The Federal Charter — The Old Swiss Confederacy
Representatives of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden agreed a mutual defence pact at the beginning of August 1291, and Switzerland dates its founding from it. The document is short and practical. The three valley communities undertook to assist one another against anyone who attacked them, to accept no judge who had bought his office or who was not a local resident, to submit disputes among themselves to arbitration, and to punish murderers and arsonists. Its context was the Gotthard pass. A bridge across the Schöllenen gorge, built early in the thirteenth century, had made the shortest route from Germany to Italy passable and made these valleys strategically valuable — which is why the Emperor Frederick II had granted Uri and Schwyz imperial immediacy, answering to him directly rather than to any intermediate lord. Rudolf of Habsburg died in July 1291, and the charter was almost certainly a response to that: an interregnum was the moment a neighbouring dynasty with local ambitions might act. The Habsburgs were themselves originally a family from the Aargau, and the confederates spent the next two centuries taking their ancestral lands. The charter was rediscovered and given its founding status in the nineteenth century, and 1 August became the national day only in 1891. William Tell appears in no contemporary source and enters the record around 1470. The confederation grew to eight cantons by 1353 and thirteen by 1513, beat the Habsburgs at Morgarten in 1315 and Sempach in 1386, and was recognised as independent of the empire in 1648.
- Year: 1291 CE
- Category: Political
