Formation of the Old Swiss Confederacy

The Old Swiss Confederacy began as a late medieval alliance between the communities of the valleys in the Central Alps, at the time part of the Holy Roman Empire, to facilitate the management of common interests such as free trade and to ensure the peace along the important trade routes through the mountains.
The Hohenstaufen emperors had granted these valleys '' reichsfrei'' status in the early 13th century. As ''reichsfrei'' regions, the cantons (or regions) of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden were under the direct authority of the emperor without any intermediate liege lords and thus were largely autonomous.

With the rise of the Habsburg dynasty, the kings and dukes of Habsburg sought to extend their influence over this region and to bring it under their rule; as a consequence, a conflict ensued between the Habsburgs and these mountain communities who tried to defend their privileged status as ''reichsfrei'' regions. The three founding cantons of the '' Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft'', as the confederacy was called, were joined in the early 14th century by the city states of Lucerne, Zürich, and Bern, and they managed to defeat Habsburg armies on several occasions. They also profited from the fact that the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, for most of the 14th century, came from the House of Luxembourg and regarded them as potential useful allies against the rival Habsburgs.

By 1460, the confederates controlled most of the territory south and west of the Rhine to the Alps and the Jura mountains. At the end of the 15th century, two wars resulted in an expansion to thirteen cantons (''Dreizehn Orte''): in the Burgundian Wars of the 1470s, the confederates asserted their hegemony on the western border, and their victory in the Swabian War in 1499 against the forces of the Habsburg emperor Maximilian I ensured a ''de facto'' independence from the empire. During their involvement in the Italian Wars, the Swiss brought the Ticino under their control.

Two similar federations sprung up in neighboring areas in the Alps in the 14th century: in the Grisons, the federation of the Three Leagues (''Drei Bünde'') was founded, and in the Valais, the Seven Tenths (''Sieben Zenden'') were formed as a result of the conflicts with the Dukes of Savoy. Neither federation was part of the medieval ''Eidgenossenschaft'' but both maintained very close connections with it.

Territorial development

Under the Hohenstaufen dynasty of the Holy Roman Empire, the three regions of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden (the '' Waldstätten'' or "forest communities") had gained the ''Reichsfreiheit'', the first two because the emperors wanted to place the strategically important St. Gotthard Pass under their direct control, the latter because most of its territory belonged to '' reichsfrei'' monasteries. The cities of Bern and Zürich had also become ''reichsfrei'' when the dynasty of their patrons, the Zähringer, had died out.

When Rudolph I of Habsburg was elected "King of the Germans" in 1273, he also became the direct liege lord of these ''reichsfrei'' regions. He instituted a strict rule and raised the taxes to finance wars and further territorial acquisitions. When he died in 1291, his son Albert I got involved in a power struggle with Adolf of Nassau for the German throne, and the Habsburg rule over the alpine territories weakened temporarily. Anti-Habsburg insurgences sprung up in Swabia and Austria, but were quashed quickly by Albert in 1292. Zürich had participated in this uprising. Albert besieged the city, which had to accept him as its patron.

This time of turmoil prompted the ''Waldstätten'' to cooperate more closely, trying to preserve or regain their ''Reichsfreiheit''. The first alliance started in 1291 when Rudolph bought all the rights over the town of Lucerne and the abbey estates in Unterwalden from Murbach Abbey in Alsace. The ''Waldstätten'' saw their trade route over Lake Lucerne cut off and feared losing their independence. When Rudolph died on July 15, 1291 the Communities prepared to defend themselves. On August 1, 1291 an Everlasting League was made between the Forest Communities for mutual defense against a common enemy. Uri and Schwyz got their status reconfirmed by Adolf of Nassau in 1297, but to no avail, for Albert finally won the power struggle and became King of Germany in 1298 after Adolf was killed in the Battle of Göllheim.

Nucleus

The Federal Charter of 1291 is one of the oldest surviving written document of an alliance between Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, the founding cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy.
It is possible that it was written a few decades later than the given date of 1291, which would put it in the same date range as the pact of Brunnen of 1315. The traditional date given for the foundation of the Swiss Confederacy in Swiss historiography of the 16th century (Aegidius Tschudi and others) is 1307.

