Whatever earlier combinations there may have been,[878] it is in the year 1291[879] that the first recorded pact was made between the three Cantons; and it arose out of their making a stand for their customary local rights as against the House of Hapsburg.[880] Uri had in 1231 been granted by King Henry VII of Germany, son of the emperor Frederick II, the cherished privilege of enrolment as an imperial fief, an act which in theory withdrew it from its former feudal subordination to the Count of Hapsburg; and in 1240 Frederick himself gave the same privilege to Schwytz.[881] On the unhinging of the imperial system after Frederick's death, the Hapsburgs, who even in his life had treated the Cantons as contumacious vassals, fought for their own claims; whereupon in due course was formed the Pact of 1291. Thus the Swiss Confederation broadly began in the special strife which arose between the new order of higher feudal princes and the civic or rural communes on the disintegration of the Germanic empire in the thirteenth century.[882] The familiar story of William Tell and the oath-taking at Rütli or Grütli in 1308 appears to be pure myth. There is no historic mention till over a hundred years later of any such acts by the Austrian bailiff as that story turns upon, or of any strife whatever in 1308. A pact of confederation had actually been made seventeen years earlier than that date; and a new and rather more definite pact was made on the same general grounds in 1315; but the romance of 1308 remains entirely unattested, and it bears the plainest marks of myth.
The histories of J. von Müller, Zschokke, Vieusseux, and others of the first half of the nineteenth century, are vitiated as regards the early period by acceptance of the traditions; though the untrustworthiness of the Tell story had been pointed out as early as the year 1600 by Franz Guillimann of Fribourg, and again in the eighteenth century by Iselin, and by Freudenberger in his Guillaume Tell: Fable danoise, 1760. (See Dändliker's Short History of Switzerland, Eng. tr. 1899, pp. 53, 54.) A full and decisive examination of it will be found in Rilliet's Les origines de la Confédération Suisse, 1868. Compare Dierauer, Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft, 1887, Buch ii, Kap. i, § iii; Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations, ed. 1882, pp. 337-41, and the essay William Tell in Baring-Gould's Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, 1888. Some very judicial attempts have been made to show that there is reason to think some fighting occurred in 1308. See, for instance, the pamphlets Le Grütli and La querelle sur les traditions concernant l'origine de la Confédération Suisse, by Prof. H. Bordier, in reply to Prof. Rilliet, 1869. Dierauer, again, declines to go the whole way in negation, and stands for the view "not fable, but legend—on some basis of fact" (as cited, i, 150). But even M. Bordier reduces Tell to a mere "somebody"; and every student surrenders the apple story, which is at least as old as the twelfth-century Danish version of it in Saxo Grammaticus.
M. Rilliet holds that the Swiss reproduction was not a local survival of the Teutonic myth, but a deliberate adaptation made in Lucerne from the abridgment of Saxo Grammaticus produced by a German monk, Gheysmer, about 1430 (Les origines, pp. 214-16, 327, 328). At Lucerne there was a local school of poetry of the kind then common in Holland; and the old ballad, which closely follows Saxo's tale, and which is the probable basis of the story as given in the later chronicles, seems to have been composed by way of securing for the Canton of Uri the main honours of the founding of the Confederation, which were being claimed by the sister Cantons. Whatever be the basis, the Tell legend is finally untenable, and the tradition of an immemorial state of freedom in the Forest Cantons is abandoned even by the conservative critics. See Bordier, La querelle, p. 7. The only point on which a case against the criticism of M. Rilliet seems to be made out is as regards his view that the Forest Cantons were not colonised before the eighth century. As M. Bordier contends, the grant of Louis of Germany seems to describe a long-settled district. M. Rilliet also goes somewhat beyond the evidence in assuming that Uri was mainly colonised under royal influence, Unterwalden by lay and ecclesiastical proprietors, and Schwytz by freemen (Les origines, pp. 20, 21).
The rise of a durable federation in the central Swiss group is thus a product of three main factors; the first being their primary physical union through the Lake of Lucerne, their common highway. But for this they would probably have been as hostile as were Uri and Glarus, which had fought from time immemorial.[883] Next was needed the chronic hostile pressure of an outside force, creating a common political interest. The septs of pre-Norman Ireland and England, and of the Scottish Highlands down till modern times, remained at strife long after Christianisation, because within their own country they were so free to struggle, and because the examples of forcible centralisation elsewhere were so remote and so hard to assimilate. But when the Forest Cantons emerge as such in history in the thirteenth century they are already menaced by a power which, without undertaking or compassing the toil of conquering them, habitually drives them to formal combination by its interference. Its continued pressure evolves the definite political agreement of 1315, after the victory of Morgarten, in which was made clear the special difficulty of conquering a race of mountaineers with the normal cavalry forces and armour-clad or servile infantry of medieval feudalism[884]—a difficulty which must rank as the third factor in the beginnings of Swiss independence.
