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The Swiss and their Neighbours, 1460-1560 - Between Accommodation and Aggression (Hardcover)
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The Swiss and their Neighbours, 1460-1560 - Between Accommodation and Aggression (Hardcover)
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Renewed interest in Swiss history has sought to overcome the old
stereotypes of peasant liberty and republican exceptionalism. The
heroic age of the Confederation in the fifteenth century is now
seen as a turning-point as the Swiss polity achieved a measure of
institutional consolidation and stability, and began to mark out
clear frontiers. The Swiss and their Neighbours, 1460-1560
questions both assumptions. It argues that the administration of
the common lordships by the cantons collectively gave rise to as
much discord as co-operation, and remained a pragmatic device not a
political principle. It argues that the Swiss War of 1499 was an
avoidable catastrophe, from which developed a modus vivendi between
the Swiss and the Empire as the Rhine became a buffer-zone, not a
boundary. It then investigates the background to Bern's conquest of
the Vaud in 1536, under the guise of relieving Geneva from
beleaguerment, to suggest that Bern's actions were driven not by
predeterminate territorial expansion but by the need to halt French
designs upon Geneva and Savoy. The geopolitical balance of the
Confederation was fundamentally altered by Bern's acquisition of
the Vaud and adjacent lands. Nevertheless, the political fabric of
the Confederation, which had been tested to the brink during the
Reformation, proved itself flexible enough to absorb such a major
reorientation, not least because what held the Confederation
together was not so much institutions as a sense of common identity
and mutual obligation forged during the Burgundian Wars of the
1470s.
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