1291 marks the death of king Rudolf I, and 1307 falls into the reign of king Albert I, both members of the House of Habsburg ruling in a time of political instability, when the Holy Roman Empire had been without emperor for several decades.
The politically weak kings of this period had to make frequent concessions to their subjects and vassals in order to remain in power.
The founding cantons received confirmations of the ''Freibriefe'' establishing their ''reichsfrei'' status. Even Unterwalden was finally properly granted this status by Albert's successor Henry VII in 1309. This did not prevent the dukes of Habsburg, who originally had had their homelands in the Aargau, from trying to reassert their sovereignty over the territories south of the Rhine.

In the struggle for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire in 1314 between duke Frederick I of Austria and the Bavarian king Louis IV, the ''Waldstätten'' sided with Louis for fear of the Habsburgs trying to annex their counties again, like Rudolph I had done. When a long-simmering conflict between Schwyz and the abbey of Einsiedeln escalated once more, the Habsburgs responded by sending a strong army of knights against these peasants to subdue their insurrection, but the Austrian army of Frederick's brother Leopold I was utterly defeated in the Battle of Morgarten in 1315.
The three cantons renewed their alliance in the pact of Brunnen, and Louis IV reconfirmed their ''Reichsfreiheit''.

The Swiss chronicles of the Burgundy Wars period (1470s) refer to a rebellion
against the local bailiffs, with a coordinated destruction of their forts or castles, known as the ''Burgenbruch'' ("slighting") in Swiss historiography. The earliest reference for this is the ''White Book of Sarnen'' (1470), which records that
:''wa böse Türnli waren, die brachen sy vnd viengen ze Uere am ersten an die hüser brechen''
:"wherever there were hostile forts (towers), they broke (slighted) them and first began in Uri to break these buildings"
The text names Zwing Uri at Amsteg as the first castle slighted, followed by castle Schwandau in Schwyz, Rötzberg in Stans, and finally the castle at Sarnen, the storming of which is told in a graphic manner.

The ''Burgenbruch'' was long seen as historical, substantiated by the numerous ruined castles in Central Switzerland, but archaeological excavations have shown that these castles were abandoned gradually, not during a sudden uprising, during the period of roughly 1200 to 1350. By the 1970s, the "demythologization" of the foundational period of the Confederacy was at its peak, and the default view was to regard the reports of the late-15th-century chronists as essentially legendary.
Since the late 1970s, systematic surveys of medieval castles in Central Switzerland have shown that a number of castles were indeed destroyed during the early 14th century, so that a possible historical nucleus of the ''Burgenbruch'' accounts may be granted, even though the destruction of these forts in itself was of limited military import and could not have resulted in a lasting political change.

Expansion to the ''Acht Orte''

Subsequently, the three communities (their territories did not yet correspond to the areas of the modern-day cantons) followed a slow policy of expansion. Uri entered a pact with the previously Habsburg valley of Urseren in 1317. In 1332, the city of Lucerne, trying to achieve from the Habsburgs, joined the alliance. In 1351, these four communities were joined by the city of Zürich, where a strong citizenship had gained power following the installation of the (guild regulations) and the banning of the noble authorities in 1336. The city also sought support against the Habsburg city of Rapperswil, which had tried to overthrow mayor Rudolf Brun in Zürich in 1350. With the help of its new allies, Zürich was able to withstand the siege of duke Albert II of Austria, and the confederates even conquered the city of Zug and the valley of Glarus in 1352. They had to return both Glarus and Zug to the Habsburgs in the peace treaty of Regensburg in 1356; emperor Charles IV in return recognized the of Zürich and confirmed its status in spite of his having forbidden any confederations within the empire in his Golden Bull issued in January of that same year.

The ''Eidgenossenschaft'' had signed "perpetual" pacts with both Glarus and Zug in 1352, and thus, even if these pacts apparently were disregarded only a few years later, this date is often considered the entry of these two cantons into the confederation despite their remaining under Habsburg rule for a few more years.Glauser, T.:
1352 – Zug wird nicht eidgenössisch
'', State archive of the Canton of Zug; Tugium 18, pp. 103–115; 2002. ( PDF file, 359 KB; in German).

