INTRODUCTION: Social order, politics, and political language in Graubünden, 1470–1620

Summary

Among all of the temporal blessings and gifts, which God is accustomed to bestow on the human race, spiritual and worldly liberty of conscience and of self-government is by no means the least, because one can preserve one's soul, honor, body and goods through its legitimate use, and enjoy these things without vexatious compulsion and pressure. Therefore it has always and everywhere been desired and sought after by everyone as a precious valuable treasure.

The form of our government is democratic; and the election and removal of all kinds of magistrates, judges and officers, both here in our free and ruling lands and in those lands subject to us, lies with our common man.

Grawpündtnerische Handlungen deβ M.DC.XVIIIjahrs (1618)

The statements above, with their unapologetic use of the expressions “democratic” and “common man,” appeared in a factional manifesto written in the “Freestate of the Three Leagues in Old Upper Rhaetia” – now the modern Swiss canton known in its three native languages as Graubünden, Grischun, or Grigioni. Effectively separated from the Holy Roman Empire in 1499, the Rhaetian Freestate developed into a polity unique in early modern Europe. Multi-lingual, and after the 1520s multi-religious, the Freestate spent the stormy years of the sixteenth century governed by communal democracy according to majoritarian principles. In an age that celebrated hierarchy and divinely ordained authority, its inhabitants celebrated their “liberty of self-government”, maintaining that they had no lord but God himself.