Swiss peasant war of 1653
Encyclopedia
The Swiss peasant war of 1653 was a popular revolt
in the Old Swiss Confederacy
at the time of the Ancien Régime
. A devaluation of Bernese money caused a tax revolt
that spread from the Entlebuch
valley in the Canton of Lucerne
to the Emmental
valley in the Canton of Bern and then to the cantons of Solothurn
and Basel
and also to the Aargau
.
The population of the countryside demanded fiscal relief from their ruling authorities, the city councils of these cantons' capitals. When their demands were dismissed by the cities, the peasants organized themselves and threatened to blockade the cities. After initial compromises mediated by other cantons had failed, the peasants united under the treaty of Huttwil
, forming the "League of Huttwil". Their movement became more radical, going beyond the initially purely fiscal demands. The Huttwil League considered itself a political entity equal to and independent from the city authorities, and it assumed full military and political sovereignty in its territories.
The peasants laid siege on Bern and Lucerne
, whereupon the cities negotiated a peace agreement with the peasant leader Niklaus Leuenberger
, the so-called peace on the Murifeld. The peasant armies retreated. The Tagsatzung
, the federal council of the Old Swiss Confederacy, then sent an army from Zürich to definitely end the rebellion, and after the Battle of Wohlenschwil, the Huttwil League was forcibly annulled in the peace of Mellingen
. The last resistance in the Entlebuch valley was broken by the end of June. After their victory, the city authorities took drastic punitive measures. The Huttwil League and the peace of the Murifeld were declared null and void by the city council of Bern. Many exponents of the insurrection were captured, tortured, and finally received heavy sentences. Niklaus Leuenberger was beheaded and quartered in Bern on September 6, 1653.
Although the military victory of the absolutist
city authorities was complete, the war had also shown them that they depended very much on their rural subjects. Soon after the war, the ruling aristocrats instituted a series of reforms and even lowered some taxes, thus fulfilling some of the peasants' original fiscal demands. In the long term, the peasant war of 1653 prevented Switzerland from an excessive implementation of absolutism
as occurred in France during the reign of Louis XIV
.
. The federation comprised rural cantons as well as city states that had expanded their territories into the countryside by political and military means at the cost of the previously ruling liege lord
s. The cities just took over the preexisting administrative structures. In these city cantons, the city councils ruled the countryside; they held the judicial rights and also appointed the district sheriff
s (Landvögte
).
Rural and urban cantons had the same standing in the federation. Each canton was sovereign within its territory, pursuing its own foreign policy and also minting its own money. The diet
and central council of the federation, the Tagsatzung
, held no real power and served more as an instrument of coordination. The reformation
in the early 16th century had led to a confessional division amongst the cantons: the central Swiss cantons including Lucerne had remained Catholic
, while Zürich
, Bern, Basel, Schaffhausen
, and also the city of St. Gallen
had become Protestant. The Tagsatzung was often paralysed by disagreements between the equally strong factions of the Catholic and Protestant sides.
Territories that had been conquered since the early 15th century were governed as condominium
s by the cantons. Reeve
s for these territories were assigned by the Tagsatzung for a period of two years; the posts changed bi-annually between the cantons. The Aargau had been annexed in 1415. The western part belonged to Bern, while the eastern part comprised the two condominiums of the former County of Baden in the north and the Freie Ämter
("Free Districts") in the south. The Free Districts had been forcibly recatholized after the Reformation in Switzerland
, and the Catholic cantons, especially Lucerne, Zug
, and Uri
considered these districts part of their sphere of influence and the reeves typically came from these cantons. The Thurgau
, which had been annexed in 1460, was also a condominium of the Confederacy.
At its root, the peasant war of 1653 was caused by the rapidly changing economic circumstances after the end of the Thirty Years' War
. The Swiss Confederacy had been spared from all belligerent action; the Swiss peasants generally had profited from the wartime economy as they had been able to export their agrarian products at higher prices than before. After the Peace of Westphalia
, the southern German economy recovered quickly, the Swiss exports dwindled, and the prices for agrarian products dropped. Many Swiss peasants, who had raised mortgages
during the boom at wartime, suddenly faced financial problems.
At the same time the war had since the 1620s caused significant expenses for the cities, e.g. for building better defenses such as new bastion
s. A significant source of income for the cantons ran dry: their financial means exhausted by the war, France and Spain no longer paid the Pensions, the agreed sums in return for the cantons providing them with mercenary regiments. The city authorities tried to compensate for this and to cover their expenses on the one hand by increasing the taxes or inventing new ones and on the other hand by minting less valuable copper coins called Batzen that had the same face value
as the previously minted silver money. The population began hoarding the silver coins, and the cheap copper money that remained in circulation continually lost in purchasing power
. Zürich, Basel, and the central Swiss cantons therefore began already in 1623 to mint more valuable coins again. Bern and also Solothurn and Fribourg
set a compulsory fixed exchange rate between copper and silver money instead, but this measure did not break the de-facto devaluation. At the end of the war, the population thus faced both a postwar depression
and a high inflation
, combined with high taxes. This financial crisis led to a series of tax revolts in several cantons of the Confederacy, for instance 1629–36 in Lucerne, 1641 in Bern, or 1645/46 in Zürich. The uprising in 1653 continued this series, but would take the conflict to an unprecedented level.
Since the 15th century, the political power in the city cantons had become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few urban families, who increasingly saw their public offices as hereditary positions and who developed aristocratic and absolutist attitudes. Slowly, an urban oligarchy
of magistrates had formed. This concentration of power in the city cantons in a small urban élite caused a veritable "participatory crisis" (Suter). The rural population increasingly was subject to decrees issued without their consent that restricted their rights of old and also their social and cultural freedom.
At the beginning of December 1652, Bern devalued its copper Batzen by 50% to adjust its face value to its intrinsic value
to combat the inflation. The authorities set a term of only three days to exchange the copper coins at the old rate against more stable gold or silver money. Not many people could thus take advantage of this exchange offer, and for most—and in particular the rural population—half their fortunes just vanished. The other cantons soon followed suit and similarly devalued the Bernese copper money. The situation was most dire in the Lucerne Entlebuch valley, where the Bernese Batzen were in widespread usage. The financial situation of many a peasant became unsustainable. Insider deals
of the ruling magistrates of Lucerne furthered the unrest among the population. The peasants of the Entlebuch valley, led by Hans Emmenegger from Schüpfheim
and Christian Schybi from Escholzmatt
, sent a delegation to Lucerne to demand remedies, but the city council refused to even hear them. The enraged peasants organized a general assembly (Landsgemeinde
) of the population of the valley at Heiligkreuz, in spite of such assemblies being illegal as the authorities' laws of the time denied the freedom of assembly
. The assembly, which took place after the mass
on February 10, 1653, decided to suspend all tax payments until the authorities in Lucerne fulfilled their demands by reducing taxes and abolishing some of them altogether, such as the taxes on salt, cattle, and horse trades.
The authorities of Lucerne were not willing to grant the population's demands, but neither did they did manage to subdue this insurrection. The large majority of the rural districts of the canton of Lucerne
sided with the peasants of the Entlebuch valley in an alliance concluded at Wolhusen
on February 26, 1653. At the beginning of March, the people of the neighbouring Bernese Emmental valley joined their cause, addressing similar demands at the Bernese authorities. Both cantons called upon the other uninvolved members of the Old Swiss Confederacy to mediate in the conflict, but at the same time, the Tagsatzung
, the diet of the cantons' governments, also began to prepare for a military resolution. Troops from Schaffhausen
and Basel were sent towards the Aargau, but this immediately solicited an armed resistance amongst the population such that the troops had to withdraw.