In the west, the ''Vier Waldstätten'' had already formed an alliance with the city of Bern in 1323, and even sent a detachment to help the Bernese forces in their territorial expansion against the dukes of Savoy and the Habsburgs in the Battle of Laupen in 1339. In 1353, Bern entered an "eternal" alliance with the confederation, completing the "Confederacy of the Eight Cantons" (german: Bund der Acht Orte).

This alliance of the was not a homogeneous state but rather a conglomerate of eight independent cities and lands, held together not by one single pact but by a net of six different "eternal" pacts, none of which included all eight parties as signatories. Only the three Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden were part of all these treaties. All eight parties would still pursue their own particular interests, most notably in the cases of the strong cities of Zürich and Bern. Zürich was also part of an alliance of cities around Lake Constance which also included Konstanz, Lindau and Schaffhausen and for some time included cities as far away as Rottweil or Ulm, and Bern followed its own hegemonial politics, participating successively in various alliances with other cities including Fribourg, Murten, Biel or Solothurn. This Bernese "Burgundian Confederation" was a more volatile construct of varying alliances, and in the Battle of Laupen (1339), Fribourg even sided against Bern. Bern's position after that battle was strong enough that such alliances often ended with the other party becoming a Bernese dependency, as it happened with e.g. Burgdorf or Payerne.

An external threat during this time arose in the form of the Guglers, marauding mercenary knights from France who were beaten back under the leadership of Bern in December 1375.

Consolidation

In 1364, Schwyz re-conquered the city and land of Zug and renewed the alliance the following year. In the 1380s, Lucerne expanded its territory aggressively, conquering Wolhusen, claiming sovereignty over the valley of the Entlebuch and the formerly Habsburg city of Sempach. As a consequence, Leopold III of Austria assembled an army and met the ''Eidgenossen'' near Sempach in 1386, where his troops were defeated decisively in the Battle of Sempach and he himself was killed. In the wake of these events Glarus declared itself free and constituted its first ''Landsgemeinde'' (regional diet) in 1387. In the Battle of Näfels in 1388, an Austrian army of Albert III, the successor of Leopold, was defeated, and in the peace treaty concluded the next year, Glarus maintained its independence from the Habsburgs.

The loose federation of states was reinforced by additional agreements amongst the partners. In the '' Pfaffenbrief'' of 1370, the signatory six states (without Bern and Glarus) for the first time expressed themselves as a territorial unity, referring to themselves as ''unser Eydgnosschaft''. They assumed in this document authority over clericals, subjecting them to their worldly legislation. Furthermore, the ''Pfaffenbrief'' forbade feuds and the parties pledged to guarantee the peace on the road from Zürich to the St. Gotthard pass. Another important treaty was the '' Sempacherbrief'' in 1393. Not only was this the first document signed by all eight of the ''Acht Orte'' (plus the associated Solothurn), but it also defined that none of them was to unilaterally start a war without the consent of all the others.

Beginning in 1401, the confederates supported the insurrection of Appenzell against the abbey of St. Gallen and Frederick IV of Austria, duke in Tyrol and Vorderösterreich. Appenzell became a protectorate of the ''Acht Orte'' in 1411, who concluded a 50-year peace with Frederick IV in 1412.

Emperor Sigismund banned Frederick IV in 1415, who had sided with Antipope John XXIII at the Council of Constance, and encouraged others to take over the duke's possessions, amongst which was the Aargau. After being granted far-reaching privileges by the emperor (all eight cantons became ''reichsfrei'') and a decree that placed the ban over the peace treaty of 1412, the ''Eidgenossen'' conquered the Aargau. A large part became Bernese, while the County of Baden was subsequently administered by the confederation as a common property until 1798. Only the Fricktal remained Habsburgian.

In the Valais, the conflict between the Bishop of Sion and the Duchy of Savoy, which had led to a separation in 1301 (the bishop controlling the upper Valais and the Savoyards the lower part), broke out again. Twice the Savoyards temporarily occupied the whole Valais, but both times they were ultimately defeated. Both peace treaties from 1361 and 1391 restored the ''status quo'' of 1301. As a result of these struggles, the villages in the upper Valais organized themselves in the ''Sieben Zenden'' ("seven tenths") around 1355, emerging after these wars as largely independent small states, much like the cantons of the ''Eidgenossenschaft''.

In the Grisons, called ''Churwalchen'' then, the bishop of Chur

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