Martial Culture in Medieval Towns

A visualisation of the main "Swiss Wars"

Explore the main wars the "Swiss" fought between 1300 and 1550 from the perspective of both urban and military history. The traditional narrative of Swiss history is centered around a dozen wars. Already by the 16th century, the series of battles "from Morgarten to Marignano", amounted to a veritable "battle canon". Our research shows however that most of these "wars" cannot be called "Swiss", and cannot really be compared to one another because they belong to different types of conflicts. This database focuses strictly on towns. As a result, the equally autonomous rural communities (Länder, Talschaften), appear in this visualization in a secondary role. This does not reflect the historical reality.

This visualisation tool allows you to explore data about 18 wars, regrouping more than 43 battles. We invite you to explore the preformated scenarios that we prepared for you to go through the different battles, wars or type of conflict below. If you want to explore the dataset itself on your own, go at the end of the page. If you want to know why it is relevant to understand how urban networks played a role within these wars, go at the bottom of the page.

 

Explore the different battles

Here you can visualise battles which belong to different wars and learn which town or networks of towns were involved.

Explore the different categories of war

Here you can visualise the different categories of conflict, and which war belonged to which category.

Explore the wars

Here you can visualise each war in a separate scenario. Learn about the battles and the towns or network of towns involved in each war.

Explore the database yourself

Here you will have access to the database and explore for yourself any data or map.

Acknowledgement: This page presents the results of a data vizualisation tool based on the Nodegoat environment. This tool has been developped in the context of the research project "Martial Culture in late Medieval Towns" both as a research tool and as public engagement output, based on archive and secondary literature research. A version of it has been developed for a museum installation at the Museum Altes Zeughaus in Solothurn, for the temporary exhibition "Alarm! Von der Kultur, dem Besitz und dem Gebrauch von Waffen in der spätmittelalterlichen Stadt" (15th October 2022 to 29th May 2023).

Data: Own research, Structured data (wikidata), Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz/Dictionnaire Historique de la Suisse
Research: Regula Schmid, Daniel Jaquet, Mathijs Roelofsen, Elena Magli.
Design and support: Vincent Deluz, Sebastian Borkowski, Kaspar Gubler and Daniel Jaquet.
Museum installation: Raumprodukt and Tweaklab.

Why visualise Swiss Wars from the perspective of both urban history and military history?

Did you know that Bern did not take part in the Sempach war? Switzerland (or rather "Swiss lands") evolved much between 1300 to 1550. It started as a loose alliance of a few towns and lands resisting greater European powers. It evolved to a super power defeating the armies of one of the greatest prince of Europe during the Burgundian wars. It then stopped expansion and concluded defensive alliances with neighbouring States after the Italian wars, while providing European powers with soldiers. This evolution was never made as a "Swiss" nation, but as a network of towns with their rural communities. The discourse about Switzerland as a nation in the middle ages is a discourse forged in the 19th century, during the creation of national identities. Exploring the towns as a central element of the military history or the oldfashioned history of battles allow to review these persepectives. Towns played a major role as strongholds, reservoirs for combattants, centers of arms production and trade, and for the financing of warfare. Moreover, they were the political actors deciding to wage war, to help allied towns or to play the card of diplomacy.