On March 18, 1653, the mediating Catholic central Swiss cantons proposed in Lucerne a resolution that fulfilled most of the peasants' demands, especially the fiscal ones. In Bern, a similar compromise was proposed by a Protestant delegation from Zürich under the direction of the mayor of Zürich, Johann Heinrich Waser, on April 4, 1653. The Bernese Emmental and most of the districts of the canton of Lucerne accepted these resolutions and their representatives swore new oaths of fealty. But the people in the Entlebuch valley did not accept the authorities' terms, as these—besides offering some tax reliefs—criminalized the insurrection and called for the punishment of the leaders. At a meeting at Signau
on April 10, 1653, the delegates from the Entlebuch convinced their neighbours in the Emmental: the assembly decided not to honor the new oaths its representatives had sworn in Bern.
The negotiations between the city authorities and the peasants were not continued. While the authorities debated at the Tagsatzung how to deal with the insurrection, the peasants worked to gain support for their cause amongst the rural population of other regions and lobbied for a formal alliance. A peasant delegation sent to Zürich was turned back promptly: the city authorities, who had put down local unrests in their territory already in 1645 and again in 1646, had already recognized the danger of the agitation. On April 23, 1653, representatives of the people of the countryside of Lucerne, Bern, Basel, and Solothurn met at Sumiswald
and concluded an alliance to help each other to achieve their goals. A week later, they met again at Huttwil
, where they renewed that alliance and elected Niklaus Leuenberger
from Rüderswil
in the Emmental as their leader.
On May 14, 1653, the peasants met again at a Landsgemeinde at Huttwil and formalized their alliance as the "League of Huttwil" by signing a written contract in the style of the old Bundesbriefe of the Old Swiss Confederacy. The treaty clearly established the league as a separate political entity that considered itself equal to and independent from the cities. The tax revolt had become an independence movement, based ideologically on the traditional Swiss founding legends, especially on the legend of William Tell
. Legally, the peasants justified their assemblies and their union by the rights of old and in particular the Stanser Verkommnis
of 1481, one of the important coalition treaties of the Old Swiss Confederacy.
The peasants by then had assumed full sovereignty over the territory they controlled. They refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the city authorities and also had the military control over the area. The Huttwil League openly declared its intention to expand until it encompassed the rural population in the whole Confederacy. The majority of the rural population supported the rebellion; the dissenting minority was silenced by threats of violence and sometimes violence indeed. Communications between the cities were interrupted, official envoys were shaken down and ships on the rivers were captured. The peasants even sent a letter to the French ambassador at Solothurn assuring the French king Louis XIV of their good intentions.
The confessional conflicts that dominated the relations between the ruling city authorities were only secondary to the peasants of the Huttwil league. The peasant alliance bridged the confessional divide, uniting Catholic people from the Entlebuch and from Solothurn with Protestant peasants from the Emmental and from Basel. The treaty of Huttwil explicitly recognized this biconfessionalism. The cities remained in all their manoeuvring and negotiations for military support within their respective confessional spheres: Catholic Lucerne had requested mediation and then military help from the Catholic central Swiss cantons, while Protestant Bern had turned to Protestant Zürich for help. The distrust between the authorities of the Catholic and Protestant cantons was so deep that none would allow troops of the other confession to operate on their territories.
Both sides began to prepare openly for an armed conflict. The cities faced the problem that their armies were militias, recruited from the rural population of their subject territories, but that precisely this rural population had turned against them. Bern began raising troops in the Vaud
and the Bernese Oberland
, two regions unaffected by the uprising. The authorities of Bern and Lucerne were supported by the other cantons at the Tagsatzung. In a dispatch from Zürich, the uprising was termed for the first time a "revolution".
On May 18, 1653, the peasants delivered ultimatums to Bern and Lucerne and raised 16,000 troops. When the city of Bern replied with a protest note, the peasants marched to Bern under the leadership of Leuenberger, arriving on May 22, 1653. A second army led by Emmenegger laid siege to Lucerne. The city authorities were unprepared for an armed conflict and immediately engaged in negotiations. Within days, peace agreements were concluded. In the peace on the Murifeld (Murifeldfrieden, named after the field just outside of Bern where the peasant army's camp lay) signed by Leuenberger and the mayor of Bern, Niklaus Dachselhofer
, the city council of Bern promised on May 28, 1653, to fulfill the peasants' fiscal demands in return for the dissolution of the Huttwil League. In view of this development, the city of Lucerne and the besieging peasants agreed on a truce. Leuenberger's army lifted the siege of Bern and retreated, but the people refused to follow their leaders and objected to dissolving the Huttwil League.
On May 30, 1653, following an earlier resolution of the Tagsatzung and earlier Bernese demands, Zürich assembled an army with recruits from its own territories, from the Thurgau
, and from Schaffhausen
under the command of Conrad Werdmüller with the task to break any armed resistance once and for all times. Some 8,000 men with 800 horses and 18 cannons marched towards the Aargau. Already three days later, Werdmüller's army controlled the important crossing of the river Reuss
at Mellingen
. In the hills around the nearby villages Wohlenschwil
and Othmarsingen
a peasant army of some 24,000 men assembled, led by Leuenberger and Schybi. A peasant delegation tried to negotiate with Werdmüller, showing him the peace treaty concluded on the Murifeld. Werdmüller, who had been until then unaware of this treaty that had been signed only days before, refused to acknowledge the validity of the contract and demanded the unconditional surrender of the peasants. Thus rebutted, the peasants attacked Werdmüller's troops on June 3, 1653, but being poorly equipped and lacking any artillery, they were defeated decisively in the Battle of Wohlenschwil. The peasants were forced to agree to the peace of Mellingen, which annulled the Huttwil League. The peasant troops returned home and an amnesty was declared, except for the leaders of the movement.
Bernese troops under the command of Sigmund von Erlach then advanced from Bern to the Aargau to meet the forces of Zürich. Under this double pressure, the peasants' resistance collapsed. Von Erlach's troops numbered about 6,000 men and 19 cannons. The operation was a veritable punitive expedition
: the troops plundered the villages along their way and even razed the defenses of the small town of Wiedlisbach
, which lost its town privileges
and was declared a village again. On June 7, 1653, the Bernese army met with a troop of about 2,000 men of Leuenberger's army who were on their way back from Wohlenschwil. The peasants retreated to Herzogenbuchsee
, where they were defeated by von Erlach's troops; the little town went up in flames in the course of the battle. Niklaus Leuenberger fled and went hiding, but he was betrayed by a neighbour and was apprehended by the Bernese district sheriff Samuel Tribolet on June 9, 1653.
The Entlebuch valley, where the revolt had begun, resisted a little longer. Peasant troops under the command of Schybi tried in vain on June 5, 1653, to gain the bridge at Gisikon
, held by a joint army of the city of Lucerne and the central Swiss cantons commanded by Sebastian Peregrin Zwyer
of Uri
. In the following weeks, Zwyer's troops slowly advanced through the valley, until they controlled it completely by June 20, 1653. Schybi was captured a few days later and incarcerated at Sursee
.
The city authorities proceeded to punish severely the leaders of the Huttwil League. Bern did not accept the terms of the peace of Melligen with its amnesty, claiming the treaty was invalid on its territory, and cracked down hard on the rural population. The peasants were fined large sums and were made to cover the expenses for the military operations. The peace of the Murifeld was declared null and void by the Bernese city council, as was the Huttwil League. The rural population was disarmed. Many of the exponents of the movement were incarcerated, tortured, and finally sentenced to death or to hard labour on galleys, or exiled. Christian Schybi was executed at Sursee
on July 9, 1653. Niklaus Leuenberger was beheaded and quartered at Bern on September 6, 1653; his head was nailed at the gallows
together with one of the four copies of the Bundesbrief of the Huttwil League. Punishment was hardest in the canton of Bern, where 23 death sentences were handed down and numerous other prominent peasants were executed in courts-martial
by von Erlach's army, compared to eight and seven death sentences in Lucerne and Basel, respectively.
