On 22 September 1499, the Sunday of Saint Maurice, in the city of Basel, King Maximilian of Habsburg, as lord of Further Austria and Tyrol, made peace with the Swabian League, Bishop Heinrich of Chur, the ten places of the Swiss Confederacy and the Three Leagues. The text is dated in the city, under the king’s seal and the seals of the confederate towns and lands. Talks, mediated by the Milanese envoy Galeazzo Visconti, had opened on 15 August. This is not the Peace of Basel of 1795 between France and Prussia.

The Swabian War, begun in February, had stopped after Dornach, on 22 July. Both sides were exhausted. Ludovico Sforza wanted Swiss mercenaries against France. An attempt in early August at Schaffhausen had failed on Maximilian’s demand that the Confederates accept the 1495 Diet of Worms; the Basel instrument names neither the Common Penny nor the Reichskammergericht.

The nine points mainly restore the status quo ante. Damages are cancelled on both sides; conquered lands, towns and villages are returned; inhabitants who had done homage to the enemy are not punished; prisoners go free on an oath of Urfehde and payment of keep. Eight of the ten jurisdictions in Prättigau and Schanfigg swear again to Habsburg, without penalty for the rising; they remain in the League of Ten Jurisdictions and in alliance with the Confederacy. The Landgericht of Thurgau, until then an imperial pledge of the city of Constance, passes to the Confederates. The imperial ban and the imperial suits against the Confederates and their allies are lifted.

The wording does not name the Empire as such: the Confederates hold that they had fought Maximilian as archduke of Austria and count of Tyrol, not as head of the Empire. There is no formal exemption from the imperial courts. Nineteenth-century historians, from Oechsli onward, read here a German recognition of Swiss independence; twentieth-century literature rejected that reading. Legal independence comes only with Westphalia, in 1648.

This is not the Ewige Richtung of 1474, not the Diet of Worms of 1495, not the accession of Basel and Schaffhausen in 1501 and not the Peace of Basel of 5 April 1795. Schaffhausen is nevertheless included in the 1499 vidimus of the peace.

The Basel negotiations, in the chronicle of Diebold Schilling the Younger, 1513. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

For context: Treaty of Basel (1499). The text: Der Friede von Basel, 22. September 1499.