Having been thus successful when opposed to northern troops, the Swiss shortly after tried their strength against a southern foe, the Duke of Milan. On this occasion the confederates were the aggressors, although under the plea of retaliation. A party of Italians had cut timber in one of their forests. Immediately a descent upon the Italian valleys was planned, and a considerable force crossed the southern Alps. A Milanese army of fifteen thousand men marched up the Ticino to meet the mountaineers. At the village of Giornico lay the Swiss vanguard of six hundred men, from Uri, Schweyz, Lucerne, and Zurich, the main body of their troops not having yet advanced so far. It was mid-winter of the year 1478. The Swiss caused the Ticino to overflow the meadows before the village, which soon became a field of ice; and as the Milanese army advanced upon Giornico, the confederates sallied out upon skates, and with this advantage over their enemies, six hundred Swiss put to flight a Milanese army of fifteen thousand men.
At that period the principal weapons were crossbows, arquebuses, lances, and halberds. Battle-axes and swords were also common, as well as knives and daggers. The body was still protected by armor, generally among the Swiss of plain workmanship; the head was covered by a helmet, or among the common soldiery with a thick felt hat, ornamented with feathers of the ostrich or the cock, according to the means of the owner. A white cross was stitched on the clothing in conspicuous places, and served as a common uniform badge with the confederates.
Victories so brilliant as those of Granson, Morat, and Giornico, with a defeat so advantageous as that of St. Jacques, spread the fame of the mountaineers through Europe—princes eagerly sought their aid as mercenaries; they were frequently opposed to each other in rival armies, and as their fidelity became as well known as their courage, they were solicited to form the body-guards of royalty.
The Swiss guards of the kings of France have a place in history. Their honorable fidelity to Louis XVI. is known the world over. Even within the present century the Swiss have watched at the gates of the Tuileries, Louis XVIII. having revived the custom on his return to France. After the Hundred Days, however, the body was finally disbanded. To the present hour it is understood that the King of Naples and the Pope are still (or were very shortly since) surrounded by body-guards from the confederacy.
But much as these different wars added to Swiss glory, they were followed by serious evils to the nation. A warlike, rapacious spirit, and with it the love of a roving, restless life, spread with wonderful rapidity among the people. Their mountain homes were deserted, their lands lay fallow, their flocks were sold to procure the means of arming themselves, employment among foreign powers was eagerly sought, and when it could not be obtained, parties of disbanded soldiers and idle camp-followers spread disorder through the country to such an extent that the severest measures were resorted to, and in the space of a few months as many as fifteen hundred vagabonds of this description were publicly executed.
The rich spoils of the Burgundian army produced a very unhappy effect. The gold, and silver, and jewels found in the deserted camp gave the conquerors a taste for riches to which they had hitherto been strangers. Formerly they had been a frugal and contented people, but a few short years produced a very striking change in this respect; a thirst for gold became general, bribes were openly offered and received, and foreign coin had an all-powerful influence in directing the course of their politics. Not only were the military openly in the pay of their neighbors, but the public men of the different cantons were only too well acquainted with German florins, Italian ducats, and French crowns. It is true, this fact was not considered so disgraceful in those times as it would be to-day. For, two hundred years since, half the court of England, with the king at their head, were in the pay of Louis XIV. But it would appear that bribery became more frequent and more impudent in Swiss politics than in those of other countries at the same period. On one occasion the French minister had his money-bags publicly opened at Berne, and the royal pensions or bribes distributed in the town with the sound of the trumpet. At Friburg heaps of crowns were openly displayed, piled up with shovels, and the bystanders were asked if the silver did not sound better than the empty promises of the Emperor Maximilian, nicknamed Pochidanari, or the Pennyless. At another time the French ambassador went to the baths of Baden, in Arau, where people from all parts of the country were assembled, kept open house, paid the score for large troops of the company, and actually threw gold into the bathing rooms, for the women to scramble for. The result of a course like this was very injurious to Swiss character. Highly honorable for courage and fidelity, it has yet been considered as too generally colored by the love of money, verifying the proverb, "point d'argent, point de Suisse."
But this mercenary spirit was not the only evil brought upon the confederacy by the victories of the fifteenth century. Internal differences of the gravest nature soon followed. The division of the spoil was very unsatisfactory to the rural cantons. They made loud complaints of injustice, and became extremely jealous of the greater intelligence, power, and influence of the towns; while the burghers, in their turn, became suspicious of the pastoral cantons, accusing them of wishing to promote disturbances between themselves and their subjects—subjects, we say, for the towns having acquired by conquest or purchase parcels of territory here and there, governed them as the feudal lords governed their vassals. In short, from the whole history of that period it is evident that a spirit of suspicion and jealousy was rife throughout the confederacy, threatening disunion and revolution. In the hope of restoring confidence and unity, a council or Diet was convened at Stantz, one of the principal towns of the canton of Unterwalden.