Although the authorities had won a total military victory, they refrained from inflicting further draconian measures on the general population. The whole affair had clearly demonstrated that the cities depended on the support of their rural subjects. Putting down the insurrection had been achieved only with difficulties, and only with the help of troops from Zürich and Uri. Had the peasants succeeded to extend the Huttwil League to encompass the countryside of Zürich, the outcome of the conflict might have been different. The city authorities were well aware of their essentially lucky escape, and their actions in the following years reflect it. While they took steps to disempower the rural population politically, they also fulfilled many of the peasants original fiscal demands, alleviating the economic pressure on them. Tax reforms were passed, to the point that for instance in the canton of Lucerne the overall taxation of the population decreased in the second half of the 17th century.
Suter even concludes that the peasant war of 1653 thwarted a further advancement of absolutist
trends in Switzerland and prevented a development like it occurred in France following the Fronde
. The authorities of the Swiss cantons had to act much more carefully and were forced to respect their rural subjects. The Bernese for instance instructed their district sheriffs to employ a far less pompous and less authoritarian attitude to minimize the conflict potential. The city council even opened legal procedures against a few of its district sheriffs against whom there were many complaints from the rural population, accusing them of corruption, incompetence, and unjustified enrichment. The district sheriff of Trachselwald
, the same Samuel Tribolet who had captured Niklaus Leuenberger, was dismissed, tried, and exiled in early 1654. Abraham Stanyan
, who had been ambassador of England in Bern from 1705 to 1713, published in 1714 an extensive treatise entitled An account of Switzerland, in which he described the authorities' rule as particularly mild, mentioning explicitly the low taxation in comparison to other European states and giving as the reason for the comparatively soft-gloved government the fear of rebellions.
In the decades following the peasant war the city authorities tried to suppress the memory of this nearly successful revolt. Resistance symbols like the flags or the weapons used by the peasants, in particular their typical club
s with nails on the hitting end (called (Bauern-) Knüttel), were outlawed, confiscated, and destroyed. Documents such as the Bundesbriefe of Huttwil were stashed away in the vaults of the city archives. Any public remembrances or pilgrimages to the places where the leaders had been executed were forbidden and carried the death penalty, as did the singing of the peasants' war songs. Bern was particularly active in trying to censor the memories of the event and also tried to suppress images of the peasant leaders. Historic texts written during the Ancien Régime of Switzerland generally follow the official diction and mention the peasant war, if they do so at all, only briefly and in negative terms. Works with differing viewpoints were often prohibited. The censorship
was not entirely successful; in private, the rural population kept the memories of 1653 alive, and various accounts of the events were printed in Germany.
In the 19th century, the official view was increasingly questioned. The aristocratic Ancien Régime
had been weakened severely during the Napoleonic Wars
, when the Confederacy had been a French satellite state. The episode of the Helvetic Republic
, short-lived as it had been, had instilled democratic ideals in the population. The restauration
of the Ancien Régime after the end of the Napoleonic era proved to be only temporary, until Switzerland became a federal state
in 1848 when its first democratic constitution was passed. During the restoration, democratic publishers instrumented and interpreted the history of the peasant war as an allegory
on the then current struggle for democracy, seeing the peasant war of 1653 as an early precursor of their own efforts to overcome the authoritarian regime. Well-known examples are the illustrations by Martin Disteli
from 1839/40, who used scenes from the peasant war in such allegoric ways.
The official view remained ambivalent at best, though. A scene devoted to the peasant war of 1653 in a theatre production for the Swiss sexacentennial celebrations in 1891, for instance, was cut on the demands of the organizers. The first statues to honor the peasants of 1653 and their leaders were erected in 1903 on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the peasant war. A monument honoring Schybi and Emmenegger was unveiled at Escholzmatt on July 26, 1903, at Rüderswil, a statue in honor of Leuenberger was erected the same year, and at Liestal
an obelisk honoring the peasant victims of the war was inaugurated on September 25, 1904. More statues and plaques were installed in various other places at the tricentennial of the war in 1953, for instance a relief showing Schybi in a chapel at Sursee
, where the peasant leader had been incarcerated.
Ideological instrumentalizations of the peasant war occurred even in the 20th century. Hans Mühlestein, a Swiss Marxist
historian, interpreted the events of 1653 in the 1940s and 1950s as an early bourgeois revolution of a progressive bourgeoisie, fitting the Marxist concept of "class struggle
"; a view considered untenable by many later historians.
Modern historians generally agree that the peasant war was an important event in Swiss history, and also in comparison to other popular revolts in late medieval Europe
. Such revolts were rather common at the time and often were motivated by excessive taxation. The peasant war of 1653 stands out as a culminative end point in Switzerland for three reasons:
In 2003, the city of Bern celebrated the 650th anniversary of its adherence to the Old Swiss Confederacy with many events, including a dedicated exposition at the Historical Museum that ran for several months and the publication of the history schoolbook Berns mutige Zeit. The simultaneous 350-year anniversary of the peasant war was reflected in the city only in a few newspaper articles, but it was widely celebrated in the coutryside with speeches, colloquia, and an ambitious and very successful open-air theatre production at Eggiwil
in the Emmental
.
, which was already in effect in all the Catholic cantons. The Protestant cantons still followed the Julian calendar
at that time. The Freie Ämter
("Free Districts") were so called because they originally had been independent in terms of low justice, and thus to a large extent "free" in the medieval sense of the word. This process of devaluation of commodity money
that has an intrinsic value lower than its face value (so called "bad money") and its driving "good money" out of circulation is described by Gresham's Law
. Incidentally, this note appears to be the first documented use of the word "revolution" with the modern meaning in the sense of a political revolution
without any connotation of a circular movement. Because of his connections—he had married into the influential Bernese von Graffenried family—Samuel Tribolet was allowed to return from exile after only two years in late 1655 and again served on the city council of Bern. The statue of Leuenberger at Rüderswil was donated by the Ökonomische Gesellschaft Bern, a society that was founded in 1759 and originally composed of members of the leading families of the city of Bern.
Popular revolt in late medieval Europe
Popular revolts in late medieval Europe were uprisings and rebellions by peasants in the countryside, or the bourgeois in towns, against nobles, abbots and kings during the upheavals of the 14th through early 16th centuries, part of a larger "Crisis of the Late Middle Ages"...
in the Old Swiss Confederacy
Old Swiss Confederacy
The Old Swiss Confederacy was the precursor of modern-day Switzerland....
at the time of the Ancien Régime
Early Modern Switzerland
The early modern history of the Old Swiss Confederacy , lasting from formal independence in 1648 to the French invasion of 1798 came to be referred as Ancien Régime retrospectively, in post-Napoleonic Switzerland.The early modern period was characterized by an increasingly...
. A devaluation of Bernese money caused a tax revolt
Tax revolt
A tax revolt is a political struggle to repeal, limit, or roll back a tax.-1930s, The Great Depression:In the United States, the term "tax revolt" is sometimes used to refer to a series of anti-tax state initiative campaigns. The first significant wave of these campaigns was during the 1930s. The...
that spread from the Entlebuch
Entlebuch
Entlebuch is a municipality in the canton of Lucerne in Switzerland. It is the seat of the district of Entlebuch. The area has been designated a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 2001.-Geography:...
valley in the Canton of Lucerne
Canton of Lucerne
Lucerne is a canton of Switzerland. It is located in the centre of Switzerland. The population of the canton is . , the population included 57,268 foreigners, or about 15.8% of the total population. The cantonal capital is Lucerne.-History:...
to the Emmental
Emmental
For the cheese made in the region, see Emmental .The Emmental is a region in west central Switzerland, forming part of the canton of Bern. It is a hilly landscape comprising the basins of the Emme and Ilfis rivers. The region is mostly devoted to farming, particularly dairy farming...
valley in the Canton of Bern and then to the cantons of Solothurn
Canton of Solothurn
Solothurn is a canton of Switzerland. It is located in the northwest of Switzerland. The capital is Solothurn.-History:The territory of the canton comprises land acquired by the capital...
and Basel
Basel
Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...
and also to the Aargau
Aargau
Aargau is one of the more northerly cantons of Switzerland. It comprises the lower course of the river Aare, which is why the canton is called Aar-gau .-History:...
.
