Swabia Swabia "Schwaben or Schwabenland" is both a historic and linguistic region in Germany. Swabia consists of most of the present-day state of Baden-Württemberg specifically, historical Württemberg and the Hohenzollerische Lande, as well as the Bavarian administrative district of Swabia. In the Middle Ages, Baden, Vorarlberg, the modern principality of Liechtenstein, modern German-speaking Switzerland, and Alsace, nowadays belonging to France, were also considered to be a part of Swabia. Suebi 2000 years ago, the Suebi or Suevi were Elbe-Germanics whose origin was near the Baltic Sea which was thus known to the Romans as the Mare Suebicum (today, the term Swabian Sea is appled to Lake Constance). They moved further to the south west, becoming part of the Alamannic confederacy. The Alamanni were ruled by independent kings throughout the 4th and 5th centuries. Duchy of Swabia Swabia became a duchy under the Frankish Empire in 496, following the Battle of Tolbiac. Swabia was one of the original stem duchies of East Francia, the later Holy Roman Empire, as it developed in the 9th and 10th centuries. The Hohenstaufen dynasty (the dynasty of Frederick Barbarossa), which ruled the Holy Roman Empire in the 12th and 13th centuries, arose out of Swabia, but following the execution of Conradin, the last Hohenstaufen, on October 29, 1268, the original duchy gradually broke up into many smaller units. Holy Roman Empire The major dynasty which arose out of the region were the Habsburgs, but also the Hohenzollerns who rose to prominence in Northern Germany, stem from Swabia, as well as actual Swabian states became established by the Dukes of Württemberg and the Margraves of Baden. Smaller feudal dynasties disappeared sooner or later, however for example branches of the Montforts and Hohenems lived until modern age and the Furstenberg survive still. The region proved to be one of the most divided in the Empire, containing, in addition to these principalities, numerous free cities, ecclesiastical territories, and fiefdoms of lesser counts and knights. The Old Swiss Confederacy was de facto independent from Swabia from 1499 as a result of the Swabian war. Fearing the power of the greater princes, the cities and smaller secular rulers of Swabia joined together to form the Swabian League in the 15th century. The League was quite successful, notably expelling the Duke of Württemberg in 1519 and putting in his place a Habsburg governor, but the league broke up a few years later over religious differences inspired by the Reformation, and the Duke of Württemberg was soon restored. The region was quite divided by the Reformation. While secular princes like the Duke of Württemberg and the Margrave of Baden-Durlach, as well as most of the Free Cities, became Protestant, the ecclesiastical territories (including the bishoprics of Augsburg, Konstanz, and others) remained Catholic, as did the territories belonging to the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and the Margrave of Baden-Baden. In the wake of the territorial reorganization of the Empire of 1803, the shape of Swabia was entirely changed. All the ecclesiastical estates were secularized, and most of the smaller secular states, and all of the free cities, were mediatized, leaving only Württemberg, Baden and Hohenzollern as souvereign states. Much of Eastern Swabia became part of Bavaria, forming what is now the Bavarian administrative region of Swabia. The Swabian War of 1499 (Schwabenkrieg, also called Schweizerkrieg in Germany) was the last major armed conflict between the Old Swiss Confederacy and the House of Habsburg. What began as a local conflict over the control of the Val Müstair and the Umbrail Pass in the Grisons soon got out of hand when both parties called upon their allies for help; the Habsburgs demanding the support of the Swabian League and the Federation of the Three Leagues of the Grisons turning to the Swiss Eidgenossenschaft. Hostilities quickly spread from the Grisons through the Rhine valley to Lake Constance and even to the Sundgau in the southern Alsace, the westernmost part of Habsburg Further Austria. Many battles were fought from January to July 1499, and in all but a few minor skirmishes the experienced Swiss soldiers defeated the Swabian and Habsburg armies. After their victories in the Burgundian Wars, the Swiss had battle tested troops and commanders. On the Swabian side, distrust between the knights and their foot soldiers, disagreements amongst the military leadership, and a general reluctance to fight a war that even the Swabian counts considered to be more in the interests of the already (all too) powerful Habsburgs than in the interest of the Holy Roman Empire proved fatal handicaps. When his military high commander fell in the Battle of Dornach, where the Swiss signed a final decisive victory, emperor Maximilian I had no choice but to agree to a peace treaty signed on September 22, 1499 in Basel. The treaty granted the Confederacy far-reaching independence from the empire. Although the Eidgenossenschaft officially remained a part of the empire until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the peace of Basel exempted it from the imperial jurisdiction and imperial taxes and thus de facto acknowledged it as a separate political entity. One source of conflict was the ancient distrust, rivalry, and hostility between the Swiss Confederacy and the House of Habsburg, which had risen to the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor since 1438. Prior to that, the empire and the emperor had been an antipole to the Habsburg dukes for the Swiss. Previous emperors had repeatedly supported the confederates in their struggles against the Habsburgs, whom they saw a strong rivals. But when Frederick III of Habsburg ascended to the throne, the