Thus far the half-feudal, half-commercial city of Lucerne, though in touch with the Forest Cantons through the uniting lake, was their enemy, as being feudatory of the Hapsburgs; but as the chronic state of war was ruinous to its trade with Italy, and peculiarly harassing to all industry, the commercial element forced a coalition, and in 1332 Lucerne joined the Confederation as Fourth Canton. Now emerges in the affairs of the Confederation the element of civic class strife, so familiar in the republics of Italy; for the accession of Lucerne is promptly followed in that city by a conspiracy of nobles, which is put down by the help of the allied Cantons; whereupon the nobles are exiled and a civic council set up, the Duke of Austria being unable to hinder. The same trouble arises in the case of Zurich, the next accession to the union. In the ordinary medieval course there had there arisen an oligarchic government of aristocratic citizens in place of the early dominion of the Abbess; and the city was made an imperial fief by Frederick II. On this basis it made commercial treaties in the manner then common among the cities of Germany, joining the Swabian, Rhenish, and South-German Leagues, and developing a large trade with Italy and Germany, and even a silk manufacture. At length the large craftsman class revolted (1336) under the leadership of a dissentient patrician, Brun or Braun, who established a constitution in which he as burgomaster held office for life, with a council of thirteen gildmasters and thirteen aristocrats, six of the latter being named by Brun. For the firm support of the gilds he duly paid them by laws checking foreign competition in manufactured goods, and denying even to the rural population the right to manufacture. The dispossessed oligarchs kept up a raiding strife on the frontiers, till at length some who were permitted to return formed a conspiracy against the burgomaster, which he suppressed with slaughter. This leading to a league against the city among the Hapsburgs and the surrounding nobles and the Cantons in treaty with them, Zurich petitioned to join the Forest Confederation, and was readily accepted (1351), finally triumphing by their help.
Zurich on its part enabled the Forest Cantons to protect themselves against Austria by conquering Glarus (1351), which offered little resistance, and was ranked as a protected territory under the Confederation. This now formed a compact territorial group save for the Canton of Zug, intervening between Lucerne and Zurich. As that could not defend itself against its neighbours, it joined their Confederation perforce (1352), being received as a full member. The same status was readily granted to the city of Berne, which, imperially enfranchised in 1218, had carried on a remarkable independent policy on Italian lines, acquiring territory from the decaying nobles around by mortgage, purchase, and conquest, till in 1339 they combined against her. Succour was then given by the Forest Cantons, securing for Berne the victory of Laupen; and when in 1352 they invited her to join their union, her rulers accepted. So tepid, however, was still the spirit of union that at the Peace of Brandenburg in 1352, confirmed by that of Regensburg in 1355, Glarus and Zug consented to withdraw, returning for a time to the Austrian allegiance;[885] and the confederation of the remaining six Cantons was still one of the loosest cohesion, differing only in the fact of its territorial continuity and its organic growth from the many city-unions which flourished in Germany in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.[886] Only the three original Cantons were pledged to make no separate treaties; Zurich was specifically permitted to do so; in 1352 Berne was in alliance with the towns of Fribourg and Soleure; in the next generation Lucerne made a compact with the towns of Sempach and Richensee; and in 1393 a burgomaster of Zurich carried through a treaty of alliance with the common enemy, the Duke of Austria.
In this case the mass of the citizens were induced to reverse the policy and banish those who had planned it; but the right of the city to make such an alliance was not technically challenged by the Confederation; and even in Schwytz a few loyalists paid old feudal dues to Austria up till 1394. A more serious ground of division was the jealousy duly arising between the rural and the city Cantons, from which came about the forcible intervention of Schwytz in a dispute between the town and country sections of Zug. The remaining Cantons insisted on subjecting the action of both Zug and Schwytz to the verdict of the union, thus effectually establishing a precedent of federal practice; but in the first decade of the fifteenth century the Cantons of Schwytz and Glarus are found on their own account helping the men of Appenzell to win their independence; and when the successful Appenzellers, who had developed a turn for aggression and confiscation, sought to join the union, they were accepted only as allies by the Cantons individually, Berne holding aloof. Yet again, when the house of Austria (which had abandoned its claims on the Cantons in 1412) was under the ban of the Empire in 1415, and the city Cantons led a movement of attack upon its territories, Uri and the Appenzellers took no part; while in 1422 Uri and Unterwalden acted alone in their unsuccessful war with the Duke of Milan.
Thus far the Confederation, in its different degrees of union, had included only German-speaking Cantons; but in 1420 the French-speaking Valais (Ger. Wallis, from the Latin Vallis Poenina? or foreigners), in 1424 Upper Rhætia, and in the same year the Romance-speaking Engadin, also in Rhætia, won their virtual independence. In all, three leagues were formed in Rhætia, forming their own confederation, known as the Grisons (="the Greys," the Graubünden or Grey Leagues, from the colour of the peasants' smocks).
As the sphere of self-government widened, new risks of strife arose. All the while the older Cantons, in particular the cities, had been acquiring lands in the feudal fashion; and in 1440 a general scramble for an inheritance in Rhætia evolved first a war between Zurich on the one hand and Schwytz and Glarus on the other, and next a joint coercion of Zurich by all the other Cantons. This led to a fresh alliance between Zurich and Austria, and a new and exceptionally ferocious war, lasting for four years. Meantime Basle, assailed by the Armagnacs under the dauphin of France, was succoured by the union and received into alliance. Next came the Burgundian wars, whereafter, not without much friction and quarrelling over booty, Soleure (Solothurn) and Fribourg were taken into the union, and a new pact framed (1481), defining afresh the general law of the Confederation. Lastly, after the Swabian war, the last in which the Swiss had to defend themselves against German aggression, the cities of Basle and Schaffhausen, become self-governing, were received into the League; and in 1513 Appenzell followed. Thus was rounded the number of thirteen Cantons, which constituted the Swiss Confederation till the end of the eighteenth century. They were: Schwytz (which gradually gave its name to the whole people), Uri, Unterwalden, Zurich (the "Forest" group), Lucerne, Glarus, Zug, Berne, Fribourg, Soleure, Basle, Schaffhausen, and Appenzell. Aargau and Thurgau, conquered in the wars with Austria in 1415 and 1460, remained subject lands, the property of the allied Cantons; and the Valais and the Grisons remained outside the union as connections or Zugewandte, the League proper being restricted to German-speaking Cantons. It will be seen too that the territory of the Confederation remained a compact and connected mass; the Vaud, the Valais, Ticino, and the Grisons forming a long band of territory outside.