The population of the countryside demanded fiscal relief from their ruling authorities, the city councils of these cantons' capitals. When their demands were dismissed by the cities, the peasants organized themselves and threatened to blockade the cities. After initial compromises mediated by other cantons had failed, the peasants united under the treaty of Huttwil
Huttwil
Huttwil is a municipality in the Oberaargau administrative district in the Swiss canton of Bern.-History:Huttwil is first mentioned in the 9th Century as Huttiwilare.During the Swiss peasant war of 1653, Huttwil was a center of the rebellion...
, forming the "League of Huttwil". Their movement became more radical, going beyond the initially purely fiscal demands. The Huttwil League considered itself a political entity equal to and independent from the city authorities, and it assumed full military and political sovereignty in its territories.
The peasants laid siege on Bern and Lucerne
Lucerne
Lucerne is a city in north-central Switzerland, in the German-speaking portion of that country. Lucerne is the capital of the Canton of Lucerne and the capital of the district of the same name. With a population of about 76,200 people, Lucerne is the most populous city in Central Switzerland, and...
, whereupon the cities negotiated a peace agreement with the peasant leader Niklaus Leuenberger
Niklaus Leuenberger
thumbNiklaus Leuenberger was a leader of the Swiss peasant war of 1653.He signed the Treaty of Mellingen along with Christian Schybi on June 4, 1653....
, the so-called peace on the Murifeld. The peasant armies retreated. The Tagsatzung
Tagsatzung
The Swiss Tagsatzung was the legislative and executive council of the Swiss confederacy from the beginnings until the formation of the Swiss federal state in 1848. It was a meeting of delegates of the individual cantons...
, the federal council of the Old Swiss Confederacy, then sent an army from Zürich to definitely end the rebellion, and after the Battle of Wohlenschwil, the Huttwil League was forcibly annulled in the peace of Mellingen
Mellingen
Mellingen is a municipality in the district of Baden in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland. The town is located on the Reuss River.-History:...
. The last resistance in the Entlebuch valley was broken by the end of June. After their victory, the city authorities took drastic punitive measures. The Huttwil League and the peace of the Murifeld were declared null and void by the city council of Bern. Many exponents of the insurrection were captured, tortured, and finally received heavy sentences. Niklaus Leuenberger was beheaded and quartered in Bern on September 6, 1653.
Although the military victory of the absolutist
Absolutism (European history)
Absolutism or The Age of Absolutism is a historiographical term used to describe a form of monarchical power that is unrestrained by all other institutions, such as churches, legislatures, or social elites...
city authorities was complete, the war had also shown them that they depended very much on their rural subjects. Soon after the war, the ruling aristocrats instituted a series of reforms and even lowered some taxes, thus fulfilling some of the peasants' original fiscal demands. In the long term, the peasant war of 1653 prevented Switzerland from an excessive implementation of absolutism
Absolutism (European history)
Absolutism or The Age of Absolutism is a historiographical term used to describe a form of monarchical power that is unrestrained by all other institutions, such as churches, legislatures, or social elites...
as occurred in France during the reign of Louis XIV
Louis XIV of France
Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...
.
Background
The Old Swiss Confederacy in the 17th century was a federation of thirteen largely independent cantonsCantons of Switzerland
The 26 cantons of Switzerland are the member states of the federal state of Switzerland. Each canton was a fully sovereign state with its own borders, army and currency from the Treaty of Westphalia until the establishment of the Swiss federal state in 1848...
. The federation comprised rural cantons as well as city states that had expanded their territories into the countryside by political and military means at the cost of the previously ruling liege lord
Liege Lord
Liege Lord was an American speed/power metal band, active in the 1980s and considered to be a pioneer of the genre. It was formed by Matt Vinci, Anthony Truglio and Frank Cortese....
s. The cities just took over the preexisting administrative structures. In these city cantons, the city councils ruled the countryside; they held the judicial rights and also appointed the district sheriff
Sheriff
A sheriff is in principle a legal official with responsibility for a county. In practice, the specific combination of legal, political, and ceremonial duties of a sheriff varies greatly from country to country....
s (Landvögte
Vogt
A Vogt ; plural Vögte; Dutch voogd; Danish foged; ; ultimately from Latin [ad]vocatus) in the Holy Roman Empire was the German title of a reeve or advocate, an overlord exerting guardianship or military protection as well as secular justice...
).
Rural and urban cantons had the same standing in the federation. Each canton was sovereign within its territory, pursuing its own foreign policy and also minting its own money. The diet
Diet (assembly)
In politics, a diet is a formal deliberative assembly. The term is mainly used historically for the Imperial Diet, the general assembly of the Imperial Estates of the Holy Roman Empire, and for the legislative bodies of certain countries.-Etymology:...
and central council of the federation, the Tagsatzung
Tagsatzung
The Swiss Tagsatzung was the legislative and executive council of the Swiss confederacy from the beginnings until the formation of the Swiss federal state in 1848. It was a meeting of delegates of the individual cantons...
, held no real power and served more as an instrument of coordination. The reformation
Reformation in Switzerland
The Protestant Reformation in Switzerland was promoted initially by Huldrych Zwingli, who gained the support of the magistrate and population of Zürich in the 1520s. It led to significant changes in civil life and state matters in Zürich and spread to several other cantons of the Old Swiss...
in the early 16th century had led to a confessional division amongst the cantons: the central Swiss cantons including Lucerne had remained Catholic
Catholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
, while Zürich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
, Bern, Basel, Schaffhausen
Schaffhausen
Schaffhausen is a city in northern Switzerland and the capital of the canton of the same name; it has an estimated population of 34,587 ....
, and also the city of St. Gallen
St. Gallen
St. Gallen is the capital of the canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland. It evolved from the hermitage of Saint Gall, founded in the 7th century. Today, it is a large urban agglomeration and represents the center of eastern Switzerland. The town mainly relies on the service sector for its economic...
had become Protestant. The Tagsatzung was often paralysed by disagreements between the equally strong factions of the Catholic and Protestant sides.
Territories that had been conquered since the early 15th century were governed as condominium
Condominium (international law)
In international law, a condominium is a political territory in or over which two or more sovereign powers formally agree to share equally dominium and exercise their rights jointly, without dividing it up into 'national' zones.Although a condominium has always been...
s by the cantons. Reeve
Vogt
A Vogt ; plural Vögte; Dutch voogd; Danish foged; ; ultimately from Latin [ad]vocatus) in the Holy Roman Empire was the German title of a reeve or advocate, an overlord exerting guardianship or military protection as well as secular justice...
s for these territories were assigned by the Tagsatzung for a period of two years; the posts changed bi-annually between the cantons. The Aargau had been annexed in 1415. The western part belonged to Bern, while the eastern part comprised the two condominiums of the former County of Baden in the north and the Freie Ämter
Freie Ämter
The Freiamt or Freie Ämter is a region in Switzerland and is located in the southeast of Canton of Aargau. It comprises the area between the Lindenberg and Heitersberg and from the terminal moraine at Othmarsingen to Reuss river in Dietwil. Today the area of the Bremgarten and Muri Districts are...
("Free Districts") in the south. The Free Districts had been forcibly recatholized after the Reformation in Switzerland
Reformation in Switzerland
The Protestant Reformation in Switzerland was promoted initially by Huldrych Zwingli, who gained the support of the magistrate and population of Zürich in the 1520s. It led to significant changes in civil life and state matters in Zürich and spread to several other cantons of the Old Swiss...
, and the Catholic cantons, especially Lucerne, Zug
Zug
Zug , is a German-speaking city in Switzerland. The name ‘Zug’ originates from fishing vocabulary; in the Middle Ages it referred to the right to ‘pull up’ fishing nets and hence to the right to fish.The city of Zug is located in the Canton of Zug and is its capital...
, and Uri
Canton of Uri
Uri is one of the 26 cantons of Switzerland and a founding member of the Swiss Confederation. It is located in Central Switzerland. The canton's territory covers the valley of the Reuss River between Lake Lucerne and the St. Gotthard Pass. German is the primary language spoken in Uri...
considered these districts part of their sphere of influence and the reeves typically came from these cantons. The Thurgau
Thurgau
Thurgau is a northeast canton of Switzerland. The population, , is . In 2007, there were a total of 47,390 who were resident foreigners. The capital is Frauenfeld.-History:...
