Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Grundungszeit ohne Eidgenossen. Politik und Gesellschaft in der Innerschweiz um 1300

2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/gerhis/ghp074

1477-089X

T. Scott,

Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies

Gone is the oath on the Rütli meadow in 1291; gone is the heroic struggle against the Habsburgs at the battle of Morgarten in 1315; gone are the alpine communities of freedom-loving peasants; and, above all, goodbye to Wilhelm Tell: no wonder Roger Sablonier has been denounced as a heretic. As the Tell Forum mordantly declared on its website: ‘Previously such would-be self-promoters would have been arraigned for high treason … but now they receive publishing subsidies from the cantons concerned’. Quel scandale! The truth is more prosaic—and more interesting. Sablonier's aim is to lay before a broad audience the results of a generation of scholarly research, to which he himself has notably contributed. The starting-point lies in two perceptible changes which occurred in Inner Switzerland around 1300: the collapse of traditional aristocratic lordship—specifically the struggle over succession to the estates and stewardship rights of the lords of Rapperswil—and the transformation of the alpine valleys into a vital economic resource, as cattle-ranchers supplying the markets of Lombardy began to erode the grazing rights of smallholders. Sablonier distinguishes between the high nobility (nobiles), once in royal service, and the lesser (milites), though he concedes that the latter were at times hard to tell apart from aspiring local potentates. The nobiles died out or sank into obscurity in the face of pressure from expanding territorial or urban lordship. That can be demonstrated for the Swiss midlands, as in the case of the lords of Regensberg or Eschenbach, but Sablonier insists that the Habsburgs were not in a position or simply not willing to assert territorial lordship in the core of Inner Switzerland—yet they bought out the abbey of Murbach's rights in Lucerne and district in 1291: there seems to be some imprecision here over exactly what constituted ‘Inner Switzerland’: compare pp. 58, 89, and 146.