Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/591

GERMANY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 541 Papacy in which he was humiliated and all but lost his throne. His successor, Charles IV, was inactive in Italy and submissive to the Papacy, and, although he went to Rome to be crowned, promised the pope not to stay there over- night. The pope himself at this time was still at Avignon, but was none the less jealous of any imperial activity in Italy. By Sigismund's time the pope had returned to Rome and quite a ceremony was made of that emperor's corona- tion, which did not occur until almost the close of his reign. Frederick III was the last emperor to be crowned at Rome. One might almost say that with him the medieval or Holy Roman Empire ended and the Hapsburg monarchy began. Through the later Middle Ages first the Kings of France and then the Dukes of Burgundy pushed their boundaries eastward at the expense of fiefs supposed to belong to the Empire. The leagues of the Rhine and Swabian cities to which we have already referred were not permanent federations. But out of the ruins of the old Hohenstaufen Duchy origin of of Swabia developed from the thirteenth cen- confedera- tury on a union of cantons and towns which was tion the beginning of modern Switzerland. The first stages of this development were made at the expense of the House of Hapsburg. The oldest historical document concerning the Swiss Confederation which has come down to us dates from 1 29 1 and records a defensive league formed between the three forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, located about the Lake of Lucerne. There had, however, been an earlier union, but the story of William Tell is a later legend. This defensive league was against the Haps- burg family, whose feudal claims in these territories the na- tives had disputed, asserting their right to self-government and to immediate relations with the imperial authority. In short, they rebelled against their feudal lords and became rural communes like so many other places in western Eu- rope. Rudolf of Hapsburg had recognized only Uri as di- rectly under imperial authority. Adolf of Nassau added Schwyz, and Henry VII extended the privilege to Unter-