, which had been annexed in 1460, was also a condominium of the Confederacy.
Causes of the conflict
Thirty Years' War
The Thirty Years' War was fought primarily in what is now Germany, and at various points involved most countries in Europe. It was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history....
. The Swiss Confederacy had been spared from all belligerent action; the Swiss peasants generally had profited from the wartime economy as they had been able to export their agrarian products at higher prices than before. After the Peace of Westphalia
Peace of Westphalia
The Peace of Westphalia was a series of peace treaties signed between May and October of 1648 in Osnabrück and Münster. These treaties ended the Thirty Years' War in the Holy Roman Empire, and the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Dutch Republic, with Spain formally recognizing the...
, the southern German economy recovered quickly, the Swiss exports dwindled, and the prices for agrarian products dropped. Many Swiss peasants, who had raised mortgages
Mortgage loan
A mortgage loan is a loan secured by real property through the use of a mortgage note which evidences the existence of the loan and the encumbrance of that realty through the granting of a mortgage which secures the loan...
during the boom at wartime, suddenly faced financial problems.
At the same time the war had since the 1620s caused significant expenses for the cities, e.g. for building better defenses such as new bastion
Bastion
A bastion, or a bulwark, is a structure projecting outward from the main enclosure of a fortification, situated in both corners of a straight wall , facilitating active defence against assaulting troops...
s. A significant source of income for the cantons ran dry: their financial means exhausted by the war, France and Spain no longer paid the Pensions, the agreed sums in return for the cantons providing them with mercenary regiments. The city authorities tried to compensate for this and to cover their expenses on the one hand by increasing the taxes or inventing new ones and on the other hand by minting less valuable copper coins called Batzen that had the same face value
Face value
The Face value is the value of a coin, stamp or paper money, as printed on the coin, stamp or bill itself by the minting authority. While the face value usually refers to the true value of the coin, stamp or bill in question it can sometimes be largely symbolic, as is often the case with bullion...
as the previously minted silver money. The population began hoarding the silver coins, and the cheap copper money that remained in circulation continually lost in purchasing power
Purchasing power
Purchasing power is the number of goods/services that can be purchased with a unit of currency. For example, if you had taken one dollar to a store in the 1950s, you would have been able to buy a greater number of items than you would today, indicating that you would have had a greater purchasing...
. Zürich, Basel, and the central Swiss cantons therefore began already in 1623 to mint more valuable coins again. Bern and also Solothurn and Fribourg
Fribourg
Fribourg is the capital of the Swiss canton of Fribourg and the district of Sarine. It is located on both sides of the river Saane/Sarine, on the Swiss plateau, and is an important economic, administrative and educational center on the cultural border between German and French Switzerland...
set a compulsory fixed exchange rate between copper and silver money instead, but this measure did not break the de-facto devaluation. At the end of the war, the population thus faced both a postwar depression
Depression (economics)
In economics, a depression is a sustained, long-term downturn in economic activity in one or more economies. It is a more severe downturn than a recession, which is seen by some economists as part of the modern business cycle....
and a high inflation
Inflation
In economics, inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services. Consequently, inflation also reflects an erosion in the purchasing power of money – a...
, combined with high taxes. This financial crisis led to a series of tax revolts in several cantons of the Confederacy, for instance 1629–36 in Lucerne, 1641 in Bern, or 1645/46 in Zürich. The uprising in 1653 continued this series, but would take the conflict to an unprecedented level.
Since the 15th century, the political power in the city cantons had become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few urban families, who increasingly saw their public offices as hereditary positions and who developed aristocratic and absolutist attitudes. Slowly, an urban oligarchy
Oligarchy
Oligarchy is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with an elite class distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, commercial, and/or military legitimacy...
of magistrates had formed. This concentration of power in the city cantons in a small urban élite caused a veritable "participatory crisis" (Suter). The rural population increasingly was subject to decrees issued without their consent that restricted their rights of old and also their social and cultural freedom.
Outbreak of the rebellion
Intrinsic value (numismatics)
In commodity money, intrinsic value can be partially or entirely due to the desirable features of the object as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Examples of such features include divisibility; easily and securely storable and transportable; scarcity; and hard to counterfeit...
to combat the inflation. The authorities set a term of only three days to exchange the copper coins at the old rate against more stable gold or silver money. Not many people could thus take advantage of this exchange offer, and for most—and in particular the rural population—half their fortunes just vanished. The other cantons soon followed suit and similarly devalued the Bernese copper money. The situation was most dire in the Lucerne Entlebuch valley, where the Bernese Batzen were in widespread usage. The financial situation of many a peasant became unsustainable. Insider deals
Insider trading
Insider trading is the trading of a corporation's stock or other securities by individuals with potential access to non-public information about the company...
of the ruling magistrates of Lucerne furthered the unrest among the population. The peasants of the Entlebuch valley, led by Hans Emmenegger from Schüpfheim
Schüpfheim
Schüpfheim is a municipality in the district of Entlebuch in the canton of Lucerne in Switzerland. It is part of the UNESCO Entlebuch Biosphere Reserve since 2001.-Geography:...
and Christian Schybi from Escholzmatt
Escholzmatt
Escholzmatt is a municipality in the district of Entlebuch in the canton of Lucerne in Switzerland. Escholzmatt is the Lucern's second largest Canton Lucerne in terms of area. It is part of the UNESCO Entlebuch Biosphere Reserve since 2001.-History:...
, sent a delegation to Lucerne to demand remedies, but the city council refused to even hear them. The enraged peasants organized a general assembly (Landsgemeinde
Landsgemeinde
The Landsgemeinde or "cantonal assembly" is one of the oldest forms of direct democracy. The first historically documented assembly took place in 1294...
) of the population of the valley at Heiligkreuz, in spite of such assemblies being illegal as the authorities' laws of the time denied the freedom of assembly
Freedom of assembly
Freedom of assembly, sometimes used interchangeably with the freedom of association, is the individual right to come together and collectively express, promote, pursue and defend common interests...
. The assembly, which took place after the mass
Mass (liturgy)
"Mass" is one of the names by which the sacrament of the Eucharist is called in the Roman Catholic Church: others are "Eucharist", the "Lord's Supper", the "Breaking of Bread", the "Eucharistic assembly ", the "memorial of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection", the "Holy Sacrifice", the "Holy and...
on February 10, 1653, decided to suspend all tax payments until the authorities in Lucerne fulfilled their demands by reducing taxes and abolishing some of them altogether, such as the taxes on salt, cattle, and horse trades.
The authorities of Lucerne were not willing to grant the population's demands, but neither did they did manage to subdue this insurrection. The large majority of the rural districts of the canton of Lucerne
Canton of Lucerne
Lucerne is a canton of Switzerland. It is located in the centre of Switzerland. The population of the canton is . , the population included 57,268 foreigners, or about 15.8% of the total population. The cantonal capital is Lucerne.-History:...
sided with the peasants of the Entlebuch valley in an alliance concluded at Wolhusen
Wolhusen
Wolhusen is a municipality in the district of Sursee in the canton of Lucerne in Switzerland.-Geography:Wolhusen has an area of . Of this area, 58.1% is used for agricultural purposes, while 32.6% is forested. Of the rest of the land, 8.6% is settled and the remainder is non-productive...
on February 26, 1653. At the beginning of March, the people of the neighbouring Bernese Emmental valley joined their cause, addressing similar demands at the Bernese authorities. Both cantons called upon the other uninvolved members of the Old Swiss Confederacy to mediate in the conflict, but at the same time, the Tagsatzung
Tagsatzung
The Swiss Tagsatzung was the legislative and executive council of the Swiss confederacy from the beginnings until the formation of the Swiss federal state in 1848. It was a meeting of delegates of the individual cantons...
