Traditionally, the Peace of Basel has been regarded as a watershed. On a regional
level the focus of imperial politics shifted from southern Germany to international
conflicts in Flanders, Burgundy, Italy, and Hungary. By 1500 the Swiss had
detached themselves from the Empire as an ‘institutionally consolidated polity’
(Peter Moraw)202 and had established their own separate identity. At a local level
armed hostilities along the Rhine ceased; between the Swiss and the ‘Swabians’ no
further military engagements occurred until the end of the ancien régime. During
the German Peasants’ War of 1524–6, which convulsed the whole of southern
Germany except Bavaria, the rebels sought to rouse the subjects of Solothurn,
Schaffhausen, and Zürich, their immediate neighbours to the south, but the magis-
trates of these cities were largely successful in keeping unrest at bay. There was
never any likelihood that the peasants’ ‘struggle against feudalism’ (Peter Blickle)203
would spill over into Switzerland, even if the cities’ oligarchies were scarcely less
‘feudal’ in their treatment of rural subjects than their aristocratic and seigneurial
counterparts to the north.204
In broad outline this picture may be accurate, but it conceals more than it
reveals. It has been pointed out that the provisions of the treaty in diplomatic
terms contained little that was new, except to reaffirm Konstanz’s neutrality.205
The Rhine was relegated to a secondary theatre of politics.206 From an inter-
national perspective the achievement of peace allowed King Maximilian to forge
a new relationship with the Confederation, henceforth to be mined as a source of
mercenaries for his international campaigns.207 As early as 1500 he had proposed
202 Peter Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung. Das Reich im späten Mittelalter
1250 bis 1490 (Propyläen Geschichte Deutschlands, 3) (Frankfurt am Main/Berlin, 1985).
203 Peter Blickle, Die Revolution von 1525, 4th edn (Munich, 2004), esp. part 1.
204 Especially in their widespread retention of serfdom. See Tom Scott, ‘Die spätmittelalterliche
bäuerliche Unfreiheit in Südwestdeutschland im europäischen Vergleich’, in Kurt Andermann and
Gabriel Zeilinger (eds), Freiheit und Unfreiheit. Mittelalterliche und frühneuzeitliche Facetten eines zeit-
losen Problems (Kraichtaler Kolloquien, 7) (Epfendorf am Neckar, 2010), 49–72; Roger Sablonier,
‘Leibherrschaft unter “freien Schweizern”. Eigenleute des Klosters Einsiedeln in Eidgenössischen
Territorien’, in Paul Freedman and Monique Bourin (eds), Forms of Servitude in Northern and Central
Europe: Decline, Resistance and Expansion (Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 9)
(Turnhout, 2005), 229–55.
205 Kramml, ‘Reichsstadt Konstanz’, 322. Even so, Confederal diets continued to meet in Konstanz
from time to time.
206 Peter Niederhäuser and Raphael Sennhauser, ‘Kaiser Maximilian I. und die Eidgenossen. Kunst
und Propaganda des “letzten Ritters” ’, in Niederhäuser and Fischer (eds), ‘Freiheitskrieg’, 73–102, here
at 96; Niederhäuser, ‘Kampf ums Überleben’, 62; Braun, Eidgenossen, 261.
207 Braun, ‘Habsburger und Eidgenossen’, 130.