy. Yet given the arguments over the
evolution of the larger Italian city-states into regional states during the fifteenth
century, Bern’s politics and policies urgently invite such a comparison. We can
dismiss Björn Forsén’s contention (following his mentor Mogens Herman Hansen)
that by virtue of its conquest of the Vaud Bern ceased to be a city-state and became
instead a regional state since, in Hansen’s diction, city-states should not exceed
3000 km2; if they do so, they become small territorial states.10 Forsén prefers to
5 Peyer, Verfassungsgeschichte, 18–21. 6 Marquardt, Alte Eidgenossenschaft, 37.
7 Rainer Christoph Schwinges, ‘Solothurn und das Reich im späten Mittelalter’, Schweizerische
Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 46 (1996), 451–73, here at 453.
8 Martina Stercken, ‘Reichsstadt, eidgenössischer Ort, städtische Territorialherrschaft: Zu den
Anfängen der Stadtstaaten im Gebiet der heutigen Schweiz’, in Mogens Herman Hansen (ed.),
A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures (Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab,
Historisk-filosofiske Skrifter, 21) (Copenhagen, 2000), 321–42.
9 Holenstein, Berns mächtige Zeit.
10 Hansen, Introduction to Thirty City-State Cultures, 59.