1 - Before Switzerland

Summary

Modern historians concur that ‘the Swiss’ and ‘Switzerland’ are concepts that emerged only in the 1400s, and that a modern state of Switzerland emerged only in the early nineteenth century, taking its final shape in 1848. Geographical and historical conditions of the region in and north of the central Alps after the year 1000, however, did provide the conditions in which a Swiss people and a Swiss political system could emerge, and shaped those people and that system in important ways. A pivotal feature of the physical and human geography described in this chapter is complexity and diversity. Neither the landscape, nor the societies, nor the institutions found in this region around the year 1000 provided any notable unity for its inhabitants. Rather, a Swiss identity emerged only through historical evolution, and remains to the present characterized by an internal variety in language, religion and culture that distinguishes Switzerland from most other European nation-states. Broad historical trends stretching back to the central Middle Ages allowed for political innovation and flexibility within the framework of noble rule in the region by 1250; this flexibility opened opportunities for various actors between 1250 and 1386 to produce a loose but stable network of alliances among cities, towns and mountain valleys – the early Swiss Eidgenossenschaft, or Confederacy. The loose Confederacy of around 1386 was the immediate precursor of the Old Confederacy (Alte Eidgenossenschaft) that took shape between 1386 and 1513, and thereafter remained largely stable until 1798.