Swiss troops in Swedish service
King Gustav II. Adolf of Sweden tried in 1631 during the Thirty Years' War in the Diet in vain for official federal immigration. The three Swiss troops in Swedish service from the Protestant cantons fought without official surrender and suffered virtually a total loss in the battle of Nördlingen in 1634 .
Swiss troops in foreign service was the name of the paid service of commanded, whole troop bodies abroad,regulatedby the authorities of the Swiss Confederation byinternational treaties . These treaties contained a chapter regulating military affairs: the so-called surrender (or private surrender if one of the contracting parties was a private military contractor).
Switzerland as an “oasis of peace and prosperity” in the European conflict
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An act of violence against three royal officials in Prague in 1618 triggered a Thirty Years' War , which eventually spread across Europe and devastated extensive areas.
The conflict was sparked mainly by four causes: the religious schism, the clashes between the imperial estates and the absolutist emperor, the rivalries of the most powerful kingdoms and the ongoing conflict between the dynasties of the Bourbons and the Habsburgs . In the bloody struggle for supremacy in Europe, the Habsburgs Spain and Austria, allied with Bavaria and the predominantly Catholic German Empire ( the Catholic League ), and the Protestant imperial princes (the Protestant Union ), the Netherlands and Sweden , stood on the one hand , supported by Catholic (Bourbon) France, opposite. The war, which had devastated entire regions for decades, was only ended in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 .
Only Switzerland (with the exception of Graubünden ) as an oasis of peacefulness and prosperity , as Grimmelshausen described it in his Simplicius Simplicissimus , was spared and even benefited economically.
When the Thirty Years' War broke out in 1618, the parliamentary statutes of the still poorly established Confederation were at least able to balance the interests of the local, politically influential war entrepreneurs, the lucrative offers of foreign envoys, the risk of fratricidal fights between confederates in hostile camps and internal religious tensions agree to exercise neutrality in this conflict. The exceptions remained France, which could still count on the influx of Swiss troops, and the individual mercenary system .
The individual places then largely held back with open partisanship and support for the other warring parties, despite conflicting interests. Even then, when as early as 1620 Graubünden was drawn into the war as the marching area of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs . The economic boom of the Swiss Confederation as a supplier of mercenaries and, thanks to an intact infrastructure, of food and war goods (e.g. horses) to every financially strong state covered up all internal contradictions.
A formal alliance proposal by the Swedish King Gustav Adolf in 1631 to the Federal Diet was rejected by the Catholic estates and finally also rejected by the four Protestant towns of Zurich, Bern, Basel and Schaffhausen, albeit only after lengthy deliberations and secret negotiations. Not only the Swedish special envoys, first knight Sadler and then knight Christoph Ludwig Raschen , had spared no effort to promote the Swedish alliance. England's envoy Oliver Flemming had also advocated this in the Reformed places.
The three diplomats were most heard in Zurich and Bern. Their authorities tacitly tolerated the private recruitment of three Swiss troops for Swedish services without official surrender in the cantons of Zurich and Bern as well as in the Bernese Vaud.
Also in 1633, after the death of King Gustav II Adolf, the Diet's answer to a renewed request for an alliance from Maximilian von Pappenheim , Landgrave of Stühlingen, commissioned by Sweden, was no.
| Name, duration of use |
(1 swe ) Escher Regiment 1632-1634 | |
| Year, contractual partner |
1631, without a contract.
On the basis of King Gustav II Adolf's personal word of honor to pay the same wages as the French king, experienced officers from leading families in Zurich began to quietly recruit a team. |
|
| Stock, formation |
1 regiment with a total of 1,800 men, in 3 battalions of 12 companies with 150 men. | |
| Origin squad, troop |
From the canton of Zurich. | |
| Owner, commander, namesake |
Colonel Johann Peter Escher vom Luchs from Zurich. From 1620 he had led a company in the army of Count Mansfeld in the service of the Protestant Union and in 1628 had transferred to Swedish services. |
|
| Use, events |
The regiment joined the Swedish army in Nuremberg in 1632 and contributed significantly to the Swedish victory in the battle of Lützen , in which King Gustav II Adolf was killed. In the Battle of Nördlingen in 1634, however, it was almost completely wiped out under the command of Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar . His meager remnants were incorporated into Swedish regiments. In 1650 Escher entered the service of Venice with a regiment recruited mainly in Germany . |
|
| Name, duration of use |
(2 swe ) Regiment Weiss 1632-1634 | |
| Year, contractual partner |
1631, without a contract.
