Eight old places
The Eight Old Places ( French Huit anciens Cantons , Italian Otto vecchi Cantoni , Romansh Otg Chantuns vegls ) were the cantons of Switzerland that formed the Old Confederation between 1353 (accession of the city of Bern ) and 1481 (accession of the cities of Friborg and Solothurn ) .
The eight locations were (in brackets, year of accession):
-
Country of Uri (1291) -
State of Schwyz (1291) -
Land Unterwalden ( Ob- and Nidwalden ) (1291) -
City of Lucerne (1332) -
City of Zurich (1351) -
City and Country Zug (1352) -
City of Bern (1353) -
State of Glarus (1352/86)
The eight-place Confederation was created by expanding the alliance of the original cantons to include five additional locations. It was a loose union of free cities and states, which insisted on a series of contracts, in which sometimes not all places were involved.
What they had in common was the will not to submit to any of the great feudal lords, especially not to the Habsburg dukes of Austria . She did not strive for freedom from the empire, but imperial freedom , that is, direct subordination to the king or emperor and the right to administer oneself and to pronounce justice. From this alliance, Switzerland gradually emerged as an independent entity within the Holy Roman Empire .
It was only when the cities of Zurich, Bern and Lucerne joined the Confederation as an instrument of their cooperation that the Confederation achieved a stable political significance, which was also tolerated by the European court centers in Vienna, Paris and Milan.
At the end of this epoch there was the Stans Decree , which regulated the conflict within the Confederation that had arisen between the regional and city centers around the accession of Solothurn and Freiburg. The subsequent expansion of the Confederation led to the Thirteen Old Places .
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ Peter Dürrenmatt : Swiss history. Volume 1, p. 132
- ↑ Marc Tribelhorn and Simon Teuscher: No people of free, noble farmers In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of January 13, 2018