Eight Swiss Free Cities – including Basel, Bern, Lucerne, and Zurich – from the 14th century until to 1648.

RANDOLPH HEAD -- Ph.D. University of Virginia – Professor at the University of California, Riverside

Dear Dr. Kolkey:

The answer to your question, below, is a clear “yes”.

In fact, from the mid-15th century onwards, Swiss politics and wars are actually well documented both in chronicle and other documentary forms.  Moreover, as is typical for early modern politics in general (not just in city-states or republics), faction was a key organizing factory, and factional shifts are often connected with the outbreak of wars.

You might check Norman Birnbaum’s classic article (Past and Present No. 15 (1959), pp. 27ff) to get a sense (in English) of Swiss factional politics and how they could play into actual events, in this case support for Zwingli.  

My own study, _Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons_ (Cambridge, 1995), has considerable discussion of the role of faction, though the most detailed research by Alexander Pfister is published in German and Romansh.

A quick oversight then:

One could divide the Swiss wars in the period you cover into three groups: wars for autonomy (Morgarten campaign in 1315 {very poorly documented}, the Sempach war in 1386, and the Swabian {Swiss} War of 1499), wars of local expansion (Aargau 1415, Thurgau 1460, Burgundian Wars of the 1470s, Italian campaigns from about 1450 to 1515), and internal wars (Alter Zurichkrieg in the late 1440s, Kappel War of 1531, Swiss Peasants’ War of 1652, First Villmergerwar of 1656, Second Villmergerwar of 1712).  

Faction played into all of these, though in different ways.  Sometimes one or another faction would seize on opportunities raised by other causes, sometimes a faction built its strength by encouraging a campaign, etc., but in almost every case these was a factional dimension about whether to go to war.  Indeed, quite a bit of current research emphasizes the intensity of patronage networks and aristocratic faction as a way of revising post-WWII Swiss historiography, which tended to celebrate the “democratic unity” of Switzerland (such an important ideological moment during the Hitler-period) in past eras.

Best regards,

Randolph

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