The oral word of honor of King Gustav II Adolf, who is highly respected in Bern, the same pay as Ludwig XIII. For some officers from leading families it was enough to recruit soldiers for the Swedish service. |
|
| Stock, formation |
1 regiment with a total of 1,800 men, in 3 battalions of 12 companies with 150 men. | |
| Origin squad, troop |
From the canton of Bern. | |
| Owner, commander, namesake |
Major General Samuel Weiss from Bern. He came from a family called In Albon von Schalen (Saillon?) From the Valais. For reasons of faith he had emigrated to Bern with his father in 1589 and was naturalized there. In 1619 he began a military career in Sweden and in 1630 was appointed major general and head of the Swedish War Council. He entrusted the management of the regiment to a deputy. Command was taken by Lieutenant Colonel Isaac von Treytorrens, Herr von Bavois, from Yverdon in the canton of Bern. Isaac followed his two uncles to Scandinavia in 1632. Fascinated by the military successes of King Charles II Gustav, both had switched to Swedish services in 1631 after a military career in Denmark: Franz von Treytorrens became lieutenant general and chief of the artillery there, his brother Albert led a cavalry regiment he had raised in Germany. |
|
| Use, events |
The regiment contributed significantly to the Swedish victory in 1632 in the Battle of Lützen, in which King Gustav II Adolf was killed. In the Battle of Nördlingen in 1634, however, it suffered a practically total loss under the command of Duke Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar. The rubble was incorporated into Swedish regiments. Treytorrens raised a regiment for Duke Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar in Alsace in 1635. Weiss resigned from Sweden in 1635 and returned to Bern. In 1658 his son of the same name raised another regiment, this time for Venice . |
|
| Name, duration of use |
(3 swe ) Gingins Free Corps 1634 | |
| Year, contractual partner |
1634 | |
| Stock, formation |
Not specified. | |
| Origin squad, troop |
From the Bernese Vaud. The officers involved were Captain Doxat of Yverdon and the lieutenants Warnery of Morges, d'Arbonnier, Bourgeois and Monney from Orbe and Crinzoz von Cottens. |
|
| Owner, commander, namesake |
Albert von Gingins from La Sarraz . The Gingins were originally a noble Savoy family who were able to change sides without prejudice to the Bernese conquest of Vaud in 1536 through submission and monetary payments. |
|
| Use, events |
The Gingins Freikorps was among the approximately 5,000 Swiss troops in the Swedish army under Duke Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar, who were almost completely destroyed in the battle of Nördlingen. | |
Sweden's entry into the war in 1630 and the subsequent rapid advance of the royal army from the Baltic coast in Pomerania to southern Germany turned the military success from the Catholic to the Reformed side.
Emperor Ferdinand II had already dismissed the first of his outstanding generals, General Wallenstein , under pressure from the imperial princes in 1630 and lost the second, General Tilly , in 1632 through his death. The Catholic party was thereby decisively weakened.
Despite the death of King Gustav II Adolf in the Battle of Lützen in 1632 , the impressive Swedish triumphal march was only interrupted two years later by the defeat in the Battle of Nördlingen . However, it prompted France to intervene.
Louis XIII now financed the Protestant army of Duke Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar and supplemented it with its own troops under French command. Although France was Catholic, it was concerned with increasing territory on the Upper Rhine at the expense of Habsburg.
