Swiss History, Part Three
Posted: May 25, 2024 Filed under: Switzerland Leave a commentWe jumped ahead a bit to cover the Bernese and Lucernese chronicles, from around 1500. Some real tough stuff in there, but also some fun:
When we last left what’s now Switzerland it was the Dark Ages. That term’s become unpopular but we just don’t know that much about what was up. There seems to be enough record and lineage to know there were some saints: Saint Bernard of Menthon, for example, he of the dogs with the barrels.
Where are our firsthand sources on Saint Bernard? What lingers seems to be mostly unsourced legend and possible propaganda? We have some 9th century stories about Saint Gall:
but we’re getting into lore here:
Images of Saint Gall typically represent him standing with a bear
who knows?
The saints, it is arguable, were trying to live outside of History, at least political history, which was possibly the smart move in the year 900. Perhaps always. Or maybe that’s the wrong way to see them, maybe they were political actors just like the counts of Annecy and the kings of Burgundy but with a holy varnish.
Between the Romans and what came next, the saints seem to have had the most lasting legacy: structures that still stand and names that are known.
The Rütli
In 1291, when the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf of Habsburg, died, the Helvetians decided their moment had come. On August 1, before a new emperor could be elected by a council of German princes, the elders of the three small states met on a tiny heath known as the Rütli on the shores of the Lake of Lucerne and negotiated an “eternal pact.” They declared their right to local self-government, promised one another assistance against any encroachment upon these rights and committed future generations to an alliance that was to “endure forever.” The pact was the beginning of the Everlasting League and the foundation of the Swiss Confederation. The forest meadow, the Rütli, accessible only by boat or by foot down a steep trail, is Switzerland’s most venerated patriotic shrine. Every school child is required to make at least one pilgrimage to it.
So says Herbert Kubly in the Time Life Switzerland. You’d think he’d include a picture of the Rutli, but he doesn’t. Maybe not his decision. That must’ve been frustrating in the days before you could find thousands of images of anything in one second.
A key word you come across in Swiss history is Eidgenossenschaft. Says Wiki:
Eidgenossenschaft is a German word specific to the political history of Switzerland. It means “oath commonwealth” or “oath alliance” in reference to the “eternal pacts” formed between the Eight Cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy of the late medieval period, most notably in Swiss historiography being the Rütlischwur between the three founding cantons Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, traditionally dated to 1307. In modern usage, it is the German term used as equivalent with “Confederation” in the official name of Switzerland.
But how could a town/canton make a pledge? A person can make an oath, but can a canton? Clive H. Church and Randolph C. Head, in their Concise History of Switzerland, say:
Urban autonomy was common across medieval Europe, and many rural communities adopted corporate forms of organization in the High Middle Ages, but rural communities with imperial liberty emerged in only a few areas, notably in the central Alps. Valley communities in the mountains from the Valais to the Grisons organized as political corporations bearing seals and administering justice, and once they had gained sufficient legal privileges and autonomy, joined as equal members the networks of alliances among communes that characterized the entire region. Several factors enabled this development: location on the passes critical to imperial policy in Italy, the relative weakness of the major feudal dynasties and the high degree of cooperation demanded by pastoralism in the Alps, which encouraged strong collective institutions. Living in a diverse landscape of nobles, towns and cities also provided models and sometimes the impetus to organize on corporate lines. Historians have pointed to the emergence of alliances that included both urban and rural communes as a distinctive feature that enabled the Swiss leagues to thrive and survive after 1500, even as primarily urban alliances elsewhere foundered.
Here is Schwyz, from which Switzerland gets her name:
(Markus Bernet took that one.)
The truth or details about all this is still somewhat disputed, but a pact among the cantons is the key to Swiss history.
Together they fought off the Hapsburgs:
This was an intense time:
Source is this great site, Swiss History: Fact of Fake News, which goes into much detail about how much to trust our historians.
William Tell
You can’t talk about Swiss history without addressing William Tell, supposedly made to shoot an apple off his son’s head by a tyrannical Habsburg reeve (or vogt)? The earliest reference to him comes in The White Book of Sarnen, put together in 1474 by a country scribe named, conveniently, Schriber. (I learn all that here).
Both Church and Head in their Concise History of Switzerland and Steinberg in Why Switzerland? (great title) delicately broach the idea that William Tell very likely never existed, but he was so important as an idea to the Swiss that he’s significant. You can go as deep as you want on the historicity of Bill Tell. I found this interesting:
Rochholz (1877) connects the similarity of the Tell legend to the stories of Egil and Palnatoki with the legends of a migration from Sweden to Switzerland during the Middle Ages.
That’s Tell by Ferdinand Hodler:
Hodler’s life gives us a snapshot of everday Swiss history as it existed in the 19th century:
Hodler was born in Bern, the eldest of six children. His father, Jean Hodler, made a meager living as a carpenter; his mother, Marguerite (née Neukomm), was from a peasant family. By the time Hodler was eight years old, he had lost his father and two younger brothers to tuberculosis. His mother remarried, to a decorative painter named Gottlieb Schüpach who had five children from a previous marriage. The birth of additional children brought the size of Hodler’s family to thirteen.
The family’s finances were poor, and the nine-year-old Hodler was put to work assisting his stepfather in painting signs and other commercial projects. After the death of his mother from tuberculosis in 1867, Hodler was sent to Thun to apprentice with a local painter, Ferdinand Sommer. From Sommer, Hodler learned the craft of painting conventional Alpine landscapes, typically copied from prints, which he sold in shops and to tourists.
When we come back: Jean Cauvin and why there were no musical instruments in Geneva for two hundred years.
Helytimes 