, the diet of the cantons' governments, also began to prepare for a military resolution. Troops from Schaffhausen
Schaffhausen
Schaffhausen is a city in northern Switzerland and the capital of the canton of the same name; it has an estimated population of 34,587 ....
and Basel were sent towards the Aargau, but this immediately solicited an armed resistance amongst the population such that the troops had to withdraw.
On March 18, 1653, the mediating Catholic central Swiss cantons proposed in Lucerne a resolution that fulfilled most of the peasants' demands, especially the fiscal ones. In Bern, a similar compromise was proposed by a Protestant delegation from Zürich under the direction of the mayor of Zürich, Johann Heinrich Waser, on April 4, 1653. The Bernese Emmental and most of the districts of the canton of Lucerne accepted these resolutions and their representatives swore new oaths of fealty. But the people in the Entlebuch valley did not accept the authorities' terms, as these—besides offering some tax reliefs—criminalized the insurrection and called for the punishment of the leaders. At a meeting at Signau
Signau
Signau is a municipality in the administrative district of Emmental in the canton of Bern in Switzerland.-Geography:Signau lies in the Emmental....
on April 10, 1653, the delegates from the Entlebuch convinced their neighbours in the Emmental: the assembly decided not to honor the new oaths its representatives had sworn in Bern.
Formation of the Huttwil League
Sumiswald
Sumiswald is a municipality in the district of the Emmental administrative district in the canton of Bern, Switzerland.-Geography:Sumiswald has an area, , of . Of this area, or 47.9% is used for agricultural purposes, while or 46.3% is forested...
and concluded an alliance to help each other to achieve their goals. A week later, they met again at Huttwil
Huttwil
Huttwil is a municipality in the Oberaargau administrative district in the Swiss canton of Bern.-History:Huttwil is first mentioned in the 9th Century as Huttiwilare.During the Swiss peasant war of 1653, Huttwil was a center of the rebellion...
, where they renewed that alliance and elected Niklaus Leuenberger
Niklaus Leuenberger
thumbNiklaus Leuenberger was a leader of the Swiss peasant war of 1653.He signed the Treaty of Mellingen along with Christian Schybi on June 4, 1653....
from Rüderswil
Rüderswil
Rüderswil is a municipality in the administrative district of Emmental in the canton of Bern in Switzerland.-Geography:Rüderswil has an area, , of . Of this area, or 68.1% is used for agricultural purposes, while or 23.7% is forested...
in the Emmental as their leader.
On May 14, 1653, the peasants met again at a Landsgemeinde at Huttwil and formalized their alliance as the "League of Huttwil" by signing a written contract in the style of the old Bundesbriefe of the Old Swiss Confederacy. The treaty clearly established the league as a separate political entity that considered itself equal to and independent from the cities. The tax revolt had become an independence movement, based ideologically on the traditional Swiss founding legends, especially on the legend of William Tell
William Tell
William Tell is a folk hero of Switzerland. His legend is recorded in a late 15th century Swiss chronicle....
. Legally, the peasants justified their assemblies and their union by the rights of old and in particular the Stanser Verkommnis
Stanser Verkommnis
In the Stanser Verkommnis of 1481 the Tagsatzung solved the latent conflict between the rural and urban cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy, averting the breaking of the Confederacy, and triggering its further expansion from 8 to 13 members until 1513.The tensions between the cantons had arisen...
of 1481, one of the important coalition treaties of the Old Swiss Confederacy.
The peasants by then had assumed full sovereignty over the territory they controlled. They refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the city authorities and also had the military control over the area. The Huttwil League openly declared its intention to expand until it encompassed the rural population in the whole Confederacy. The majority of the rural population supported the rebellion; the dissenting minority was silenced by threats of violence and sometimes violence indeed. Communications between the cities were interrupted, official envoys were shaken down and ships on the rivers were captured. The peasants even sent a letter to the French ambassador at Solothurn assuring the French king Louis XIV of their good intentions.
The confessional conflicts that dominated the relations between the ruling city authorities were only secondary to the peasants of the Huttwil league. The peasant alliance bridged the confessional divide, uniting Catholic people from the Entlebuch and from Solothurn with Protestant peasants from the Emmental and from Basel. The treaty of Huttwil explicitly recognized this biconfessionalism. The cities remained in all their manoeuvring and negotiations for military support within their respective confessional spheres: Catholic Lucerne had requested mediation and then military help from the Catholic central Swiss cantons, while Protestant Bern had turned to Protestant Zürich for help. The distrust between the authorities of the Catholic and Protestant cantons was so deep that none would allow troops of the other confession to operate on their territories.
Military confrontation
Vaud
Vaud is one of the 26 cantons of Switzerland and is located in Romandy, the French-speaking southwestern part of the country. The capital is Lausanne. The name of the Canton in Switzerland's other languages are Vaud in Italian , Waadt in German , and Vad in Romansh.-History:Along the lakes,...
and the Bernese Oberland
Bernese Oberland
The Bernese Oberland is the higher part of the canton of Bern, Switzerland, in the southern end of the canton: The area around Lake Thun and Lake Brienz, and the valleys of the Bernese Alps .The flag of the Bernese Oberland consists of a black eagle in a gold field The Bernese Oberland (Bernese...
, two regions unaffected by the uprising. The authorities of Bern and Lucerne were supported by the other cantons at the Tagsatzung. In a dispatch from Zürich, the uprising was termed for the first time a "revolution".
On May 18, 1653, the peasants delivered ultimatums to Bern and Lucerne and raised 16,000 troops. When the city of Bern replied with a protest note, the peasants marched to Bern under the leadership of Leuenberger, arriving on May 22, 1653. A second army led by Emmenegger laid siege to Lucerne. The city authorities were unprepared for an armed conflict and immediately engaged in negotiations. Within days, peace agreements were concluded. In the peace on the Murifeld (Murifeldfrieden, named after the field just outside of Bern where the peasant army's camp lay) signed by Leuenberger and the mayor of Bern, Niklaus Dachselhofer
Niklaus Dachselhofer
Niklaus Dachselhofer was a Swiss politician in Bern. He became a member of the canton's Grand Council in 1628 and one year later also a member of the city council . From 1636 to 1667 he was Schultheiss of Berne.-References: URl last accessed 2006-12-18....
, the city council of Bern promised on May 28, 1653, to fulfill the peasants' fiscal demands in return for the dissolution of the Huttwil League. In view of this development, the city of Lucerne and the besieging peasants agreed on a truce. Leuenberger's army lifted the siege of Bern and retreated, but the people refused to follow their leaders and objected to dissolving the Huttwil League.
On May 30, 1653, following an earlier resolution of the Tagsatzung and earlier Bernese demands, Zürich assembled an army with recruits from its own territories, from the Thurgau
Thurgau
Thurgau is a northeast canton of Switzerland. The population, , is . In 2007, there were a total of 47,390 who were resident foreigners. The capital is Frauenfeld.-History:...
, and from Schaffhausen
Schaffhausen
Schaffhausen is a city in northern Switzerland and the capital of the canton of the same name; it has an estimated population of 34,587 ....
under the command of Conrad Werdmüller with the task to break any armed resistance once and for all times. Some 8,000 men with 800 horses and 18 cannons marched towards the Aargau. Already three days later, Werdmüller's army controlled the important crossing of the river Reuss
Reuss River
The Reuss is a river in Switzerland. With a length of and a drainage basin of , it is the fourth largest river in Switzerland...
at Mellingen
Mellingen
Mellingen is a municipality in the district of Baden in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland. The town is located on the Reuss River.-History:...