The misery of the war was thus extended for another decade, until in 1648 a flank attack by a force led by Lieutenant General Johann Ludwig von Erlach from Bern decided the battle of Lens in favor of the French.
This victory, as a key event, ultimately led to the breakthrough of the negotiations on the Peace of Westphalia, which had been going on for five years, and finally to the end of the Thirty Years' War.
The defensive of Wil 1647 and further consequences for Switzerland
When in the 1630s in the north-west of the Confederation there were several border violations by troops from both warring parties, the Protestant towns particularly affected were unable to agree with the Catholic majority in the daily statute on a common defense of the federal territory. An attempt by Bern to protect its border with mercenaries failed miserably because of the costs and the licentiousness of the recruited troops.
It was not until 1646 that a Swedish advance to Lake Constance through the Thurgau (a common rule of the seven ruling places excluding Bern) triggered an entire federal defense campaign. In 1647, the Diet and the Wil Defensionale created a joint federal war council and a federal army of 36,000 men.
During the Peace of Westphalia, Mayor Johann Rudolf Wettstein from Basel achieved the separation of Switzerland from the Association of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation on his own initiative and practically single-handedly .
A minimal consensus, pragmatic action and some luck helped Switzerland get through the Thirty Years' War almost unscathed. It had also taken in a large number of religious refugees, especially the exposed cantons of Vaud and Basel. But also in Freiamt (now in Aargau), with a population that was almost ten times smaller at the time, around 7,000 emigrants, most of them for good, were generously welcomed.
The topics of neutrality , national defense and religious tolerance penetrated the consciousness of the Swiss elite for the first time and from then on remained, with changing interpretations, key terms in Swiss politics.
However, the sudden economic downturn after the end of the war also quickly had negative consequences.
In the 1650s the Peasants' War broke out and the pent-up religious tensions in the First Villmerger War were released .
When famine arose and poverty and misery spread, the regions in Alsace, southern Germany and East Prussia, largely depopulated by the war, became preferred immigration areas for Swiss farming families.
literature
- Beat Emmanuel May (by Romainmotier): Histoire Militaire de la Suisse, et celle des Suisses dans les différens services de l'Europe. Tome VII, J. P. Heubach et Comp., Lausanne 1788, OCLC 832583553 .
- Karl Müller von Friedberg : Chronological representation of the federal surrender of troops to foreign powers. Huber and Compagnie, St. Gallen 1793, OCLC 716940663 .
- Moritz von Wattenwil: The Swiss in foreign military service. Separately printed from the Berner Tagblatt , Bern 1930, OCLC 72379925 .
- Paul de Vallière, Henry Guisan , Ulrich Wille : Loyalty and honor, history of the Swiss in foreign service (translated by Walter Sandoz). Les Editions d'art ancien, Lausanne 1940, OCLC 610616869 .
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Anselm Zurfluh: Thirty Years War. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- ↑ Hans Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen: The adventurous Simplicius Simplicissimus. Flamberg Verlag Zurich / Stuttgart 1963
- ↑ Silvio Färber: Bündner Wirren. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- ^ A b c Heinrich Türler, Viktor Attinger, Marcel Godet: Historisch-Biographisches Lexikon der Schweiz. Fourth volume, Neuchâtel 1927
- ^ A b Paul de Vallière, Henry Guisan, Ulrich Wille: Treue und Ehre, history of the Swiss in foreign service (translated by Walter Sandoz). Les Editions d'art ancien, Lausanne 1940.
- ^ A b Emmanuel May (by Romainmotier): Histoire Militaire de la Suisse, et celle des Suisses dans les différens services de l'Europe. Tome VII, J. P. Heubach et Comp., Lausanne 1788.
- ↑ Hans Braun: Weiss, Samuel. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- ↑ Hans Braun: Weiss, Samuel von. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- ↑ Ansgar Wildermann: Gingins, de. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- ↑ Karin Marti-Weissenbach: May, Beat Emmanuel (from Romainmôtier). In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- ↑ Olivier Meuwly: Valliere, Paul de. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .