communes in the east acquired territorial lordships through purchase and conquest. The cities of Bern, Zürich, and Luzern, which formed a loose alliance through the Swiss Confederacy, played a leading role in this process. Like noble lords or ecclesiastical institutions, the cities thought of their possessions as lordships and the possessions’ inhabitants as subjects.42 They built territorial complexes that were among the most extensive urban dominions north of the Alps and had their closest parallels in the contadi of Italian cities.43 In many cases, the cities contented themselves with a kind of overlordship supervising their hinterlands that entailed primarily the right to exercise supreme judicial authority, collect property taxes, and levy troops. By contrast, local and mid-level judicial rights remained with local lords, many of whom were also influential citizens of the cities in question.
Despite the successful expansion of the Savoyards and the Swiss confederate cities, numerous small lordships asserted themselves through the end of the fifteenth century.44 They not only escaped incorporation into large territorial power complexes but also accumulated local lordship rights and built territories around themselves on a smaller scale. Among them were bishoprics such as Basel and Lausanne; monastic foundations such as the Cluniac priories of Romainmôtier and Payerne and the Benedictine abbey of Einsiedeln; and institutions like the Grossmünster college of canons in Zürich.45 The category also included large autonomous noble lordships, such as those of the lords of Chalon, who belonged to the ranks of French princes,46 the counts of Neuchâtel and Gruyère, and the barons of Hallwil.47 Also notable in this context is a phenomenon peculiar to the region that requires assessment: the rural communal entities, such as Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, which emerged as autonomous political powers exercising lordship over neighboring entities.48 This was certainly an important local phenomenon, but its significance as the source of a “peasant state” has been overemphasized in Swiss national history.
The complexity of these political structures rests on the fact that, in many cases, claims of lordship overlapped on a local level. Even the successful territorial power complexes often divided their lordship of individual villages with potential rivals. The delineations of such rights were highly complicated, because local and regional lordships formed ties of dependence with one another through the granting of lordship rights as fiefs and pledges, and these ties manifested somewhat differently in each place. Moreover, factions among the peasants within a village were often bound up in clientage relationships with lordly officials, who in turn were bound up with greater lords.49 Under these circumstances, the regulation of local legal relationships often fulfilled functions that later, in modern states, became primarily the affairs of capital cities and high diplomacy; the village was the central object of and site for conflicts between rival lordships.
Intensifying Lordship
The administrative systems of the different power complexes experienced similar developments, though they also exhibited marked regional variations and proceeded at different rates of development. Greater lordships consolidated and standardized legal, military, and fiscal systems in their regions of influence. In contrast to older, personal networks of vassals and followers, new administrative systems fashioned themselves on territorial organizational principles.50 They supported themselves through longstanding official posts, the salaried holders of which were responsible for defined geographic regions. Thus by the thirteenth century, the Savoyards allocated the local lordships within their territories to castellanies, entrusting their administration to important supporters. At the middle level, the castellans of the territory were under the control of the Savoyard ballivate of Vaud or Chablais and eventually the central Savoyard courtly administration. From around 1400, cities also subdivided their territorial administrations into districts, each of which fell under the responsibility of a territorial steward (Landvogt) recruited from the urban elite.51 Eventually, administrative duties in the service of a greater noble lord and his knightly followers offered better prospects for wealth and prestige than the traditional exercise of local rights of lordship.52 While the social ruling class of the area under consideration still consisted to a considerable extent of relatively autonomous local lords at the beginning of the thirteenth century, by the end of the late Middle Ages these appeared ever more distinctly as a service aristocracy, into which members of the urban ruling classes could also ascend.
These developments resulted in far-reaching changes at the local level of the villages.53 Small, local lordship complexes were increasingly incorporated into large territories or used by members of the urban upper classes as negotiable investments. In both cases lordship rights were in practice increasingly exercised by officials who had often been recruited from the ranks of the local inhabitants.54 In everyday life, the exercise of lordship appeared less often in conjunction with lords than with their office-holding dependents. The retreat of local lords from the villages and the new, increasingly collective methods of production helped to raise collective or communal forms of organization—which were carried out by the local inhabitants themselves—to a higher political-legal status.55 Local communal institutions sometimes functioned as the means for enforcing lordly demands, but sometimes also as substrates of resistance by peasant populations and especially by village ruling classes. Communes often bought rights to taxation or to legal authority from their lords. Subsequently, communes functioned as de facto lords over their own members—as communal holders of taxation and regulatory rights.56
After the economic and demographic crises of the second half of the fourteenth century, many villages switched to forms of production that were focused less on self-sufficiency than on urban markets. This led to specialization in the production of particular goods like wine, meat, and raw manufacturing materials. As a consequence, rural producers also turned to purchases from markets to meet their everyday needs.57 From this arose both new possibilities for profit and new risks of poverty, which together heightened the social and economic inequalities in village society.58 Lordship institutions or individual lordly officers often played important roles as intermediaries between rural producers and urban markets, serving as creditors and brokers.59 This resulted in many interconnections between relationships of lordship and economic dependency. How this affected the implementation of local lordship rights remains to be examined.
The new ruling class made up of officials and members of the territorial power complexes became the agents of an administrative culture characterized by specific practices and concepts of order that went through fundamental changes. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, administrative specialists adopted increasingly elaborate writing techniques; borrowed academic methods for the determination, interpretation, and enforcement of rules; and developed a new understanding of order. From the early thirteenth century, this can be discerned first of all in attempts by church institutions to document local lordship rights systematically in writing. From the end of the century, the Savoyard administration, which had often modeled itself after northern Italian city administrations, took a leading role in the implementation of new administrative techniques. Here writing also increased the control of individual operations that were carried out through the law. Before 1300 the Savoyards had already assembled numerous lists of goods and services and developed a complex bookkeeping system for the finances of individual officials; they began to manage their archives systematically around the end of the fourteenth century.60 Such techniques arrived in other power complexes after a delay of sometimes several decades. Likewise, Italian and Provençal influence is responsible for the fact that notarial practice was already widespread in the fourteenth century in the western part of the region under examination, while in the east it was only during the early modern period that it gained similar significance.61
Regardless of the spread of notaries, there is a visible and common tendency around 1400 throughout the area under examination to document in writing the business dealings of a large portion of the population, and to make possible ever more systematic control by the lordship’s administration. In this context, even smaller power complexes increasingly relied on the service of administrative specialists, who often boasted at least a rudimentary university education.62 These developments
