From the end of the fourteenth century the drive towards political independence and territorial expansion in the cities and rural cantons (Lander) of the Confederation advanced alongside the beginnings of an institutional inner consolidation of the state. Within individual territories some of the conditions generated by specific developments in institutions and methods of government were to last until the nineteenth century.
We should first note the considerable constitutional differences between urban and rural cantons. From the beginning of the fifteenth century power in the cities was increasingly centralised in small councils (Kleine Rate), independent of existing craft guilds, involving a small group of eminent urban families and those co-opted by them. Their rule, in particular the administration of justice, customs, taxes and military forces, was refined and extended into all areas. This consolidation of government generally proceeded faster in the towns than in the rural communities. The political disparity between urban and rural areas within the Confederation in the closing years of the fifteenth century was heightened by this growing inequality. Among the rural political elite it nourished some fear of being unable to compete, politically or socially, with the towns.
Nevertheless, during the second half of the fourteenth century the rural Orte had formalised their assemblies (Landsgemeinde), circumscribed offices such as that of the Landammann, appointed their councils according to a definite juridical concept and produced written constitutions: in fact they had emerged as stable, lasting, structurally well-organised political ‘states’. It was first to these rural constitutions, rather than to the towns, that nineteenth-century historians turned to satisfy their modern ideas of a peaceful and democratic order. The widespread concept of a ‘Landsgemeinde democracy’ was the outcome. This tradition is surely erroneous. At this time the Landsgemeinde was basically far more concerned to publicise and make effective the claims of oligarchies than to encourage egalitarian co-operation among the ‘people’; there was still no such thing as a sovereign people of citizens with equal rights. None the less, it is undeniable that under these circumstances political decisions could be more strongly influenced from below than they were in the towns, and that the political and social position of the rulers was legitimised and exhibited in a rather different way.
In spite of these differences, recent research into constitutional history has rightly insisted on the essential structural similarities between the urban and rural communities. Both were communally organised republics, steered around 1490 by a ruling group which was still very unstable but in its structure fundamentally oligarchic. Towards the end of the century the political and social aims of these ruling groups became increasingly similar, in spite of their diverging political organisation. In the later fifteenth century they tended to become more aristocratic, a tendency which was to be institutionalised in the early modern period. To contemporaries from outside, the Confederation at least, and, by comparison with the elite of government elsewhere, the oligarchies of the Confederation, both rural and urban, were distinctive in respect of their origin, group consciousness and outward manifestation of power, these common characteristics becoming more evident after 1450.
The process of state consolidation can only be partly characterised by the old-fashioned concept of a steady path to local domination through the buildup of comprehensive and undivided territorial and state controls over an ever more closely united group of subject regions. It is also inseparable from the development of new techniques of day-to-day government. Increased surveillance and control over its subjects, and a tighter grip on power by the ruling class, are important features of the ‘early modern state’. A good example of this increase in governmental power, already well developed (by contrast with other parts of the region) before 1450, is found in Lucerne. Following the practical example of the increasingly powerful Habsburg monarchy, Zurich, with Berne and Fribourg, which were in close contact with the highly developed ruling machinery of neighbouring Savoy, also strove to make its government more effective. Besides effective judicial control, the exaction of taxes and military service from newly acquired subjects were central concerns. Indeed, the attempt to impose military service (the so-called Mannschaftsrecht) was a primary assumption of those wishing to monopolise the legitimate exercise of power. A new and highly significant way of demonstrating the domination of the urban ruling class over its subjects was to administer an oath of allegiance. It is interesting to note that no proper system of representation by estates was able to develop in the ruling towns. The ‘plebiscites’ (the so-called Amteranfragen), first introduced by Berne and later by other towns, did not constitute such a system. In the fifteenth century neither the urban nor the rural communes possessed a form of estate representation comparable with other European examples such as the Tyrol.
The tightening of territorial administration became manifest after 1450, particularly in the big city republics of Berne and Zurich. However, we should not overstress this process of concentration and consolidation of inner administrative structures during the fifteenth century, especially in comparison with contemporary royal states and principalities which were, to a greater or lesser extent, centralised. The institutional consolidation of individual territories, and the penetration and unification of state power which accompanied them, were long-drawn-out and precarious processes; even the great strides made in the sixteenth century did not quite complete them. The strength of local selfregulation was still structurally significant, as was the limited degree of administrative centralisation and the diversity of mechanisms for the exercise of state power, both de facto and de jure.
Nevertheless, in the late medieval Confederation there was no lack of indication that the political and social changes in the claims and practice of government were beginning to have some effect. Witness, above all, the more or less chronic uprisings in the countryside which, under various forms and with various intensity, plagued the developing confederate oligarchies from the end of the fourteenth century. However, this widespread rural unrest must be related to economic and social developments. First, economic reasons may be presumed for the disturbances of the 1380s. Secondly, there are at least isolated indications that the Swiss midlands were affected by the widely known agrarian and demographic crises that marked the century 1350 to 1450. These difficulties, compounded in some regions by an upswing in the rural economy perceptible after the 1450s, may well have increased social tensions in the countryside. Thirdly, the increase in stock rearing in the alpine and pre-alpine regions of central Switzerland must have increased the potential for social conflict. And fourthly, a further probable reason for the conflicts after 1470 was discontent with the amount of money that the governing class was receiving from mercenary contracts, and possibly the socially unjust division of the enormous booty gained from the war against Charles the Bold.
A persistently unruly area was the Bernese Oberland, where there had been resistance to the monastery of Interlaken in the fourteenth century and, later, much opposition to Berne by the ‘Evil League’ (Baser Bund) from 1445 to 1451. In 1447 political disputes around Fribourg led to another substantial peasant uprising. In many parts of the countryside around Zurich, peasant resistance was never completely stilled after the beginning of the fifteenth century, and in 1440—1 the district of Gruningen formally demanded a return to the (evidently much milder) domination of Austria. While the subjects of Wadenswil rebelled (and not for the last time) against the town’s tax demands in 1467—8, the revolt against Hans Waldmann, burgomaster of Zurich, in 1489 gave drastic expression to the widespread rural opposition to the centralising policies of the urban oligarchies which rode roughshod over the special and individual rights of rural communities. In Berne, in 1470-1, the question of competence to administer the countryside led to the ‘quarrel of the Judicial Lords’ (Twingherrenstreit), a serious dispute within the city’s ruling class. Overt peasant resistance also developed in the Entlebuch (the Amstaldenhandel or Amstalden affair of 1478), and in St Gallen in the attack on the monastery of Rorschach (Rorschacher Klosterbruch) in 1489—90; less violent, however, was the resistance to the oath in Thurgau in the 1470s. Peasant unrest prior to the Reformation was seen again in the unquiet years from 1513 to 1515 in the region of Berne; in the revolt of Koniz (Konizer Handel); in the hinterland of Lucerne (the so-called ‘Onion War’ or Zwiebelnkrieg); in the upper bailiwicks of Solothurn (the ‘Gingerbread War’ or Lebkuchenkrieg) and elsewhere.
In 1489 the Council of Berne urged the governing council of Zurich to put an end to the disturbances in its countryside as soon as possible. This example shows clearly that the internal consolidation of individual Orte was related to the wider matter of consolidating the whole confederate system of alliances. A common interest in internal law and order, and in mutual interdependence (both of which had been, to varying degrees, powerful motives as early as the fourteenth century), without doubt fostered the integration of the whole Confederation. That process must now be considered.