174 The Swiss and Their Neighbours, 1460–1560
describe Bern as a ‘small macro-state’, a category hitherto unknown to political
science.11 If his definition were to have any plausibility, he would have to show that
Bern administered its territory in a manner radically different from the other Swiss
city-states, which patently it did not.12 Recent writing on the Italian regional
city-states has demonstrated beyond peradventure that they retained much of their
civic character and urban primacy despite the erosion of republican government
and the rise of dynastic regimes,13 albeit that the sixteenth century witnessed the
increasing oligarchization of the civic elites,14 a phenomenon which finds exact
parallels in Switzerland.
And, contrary to the view once expressed by Giorgio Chittolini that the city-states
of northern Europe never achieved the institutional consolidation, geographical
cohesion, and jurisdictional exclusivity characteristic of the Italian city-states,15 it
is now recognized that such uniformity was exceedingly rare in Italy itself: consider
Andrea Zorzi’s famous verdict on Florence, ‘the goal was never a matter of “admin-
istering a state”, but rather of “governing a dominion” ’.16 Could not exactly the
same be said of Bern? Although there is disagreement, Italian historians have
advanced the concept of ‘pallid statehood’ to counteract the claims that have been
made for the contribution of the Italian city-states to ‘the origins of the modern
state’.17 This is not an argument that can be pursued here; nevertheless, the relega-
tion of the constitutional achievement of the Italian city-states—whatever their
place in the history of political thought—has implications for the Swiss city-states
as well, whose lack of institutional or political-philosophical innovation has some-
times been regarded as their distinguishing feature, despite clothing themselves in
the language of republicanism.
In one salient respect, however, the Swiss city-states, large or small, by the sixteenth
century differed from their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, including Italy. After
1515 they fought no wars on their own account; they maintained no standing
armies; as a result their populations escaped burdensome direct taxation, wholly or
in part; and the receipt of foreign pensions enabled the Catholic cities not only to
balance their budgets but to achieve substantial surpluses as well. That, as we have
noted, was the case with Fribourg, and further research is likely to show that it
11 Björn Forsén, ‘Was there a South-West German city-state culture?’, in Mogens Herman Hansen
(ed.), A Comparative Study of Six City-State Cultures (Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab,
Historisk-filosofiske Skrifter, 27) (Copenhagen, 2002), 91–105, here at 93.
12 See Tom Scott, The City-State in Europe, 1000–1600. Hinterland—Territory—Region (Oxford,
2012), 225.
13 Tom Scott, ‘The Economic Policies of the Regional City-States of Renaissance Italy: Observations
on a Neglected Theme’, Quaderni Storici, new series 145 (2014), 219–63, here at 221, summarizing
the arguments of Gian Maria Varanini, Giorgio Chittolini, and Marco Folin.
14 Scott, City-State in Europe, 206.
15 Giorgio Chittolini, ‘Gli stati cittadini italiani’, in Schwinges, Hesse, and Moraw (eds), Europa im
späten Mittelalter, 153–65, here at 159.
16 Andrea Zorzi, ‘The “Material Constitution” of the Florentine Dominion’, in William J. Connell
and Andrea Zorzi (eds), Florentine Tuscany. Structures and Practices of Power (Cambridge, 2000), 8–31,
here at 22. See also Tom Scott, ‘A Historian of Germany Looks at the Italian City-State’, Storica,
47 (2010), 7–59, here at 54–9, quotation at 58.
17 Scott, ‘A Historian of Germany’, 59, summarizing the debate between Giorgio Chittolini and
Gian Maria Varanini, on the one hand, and Andrea Gamberini and Federica Cengarle, on the other.