3 - Local practice and federal government in the Freestate

Summary

Just as the Rhaetians, joined by their Leagues

Divide all offices among them, to noblemen

But also to men from the people,

So they are accustomed to gather as a common resource

All the taxes that are paid to them each year;

Then they divide it, partly by heads,

Dividing it man by man,

And partly according to wealth,

In the opinion that they can better protect their freedom

And control the powerful in this fashion,

By keeping absolutely nothing in a public treasury.

Franciscus Niger, 1543

Throughout the fifteenth and into the sixteenth centuries, Rhaetians drew upon their experience of communal life to construct the system of alliances that culminated in the Bundesbrief of 1524. After 1524, communal values and practices continued to provide organizational models for the institutions and political culture of the Freestate. Public assembly, majority decision, and publicly controlled division of benefits and resources were characteristic practices that deeply influenced both the form of the Freestate and the political ideas of its inhabitants. Yet the application of local practices to larger problems was not automatic and reflexive; instead, federal institutions derived from a range of possibilities among which local practice was only one. The extension of communal values to the Freestate did not, therefore, result in structures identical to those found in the communes. Rhaetians also drew on other models of political order to arrive at results consistent with, but not directly based on, communal principles.