Swiss suddenly faced a new situation where they could no longer count on support from the empire. Worse even, conflicts with the Habsburg dukes threatened to become conflicts with the empire itself. Under Frederick's reign, this did not occur, but when his son Maximilian I rose to power, the danger became more imminent, even more so when Maximilian took over the possessions of his cousin Sigismund in Tyrol and in Further Austria and thus united the whole Habsburg territory in his hands. The Swabian League had been founded by emperor Frederick III in 1487/88 as an alliance against the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty, which had begun to expand its influence westwards, clashing with the Habsburgs. Even the Swabian counts and cities were less than enthusiastic and joined the league only hesitatingly. When asked by the emperor to also join the league, the Eidgenossen flatly refused: they saw no reason to join an alliance designed to further Habsburg interests, and they were wary of this new, relatively closely knit and powerful alliance that had arisen on their northern frontier. Furthermore, they resented the strong aristocratic element in the Swabian League, so different from their own organization, which had grown over the last two hundred years liberating themselves from precisely such an aristocratic rule. On the Swabian side, similar concerns existed. The independence of the Eidgenossen and their freedom compared to the common people in Swabia was a powerful model for the latter. Many a baron in southern Swabia feared that his own subjects might revolt and seek adherence to the Swiss Confederacy. The city of Constance (and its bishop) was caught in the middle between these two blocks: it held possessions in Swabia, but also still exercised the high justice over the Thurgau, where the Swiss had assumed the low justice since the annexation in 1460. The foundation of the Swabian League prompted the Swiss city states (cantons) of Zürich and Berne to propose accepting Constance into the Swiss Confederacy. The negotiations failed, though, due to the opposition of the founding cantons of the Confederacy and Uri in particular. The split jurisdiction over the Thurgau was the cause of many quarrels between the city and the Confederacy. In 1495, one such disagreement was answered by a "punitive expedition" of soldiers of Uri and the city had to pay the sum of 3,000 guilders to make them cease their plundering and retreat. (The Thurgau was a commonly administered territory of the Swiss Confederacy, and Uri was one of the cantons involved in that administration.) Finally, Constance joined the Swabian League as a full member on November 3, 1498. Although this did not yet definitively define the position of the city—during the Reformation, it would be allied again with Zürich and Berne, and only after the defeat of the Schmalkaldic League in 1548 its close connections to the Eidgenossenschaft would be finally severed—it was another factor contributing to the growing estrangement between the Swiss and the Swabians. Other rivalries had been slowly aggravating, too. The competition between Swiss (Reisläufer) and Swabian mercenaries (Landsknechte), who both fought in armies throughout Europe, sometimes opposing each other on the battlefield, sometimes competing for contracts, intensified. Contemporary chronicles agree in their reports that the Swiss, who were considered the best soldiers in Europe at the time after their victories in the Burgundian Wars, were subject to many taunts and abuses by the Landsknechte; they were called "Kuhschweizer" (roughly "Swiss cow herders"; although intended as a derogatory term, there is no connection to "coward") and ridiculed in other ways. Such insults were neither given nor taken lightly, and frequently led to bloodshed. Indeed, such incidents would contribute to prolong the Swabian War itself by triggering skirmishes and looting expeditions that the military commands of neither side ever had wanted or planned. Concerning the interior politics of the empire, Maximilian I, like other Holy Roman Emperors before and after him, had to face struggles with other powerful princes and he thus sought to secure his position and the imperial monarchy by furthering centralisation. At the Reichstag in Worms in 1495, he was partly successful, but also had to make concessions in favor of the princes. The Imperial reform proclaimed an "eternal public peace" (Ewiger Landfriede) to put an end to the abounding feuds and the anarchy of the robber barons, defined a new standing imperial army to enforce that peace, to which each Imperial Estate (Reichsstand) would have had to send troops, and mandated the common penny (Reichspfennig), a new head tax to finance this army. Among the concessions Maximilian had to make was the institution of a new supreme court, the Reichskammergericht, thus separating the highest judicial authority from the person and the whereabouts of the emperor, and the Reichsregiment, a kind of governmental council of princes. (The latter, however, would never play a significant role: it convened for the first time in 1500, but was dissolved by Maximilian already two years later.) The Swiss refused to accept these resolutions of the Reichstag. They had no interest whatsoever to send troops to serve in an army under Habsburg authority, nor to pay taxes, nor to accept any foreign court's jurisdiction; and they had succeeded to secure public peace within their territories reasonably well by themselves: they simply considered the whole proposal a curtailing of their freedom. The Swiss were by far not the only members of the empire refusing to accept the resolutions, but Maximilian would use their refusal later as a pretext to place the Swiss Confederacy under an Imperial Ban (Reichsacht).