In the late fifteenth century the Romandie, what is today French-speaking western
Switzerland, was an open landscape: no single power was dominant. The duchy of
Savoy (raised from a county in 1416) straddled the Alps, with its twin capitals of
Chambéry (for Savoy) and Turin (for Piedmont). Its control of the major alpine
passes—the Great and Lesser St Bernard, and Mont Cenis—had brought it great
wealth from the revenues accruing from trade crossing the Alps from the
Mediterranean to northern Europe. But the advantages of its location as a Paßstaat
threatened after mid-century to become a curse as foreign troops—princely armies,
hired mercenaries, or freelance fighters—marauded and devastated Savoyard terri-
tory. The danger was manifest during the Burgundian Wars of 1475–7, and was
intensified after 1494 when the European powers resumed their struggle for con-
trol of northern Italy.
Savoy also ruled the Vaud, the fertile landscape north of Lake Geneva, which it
had inherited from the dukes of Zähringen in the early thirteenth century, and was
augmented by further acquisitions under Count Peter II of Savoy in mid-century.
The Vaud remained, however, eccentric to the main Savoy territories. In 1465
Duke Amadeus IX bestowed the Vaud as an apanage upon his youngest brother,
Count Jacob de Romont, then aged fifteen, who after 1471 let it be governed as if
it were a principality while he was in the service of the French crown.1 While that
might seem to suggest some relegation of its geopolitical significance to Savoy,
Count Jacob’s close ties to Burgundy made the Vaud an object of vital strategic
importance during the Burgundian Wars.
By that time the dukes of Burgundy had expanded well beyond their heartlands
to rule most of the Low Countries. After his succession in 1467 Duke Charles the
Bold made no secret of his designs upon the Empire in pursuit of a royal title, and
eagerly grasped the opportunity in 1469 of securing the Outer Austrian lands in
Alsace, the fortress of Breisach, and the four Forest Towns on the Hochrhein as a
mortgage from the notoriously cash-strapped Archduke Sigismund. Though he
was compelled to surrender the mortgage five years later, his efforts to reclaim
1 Bittmann, Memoiren, 425; Arnold Esch, ‘Alltag der Entscheidung. Berns Weg in den
Burgunderkrieg’, in Alltag der Entscheidung. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Schweiz an der Wende vom
Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Bern/Stuttgart/Vienna, 1998), 9–86, here at 18. Duchess Yolande, widow of
Amadeus and sister of King Louis XI of France confirmed the apanage in 1472 in the wake of Jacob’s
reconciliation to her after he had broken with her rival, Count Philippe of Bresse.
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The Romandie
An Open Landscape