. In the hills around the nearby villages Wohlenschwil
Wohlenschwil
Wohlenschwil is a municipality in the district of Baden in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland.-History:On June 3, 1653 Wohlenschwil was the site of the Battle of Wohlenschwil, which ended the Swiss peasant war of 1653...
and Othmarsingen
Othmarsingen
Othmarsingen is a municipality in the district of Lenzburg in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland.-History:Mesolithic siliceous rock objects and tools and Hallstatt era graves indicate that the Othmarsingen area was prehistorically occupied. Othmarsingen is first mentioned around 1184-90 as...
a peasant army of some 24,000 men assembled, led by Leuenberger and Schybi. A peasant delegation tried to negotiate with Werdmüller, showing him the peace treaty concluded on the Murifeld. Werdmüller, who had been until then unaware of this treaty that had been signed only days before, refused to acknowledge the validity of the contract and demanded the unconditional surrender of the peasants. Thus rebutted, the peasants attacked Werdmüller's troops on June 3, 1653, but being poorly equipped and lacking any artillery, they were defeated decisively in the Battle of Wohlenschwil. The peasants were forced to agree to the peace of Mellingen, which annulled the Huttwil League. The peasant troops returned home and an amnesty was declared, except for the leaders of the movement.
Bernese troops under the command of Sigmund von Erlach then advanced from Bern to the Aargau to meet the forces of Zürich. Under this double pressure, the peasants' resistance collapsed. Von Erlach's troops numbered about 6,000 men and 19 cannons. The operation was a veritable punitive expedition
Punitive expedition
A punitive expedition is a military journey undertaken to punish a state or any group of persons outside the borders of the punishing state. It is usually undertaken in response to perceived disobedient or morally wrong behavior, but may be also be a covered revenge...
: the troops plundered the villages along their way and even razed the defenses of the small town of Wiedlisbach
Wiedlisbach
Wiedlisbach is a municipality in the Oberaargau administrative district in the canton of Bern in Switzerland.In 1974, the Wakker Prize was bestowed on Wiedlisbach for the development and preservation of its architectural heritage.-Geography:...
, which lost its town privileges
Town privileges
Town privileges or city rights were important features of European towns during most of the second millennium.Judicially, a town was distinguished from the surrounding land by means of a charter from the ruling monarch that defined its privileges and laws. Common privileges were related to trading...
and was declared a village again. On June 7, 1653, the Bernese army met with a troop of about 2,000 men of Leuenberger's army who were on their way back from Wohlenschwil. The peasants retreated to Herzogenbuchsee
Herzogenbuchsee
Herzogenbuchsee is a municipality in the Oberaargau administrative district in the canton of Bern in Switzerland.The population is 6,646 , counting the villages in the Oberaargau. The traditional name was Buchsi.- History :...
, where they were defeated by von Erlach's troops; the little town went up in flames in the course of the battle. Niklaus Leuenberger fled and went hiding, but he was betrayed by a neighbour and was apprehended by the Bernese district sheriff Samuel Tribolet on June 9, 1653.
The Entlebuch valley, where the revolt had begun, resisted a little longer. Peasant troops under the command of Schybi tried in vain on June 5, 1653, to gain the bridge at Gisikon
Gisikon
Gisikon is a municipality in the district of Lucerne in the canton of Lucerne in Switzerland.-Geography:Gisikon has an area of . Of this area, 50% is used for agricultural purposes, while 20% is forested. Of the rest of the land, 24.5% is settled and the remainder is non-productive...
, held by a joint army of the city of Lucerne and the central Swiss cantons commanded by Sebastian Peregrin Zwyer
Sebastian Peregrin Zwyer
Sebastian Peregrin Zwyer was a Swiss military commander, mercenary entrepreneur, and one of the foremost politicians of the Old Swiss Confederacy in the seventeenth century....
of Uri
Canton of Uri
Uri is one of the 26 cantons of Switzerland and a founding member of the Swiss Confederation. It is located in Central Switzerland. The canton's territory covers the valley of the Reuss River between Lake Lucerne and the St. Gotthard Pass. German is the primary language spoken in Uri...
. In the following weeks, Zwyer's troops slowly advanced through the valley, until they controlled it completely by June 20, 1653. Schybi was captured a few days later and incarcerated at Sursee
Sursee
Sursee is a municipality in the district of Sursee in the canton of Lucerne, Switzerland. Sursee is located at the northern end of Lake Sempach, not far from where the Sure river enters the lake , hence the name "Sursee"....
.
Aftermath
Sursee
Sursee is a municipality in the district of Sursee in the canton of Lucerne, Switzerland. Sursee is located at the northern end of Lake Sempach, not far from where the Sure river enters the lake , hence the name "Sursee"....
on July 9, 1653. Niklaus Leuenberger was beheaded and quartered at Bern on September 6, 1653; his head was nailed at the gallows
Gallows
A gallows is a frame, typically wooden, used for execution by hanging, or by means to torture before execution, as was used when being hanged, drawn and quartered...
together with one of the four copies of the Bundesbrief of the Huttwil League. Punishment was hardest in the canton of Bern, where 23 death sentences were handed down and numerous other prominent peasants were executed in courts-martial
Court-martial
A court-martial is a military court. A court-martial is empowered to determine the guilt of members of the armed forces subject to military law, and, if the defendant is found guilty, to decide upon punishment.Most militaries maintain a court-martial system to try cases in which a breach of...
by von Erlach's army, compared to eight and seven death sentences in Lucerne and Basel, respectively.
Although the authorities had won a total military victory, they refrained from inflicting further draconian measures on the general population. The whole affair had clearly demonstrated that the cities depended on the support of their rural subjects. Putting down the insurrection had been achieved only with difficulties, and only with the help of troops from Zürich and Uri. Had the peasants succeeded to extend the Huttwil League to encompass the countryside of Zürich, the outcome of the conflict might have been different. The city authorities were well aware of their essentially lucky escape, and their actions in the following years reflect it. While they took steps to disempower the rural population politically, they also fulfilled many of the peasants original fiscal demands, alleviating the economic pressure on them. Tax reforms were passed, to the point that for instance in the canton of Lucerne the overall taxation of the population decreased in the second half of the 17th century.
Suter even concludes that the peasant war of 1653 thwarted a further advancement of absolutist
Absolutism
The term Absolutism may refer to:* Absolute idealism, an ontologically monistic philosophy attributed to G.W.F. Hegel. It is Hegel's account of how being is ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole...
trends in Switzerland and prevented a development like it occurred in France following the Fronde
Fronde
The Fronde was a civil war in France, occurring in the midst of the Franco-Spanish War, which had begun in 1635. The word fronde means sling, which Parisian mobs used to smash the windows of supporters of Cardinal Mazarin....
. The authorities of the Swiss cantons had to act much more carefully and were forced to respect their rural subjects. The Bernese for instance instructed their district sheriffs to employ a far less pompous and less authoritarian attitude to minimize the conflict potential. The city council even opened legal procedures against a few of its district sheriffs against whom there were many complaints from the rural population, accusing them of corruption, incompetence, and unjustified enrichment. The district sheriff of Trachselwald
Trachselwald
Trachselwald is a municipality in the administrative district of Emmental in the Swiss canton of Bern.- History :The name of this municipality means "Drechsler-Wald" and was first mentioned in 1131...
, the same Samuel Tribolet who had captured Niklaus Leuenberger, was dismissed, tried, and exiled in early 1654. Abraham Stanyan
Abraham Stanyan
Abraham Stanyan was an English politician and diplomat.After becoming a student in the Middle Temple, he served as secretary to Sir William Trumbull as Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and later to the Earl of Manchester as Ambassador to the Venice in 1697–1698 and then in France in 1699–1700. ...
, who had been ambassador of England in Bern from 1705 to 1713, published in 1714 an extensive treatise entitled An account of Switzerland, in which he described the authorities' rule as particularly mild, mentioning explicitly the low taxation in comparison to other European states and giving as the reason for the comparatively soft-gloved government the fear of rebellions.
Historiography
Club (weapon)
A club is among the simplest of all weapons. A club is essentially a short staff, or stick, usually made of wood, and wielded as a weapon since prehistoric times....
s with nails on the hitting end (called (Bauern-) Knüttel), were outlawed, confiscated, and destroyed. Documents such as the Bundesbriefe of Huttwil were stashed away in the vaults of the city archives. Any public remembrances or pilgrimages to the places where the leaders had been executed were forbidden and carried the death penalty, as did the singing of the peasants' war songs. Bern was particularly active in trying to censor the memories of the event and also tried to suppress images of the peasant leaders. Historic texts written during the Ancien Régime of Switzerland generally follow the official diction and mention the peasant war, if they do so at all, only briefly and in negative terms. Works with differing viewpoints were often prohibited. The censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
was not entirely successful; in private, the rural population kept the memories of 1653 alive, and various accounts of the events were printed in Germany.
