A web of alliances among rural and urban cantons in the Alps (traditionally from 1291 until the French invasion of 1798) with no common government beyond a diet of instructed envoys. It combined open-air assemblies in rural cantons with patrician rule in cities, jointly ruled subject territories, and survived religious civil wars.
In the thirteenth century the valley communities of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden held privileges directly from the Holy Roman Emperor and resisted control by the Habsburgs. A charter of alliance dated to early August 1291, in which the three communities promised mutual aid and refused foreign judges, survives in Schwyz. It was one of many comparable alliances of the period; rediscovered in the eighteenth century, it was treated as the founding charter of Switzerland only shortly before the first national celebration of 1891, which replaced the older founding date of 1307, and the legends of William Tell and the Rütli oath are later traditions. Victories over Habsburg armies at Morgarten (1315), Sempach (1386) and Näfels (1388) and further alliances brought in Lucerne, Zurich, Glarus, Zug and Bern by 1353; Fribourg and Solothurn joined in 1481, Basel and Schaffhausen in 1501 and Appenzell in 1513, making the "thirteen places".
The Confederacy was not a state but a set of overlapping treaties.
The rural economy shifted from mixed farming towards cattle and dairy for export, organised through communal management of alpine pastures and forests by village corporations. Cities lived from crafts, trade and finance. A distinctive "public good" was military: Swiss pikemen were the most sought-after infantry in Europe, and mercenary contracts brought pensions from foreign princes to cantonal governments and leading families, as well as wages to soldiers. Contemporaries already saw these pensions as corrupting; a pact of 1503 attempted, without lasting success, to ban private pensions.
The Confederacy repeatedly came close to collapse. The Old Zurich War (1440–1446) set Zurich against Schwyz and its allies. The Reformation split the cantons: Zurich, Bern, Basel and Schaffhausen became Protestant, the central cantons stayed Catholic, and two Kappel wars (1529 and 1531) ended with a peace that let each canton choose its faith, later reinforced by Catholic and Protestant leagues and separate diets. The Peasants' War of 1653 against urban governments in Lucerne, Bern, Solothurn and Basel was crushed and its leaders executed. The Villmergen wars of 1656 and 1712 settled the balance between confessional blocs. Yet the cantons also had robust arbitration rules: alliance treaties named arbitrators from neutral cantons, and the diet mediated countless disputes. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) recognised the Confederacy's exemption from the Empire.
The Confederacy kept a patchwork of small republics and communes independent among the great monarchies for five centuries and developed habits of confederal bargaining, arbitration and confessional coexistence. Its weaknesses, divided cantons and resentful subject lands, became decisive in 1798, when French troops invaded with support from revolutionaries in the subject territories; Bern fell in March and the Helvetic Republic, a unitary state, was proclaimed. Napoleon's Act of Mediation (1803) restored cantonal government, and the federal state of 1848 drew on both traditions.
Kept a league of sovereign rural and urban cantons independent for about five centuries without a common government, through a diet of instructed envoys, treaty-based arbitration and joint administration of conquered lands. Rural cantons preserved open-air assemblies of adult men. Subject territories had no political voice and city cantons became patrician oligarchies.
Confessional division, the exclusion of subject territories and the rigid rule of patrician cities left the Confederacy unable to resist revolutionary France. In 1798 French troops invaded with support from subject-land revolutionaries, Bern fell, and the unitary Helvetic Republic was proclaimed. Cantonal government returned in 1803 and a federal state was founded in 1848.
The Old Swiss Confederacy had no common government: its diet (Tagsatzung) was a meeting of cantonal envoys who voted on instructions, majority decisions applied only to the jointly ruled territories, and other business required unanimity.[1][2]
The 1291 charter of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden was one of many comparable alliances; rediscovered in the eighteenth century, it was treated as the founding document of Switzerland only from the late nineteenth century, when the first federal celebration was held in 1891.[1][2][3]
In the Grisons (Three Leagues), an associate of the Confederacy, the court communes voted on the resolutions of the Leagues' diet, a procedure called the referendum, an order Randolph Head analyses as early modern democracy.[1][2]