One by one, the deputations from the different cantons made their appearance at the little town of Stantz. They came by the lake of Lucerne, or lake of the forest cantons, as it is more frequently called by the people themselves, a beautiful sheet of limpid water, lying in the bosom of noble Alpine mountains, with sweet pastoral valleys opening here and there among the solemn cliffs. There were soldiers, merchants, lawyers, and peasants in the assembly; there were burghers from Berne, Zurich, and Lucerne, with shepherds from Schwyz and Uri; in addition to the regular deputies, there were also agents from St. Gall, Appenzell, Soleure, and Friburg, applying for admission to the confederacy, to which they had been hitherto only allies. It was in the winter season that the Diet assembled. The session was scarcely opened when it became evident that they had met in an evil temper; every subject introduced was received with bitterness, mistrust, and suspicion. The angry passions of the rural cantons were thoroughly aroused; they were extremely jealous of the towns, and no reasoning could induce them to accede to the application for admission from Friburg and Soleure. These districts were headed by important cities, and every city was accused of tyranny. The burghers knew too much, they were too rich, they were too prosperous. The deputies of the larger cantons, on the other hand, were indignant at this petty jealousy, and at the refusal to receive Soleure and Friburg, whose citizens had fought side by side with them in so many of their struggles. The subject of the division of the spoils from the war with Burgundy was again advanced by the rural cantons with renewed bitterness. In short, every matter broached seemed to offer only another field for mistrust and fierce contention.
While the Diet was thus holding its stormy session at Stantz, a conspiracy against Lucerne was discovered. The peasants of a rural district subject to the town were implicated in it; they had resolved to seize the occasion of an approaching festival for attacking the burghers, murdering the governor and council, and razing the city to the ground, so that in future nothing but a village, like their own, should exist on the spot. Tidings of the discovery of this conspiracy only aggravated the evil temper of the Diet. From invective and accusation both parties proceeded to the gravest threats. The deputies of Friburg and Soleure, in the hopes of restoring a better understanding, voluntarily withdrew their application, but in vain. Both parties were too highly exasperated. Reconciliation was held to be impossible. Disunion and civil war, that most wretched, most shameful warfare, were declared inevitable.
The canton of Unterwalden was divided into two districts, each including one of the two great gorges of that region. Each of these valleys had its own towering mountains, with rocky summits, wooded heights, and green alpine pastures. Through each flowed a stream, or rather wild torrent, and the more level lands on their banks were thickly sprinkled with rustic dwellings, in near neighborhood. Stantz, the seat of the Diet, and a mere village, was the principal town of Lower Unterwalden. The sister valley of Upper Unterwalden was the most fertile and beautiful. Its chief village was Sarnen. A stream called the Melch ran through a branch of the valley, to which it gave its name of Melchthal. This dale was already noted ground in Swiss history, as the native spot of two of their heroes. Arnold von Melchthal, the companion of Tell, was a peasant of this valley, as his name denotes; and Arnold von Winkelried, to whose heroic self-sacrifice they owed the victory of Sempach, was also born and lived on the banks of the Melch. During the time of the critical Diet of Stantz, there lived in this valley a family by the name of Loewenbrugger. They were among the most important peasants of the dale. Ten children, five sons and five daughters, had been born in the paternal cottage. Some were living there at the time, with their mother, others had married and gone to different homes. The father was absent. Nicholas Loewenbrugger had for many years held a conspicuous position in his native district. He had served his country faithfully on many occasions by his wisdom and his courage. During their wars he had distinguished himself highly, not only for bravery, but also for humanity. When still in middle life, however, he had retired from the little world about him, leaving his paternal estate to the care of his wife, and choosing a cliff on one of the neighboring mountains, he there built himself a hermitage, in which he gave up his whole time to devotion and religious services. So great was the simplicity of his ascetic life, that it is said his only bed was the floor of his cell, and his pillow a stone. It was even believed that for years he had taken no other nourishment than the blessed elements of the holy sacrament. Whatever exaggerations may have been credited in that superstitious age, it is at least certain that his unfeigned piety and saintly life had acquired for him a high place in the respect of his countrymen, while the name of Nicholas von der Fluë, or Nicholas of the Rock, from the spot where he dwelt, was honored far and wide through the cantons.