Early Modern Switzerland
The early modern history of the Old Swiss Confederacy , lasting from formal independence in 1648 to the French invasion of 1798 came to be referred as Ancien Régime retrospectively, in post-Napoleonic Switzerland.The early modern period was characterized by an increasingly...
had been weakened severely during the Napoleonic Wars
Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...
, when the Confederacy had been a French satellite state. The episode of the Helvetic Republic
Helvetic Republic
In Swiss history, the Helvetic Republic represented an early attempt to impose a central authority over Switzerland, which until then consisted mainly of self-governing cantons united by a loose military alliance, and conquered territories such as Vaud...
, short-lived as it had been, had instilled democratic ideals in the population. The restauration
Restauration (Switzerland)
The periods of Restoration and Regeneration in Swiss history last from 1814 to 1847. "Restoration" refers to the period of 1814 to 1830, the restoration of the Ancien Régime , reverting the changes imposed by Napoleon Bonaparte with the centralist Helvetic Republic from 1798 and the partial...
of the Ancien Régime after the end of the Napoleonic era proved to be only temporary, until Switzerland became a federal state
Switzerland as a federal state
The rise of Switzerland as a federal state began on September 12, 1848, with the creation of a federal constitution, which was created in response to a 27-day civil war in Switzerland, the Sonderbundskrieg...
in 1848 when its first democratic constitution was passed. During the restoration, democratic publishers instrumented and interpreted the history of the peasant war as an allegory
Allegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
on the then current struggle for democracy, seeing the peasant war of 1653 as an early precursor of their own efforts to overcome the authoritarian regime. Well-known examples are the illustrations by Martin Disteli
Martin Disteli
Martin Disteli was a Swiss painter.-References:*This article was initially translated from the German Wikipedia....
from 1839/40, who used scenes from the peasant war in such allegoric ways.
The official view remained ambivalent at best, though. A scene devoted to the peasant war of 1653 in a theatre production for the Swiss sexacentennial celebrations in 1891, for instance, was cut on the demands of the organizers. The first statues to honor the peasants of 1653 and their leaders were erected in 1903 on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the peasant war. A monument honoring Schybi and Emmenegger was unveiled at Escholzmatt on July 26, 1903, at Rüderswil, a statue in honor of Leuenberger was erected the same year, and at Liestal
Liestal
Liestal is the capital of the canton of Basel-Country in Switzerland, south of Basel.It is an industrial town with a cobbled-street Old Town.-History:...
an obelisk honoring the peasant victims of the war was inaugurated on September 25, 1904. More statues and plaques were installed in various other places at the tricentennial of the war in 1953, for instance a relief showing Schybi in a chapel at Sursee
Sursee
Sursee is a municipality in the district of Sursee in the canton of Lucerne, Switzerland. Sursee is located at the northern end of Lake Sempach, not far from where the Sure river enters the lake , hence the name "Sursee"....
, where the peasant leader had been incarcerated.
Ideological instrumentalizations of the peasant war occurred even in the 20th century. Hans Mühlestein, a Swiss Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
historian, interpreted the events of 1653 in the 1940s and 1950s as an early bourgeois revolution of a progressive bourgeoisie, fitting the Marxist concept of "class struggle
Class struggle
Class struggle is the active expression of a class conflict looked at from any kind of socialist perspective. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote "The [written] history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle"....
"; a view considered untenable by many later historians.
Modern historians generally agree that the peasant war was an important event in Swiss history, and also in comparison to other popular revolts in late medieval Europe
Popular revolt in late medieval Europe
Popular revolts in late medieval Europe were uprisings and rebellions by peasants in the countryside, or the bourgeois in towns, against nobles, abbots and kings during the upheavals of the 14th through early 16th centuries, part of a larger "Crisis of the Late Middle Ages"...
. Such revolts were rather common at the time and often were motivated by excessive taxation. The peasant war of 1653 stands out as a culminative end point in Switzerland for three reasons:
- The revolt spread quickly to cover several cantons, whereas previous uprisings in the Confederacy had invariably been local affairs.
- The peasants were well organized and for the first and only time mobilized veritable armies against their rulers, which hadn't happened before. The peasant leaders had clearly learned from previous unsuccessful smaller revolts they had been involved in.
- The peasants' goals for the first time went beyond a pure restoration of rights of old and tax relief: the Huttwil League radically denied the authorities' hitherto unquestioned entitlement to rule.
In 2003, the city of Bern celebrated the 650th anniversary of its adherence to the Old Swiss Confederacy with many events, including a dedicated exposition at the Historical Museum that ran for several months and the publication of the history schoolbook Berns mutige Zeit. The simultaneous 350-year anniversary of the peasant war was reflected in the city only in a few newspaper articles, but it was widely celebrated in the coutryside with speeches, colloquia, and an ambitious and very successful open-air theatre production at Eggiwil
Eggiwil
Eggiwil is a municipality in the administrative district of Emmental in the canton of Bern in Switzerland.-Geography:Eggiwil has an area, , of . Of this area, or 53.6% is used for agricultural purposes, while or 41.1% is forested...
in the Emmental
Emmental
For the cheese made in the region, see Emmental .The Emmental is a region in west central Switzerland, forming part of the canton of Bern. It is a hilly landscape comprising the basins of the Emme and Ilfis rivers. The region is mostly devoted to farming, particularly dairy farming...
.
Footnotes
All dates are given according to the Gregorian calendarGregorian calendar
The Gregorian calendar, also known as the Western calendar, or Christian calendar, is the internationally accepted civil calendar. It was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII, after whom the calendar was named, by a decree signed on 24 February 1582, a papal bull known by its opening words Inter...
, which was already in effect in all the Catholic cantons. The Protestant cantons still followed the Julian calendar
Julian calendar
The Julian calendar began in 45 BC as a reform of the Roman calendar by Julius Caesar. It was chosen after consultation with the astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria and was probably designed to approximate the tropical year .The Julian calendar has a regular year of 365 days divided into 12 months...
at that time. The Freie Ämter
Freie Ämter
The Freiamt or Freie Ämter is a region in Switzerland and is located in the southeast of Canton of Aargau. It comprises the area between the Lindenberg and Heitersberg and from the terminal moraine at Othmarsingen to Reuss river in Dietwil. Today the area of the Bremgarten and Muri Districts are...
("Free Districts") were so called because they originally had been independent in terms of low justice, and thus to a large extent "free" in the medieval sense of the word. This process of devaluation of commodity money
Commodity money
Commodity money is money whose value comes from a commodity out of which it is made. It is objects that have value in themselves as well as for use as money....
that has an intrinsic value lower than its face value (so called "bad money") and its driving "good money" out of circulation is described by Gresham's Law
Gresham's Law
Gresham's law is an economic principle that states: "When a government compulsorily overvalues one type of money and undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear from circulation into hoards, while the overvalued money will flood into circulation." It is commonly...
. Incidentally, this note appears to be the first documented use of the word "revolution" with the modern meaning in the sense of a political revolution
Revolution
A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.Aristotle described two types of political revolution:...
without any connotation of a circular movement. Because of his connections—he had married into the influential Bernese von Graffenried family—Samuel Tribolet was allowed to return from exile after only two years in late 1655 and again served on the city council of Bern. The statue of Leuenberger at Rüderswil was donated by the Ökonomische Gesellschaft Bern, a society that was founded in 1759 and originally composed of members of the leading families of the city of Bern.
Further reading
- Blickle, P.: Deutsche Untertanen, Ch. Beck Verlag, Munich, 1981. In German. ISBN 3-406-08164-9.