failed owing to a rising of the burghers, who sympathized with Freedom from the Political Claims of the Habsburgs. the Confederates, and on the 16th of July 1394 the peace was prolonged for twenty years (and again in 1412 for fifty years), various stipulations being made by which the long struggle of the League against the Habsburgs was finally crowned with success.
By the peace of 1394 Glarus was freed on payment of £200 annually (in 1395 it bought up all the rights of Sackingen); Zug too was released from Austrian rule. Schwyz was given the advocatia of the great abbey of Einsiedeln; Lucerne got the Entlebuch (finally in 1405), Sempach and Rothenburg, Bern and Soleure were confirmed in their conquests. Above all, the Confederation as a whole was relieved from the overlordship of the Habsburgs, to whom, however, all their rights and dues as landed proprietors were expressly reserved; Bern, Zürich and Soleure guaranteeing the maintenance of these rights and dues, with power in case of need to call on the other Confederates to support them by arms. Though the house of Habsburg entertained hopes of recovering its former rights, so that technically the treaties of 1389, 1394 and 1412 were but truces, it finally and for ever renounced all its feudal rights and privileges within the Confederation by the “Everlasting Compact” of 1474.
It is probable that Bern did not take any active share in the Sempach War because she was bound by the treaty of peace made with the Austrians in 1368; and Soleure, allied with Bern, was doubtless a party to the treaty of 1394 (though not yet in the League), because of its sufferings in 1382 at the hands of the Kyburg line of the Habsburgs, whose possessions (Thun, Burgdorf, &c.) in 1384 fell into the hands of the two allies.
We may mention here the foray (known as the English or Gugler War) made in 1375 by Enguerrand de Coucy (husband of Isabella, daughter of Edward III. of England) and his freebooters (many of them Englishmen and Welshmen), called “Gugler” from their pointed steel caps, with the object of obtaining possession of certain towns in the Aargau (including Sempach), which he claimed as the dowry of his mother Catherine, daughter of the Leopold who was defeated at Morgarten. He was put to rout in the Entlebuch by the men of Bern, Lucerne, Schwyz and Unterwalden in December 1375. This victory was commemorated with great rejoicings in 1875.
3. The great victory at Sempach not merely vastly increased
the fame of the Everlasting League but also enabled it to extend
both its influence and its territory. The 15th
century is the period when both the League and
its several members took the aggressive, and the
expansion of their power and lands cannot be better
Struggles in Appenzell, St Gall and Valsis.
seen than by comparing the state of things at the beginning
and at the end of this century. The pastoral highlands of
Appenzell (Abbatis Cella) and the town of St Gall had long been
trying to throw off the rights exercised over them by the great
abbey of St Gall. The Appenzellers, especially, had offered a
stubborn resistance, and the abbot’s troops had been beaten back
by them in 1403 on the heights of Vögelinseck, and again in 1405
in the great fight on the Stoss Pass (which leads up into the highlands),
in which the abbot was backed by the duke of Austria.
The tales of the heroic defence of Uri Rotach of Appenzell, and
of the appearance of a company of Appenzell women disguised as
warriors which turned the battle, are told in connexion with this
light, but do not appear till the 17th and 18th centuries, being
thus quite unhistorical, so far as our genuine evidence goes.
Schwyz had given them some help, and in 1411 Appenzell was
placed under the protection of the League (save Bern), with
which in the next year the city of St Gall made a similar treaty
to last ten years. So too in 1416–1417 several of the “tithings”
of the Upper Valais (i.e. the upper stretch of the Rhone valley),
which in 1388 had beaten the bishop and the nobles in a great
tight at Visp, became closely associated with Lucerne, Uri and
Unterwalden. It required aid in its final struggle (1418–19)
against the great house of Raron, the count-bishop of Sitten (or
Sion), and the house of Savoy, which held the Lower Valais—the
Forest districts, on the other hand, wishing to secure themselves
against Raron and Savoy in their attempt to conquer
permanently the Val d’Ossola on the south side of the Simplon
Pass. Bern, however, supported its burgher, the lord of Raron,
and peace was made in 1420. Such were the first links which
bound these lands with the League; but they did not become
full members for a long time—Appenzell in 1513, St Gall in 1803,
the Valais in 1815.
Space will not allow us to enumerate all the small conquests made in the first half of the 15th century by every member of the League; suffice it to say that each increased and rounded off its territory, but did not give the conquered lands any political rights, governing them as “subject lands,” often very harshly. The same phenomenon of lands which had won their own freedom playing the part of tyrant over other lands which joined them more or less by their voluntary action is seen on a larger scale in the case of the conquest of the Aargau, and in the first attempts to secure a footing south of the Alps.
In 1412 the treaty of 1394 between the League and the Habsburgs had been renewed for fifty years; but when in 1415 Duke Frederick of Austria helped Pope John XXII. to escape from Constance, where the great ecumenical council was then sitting, and the emperor Sigismund placed the duke under the ban of the Empire, summoning all members of the Empire to arm against him, the League hesitated, because of their treaty of 1412, till the emperor declared that all the rights and lands of Austria in the League were forfeited, and that their compact did not release them from their obligations to the Empire. In the name, therefore, of the emperor, and by his special command, the different members of the League overran the extensive Habsburg possessions in the Aargau. The chief share fell to Bern, but certain districts (known as the Freie Aemter) were joined together and governed as bailiwicks held in common by all the members of the League (save Uri, busied in the south, and Bern, who had already secured the lion’s share of the spoil for herself). This is the first case in which the League as a whole took up the position of rulers over districts which, though guaranteed in the enjoyment of their old rights, were nevertheless politically unfree. As an encouragement and a reward, Sigismund had granted in advance to the League the right of criminal jurisdiction (haute justice or Blutbann), which points to the fact that they were soon to become independent of the Empire, as they were of Austria.
As the natural policy of Bern was to seek to enlarge its borders at the expense of Austria, and later of Savoy, so we find that Uri, shut off by physical causes from extension in other directions, as steadily turned its eyes towards the south. In 1410 the valley of Urseren was finally joined to Uri; though communications were difficult, and carried on only by Italian First Italian Conquest means of the “Stiebende Brücke,” a wooden bridge suspended by chains over the Reuss, along the side of a great rocky buttress (pierced in 1707 by the tunnel known as the Urnerloch), yet this enlargement of the territory of Uri gave it complete command over the St Gotthard Pass, long commercially important, and now to serve for purposes of war and conquest. Already in 1403 Uri and Obwalden had taken advantage of a quarrel with the duke of Milan as to custom dues at the market of Varese to occupy the long narrow upper Ticino valley on the south of the pass called the Val Leventina; in 1411 the men of the same two lands, exasperated by the insults of the local lords, called on the other members of the League, and all jointly (except Bern) occupied the Val d’Ossola, on the south side of the Simplon Pass. But in 1414 they lost this to Savoy, and, with the object of getting it back, obtained in 1416–1417 the alliance of the men of the Upper Valais, then fighting for freedom, and thus regained (1416) the valley, despite the exertions of the great Milanese general Carmagnola. In 1419 Uri and Obwalden bought from its lord the town and district of Bellinzona. This rapid advance, however, did not approve itself to the duke of Milan, and Carmagnola reoccupied both valleys; the Confederates were not at one with regard to these southern conquests; a small body pressed on in front of the rest, but was cut to pieces at Arbedo near Bellinzona in 1422. A bold attempt in 1425 by a Schwyzer, Peter Rissi by name, to recover the Val d’Ossola caused the Confederates to send a force to rescue these adventurers; but
