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It formed at the end of the 13th century, from a nucleus in what is now Central Switzerland, expanding to include the cities of Zurich and Bern by the middle of the 14th century. This formed a rare union of rural and urban communes , all of which enjoyed imperial immediacy in the Holy Roman Empire.
Bern invaded and conquered Aargau in 1415 and Vaud in 1536, as well as other smaller territories, thereby becoming the largest city-state north of the Alps, by the 18th century comprising most of what is today the canton of Bern and the canton of Vaud. The expansionist policy of the city of Bern led them into the Bernese Oberland. Through ...
In the cities—which were small by modern standards; Basel had about 10,000 inhabitants, [30] Zürich, Bern, Lausanne, and Fribourg about 5,000 each—the development was a natural one, for the liege lords very soon gave the cities a certain autonomy, in particular over their internal administration. The number of cities also grew during this ...
This situation led the cities of Lucerne, Zürich and Bern to attach themselves to the Swiss Confederacy in 1332, 1351, and 1353 respectively. As elsewhere in Europe, Switzerland suffered a crisis in the middle of the century, triggered by the Black Death followed by social upheaval and moral panics , often directed against the Jews as in the ...
But still, Switzerland remained a relative "oasis of peace and prosperity" [4] (Grimmelshausen) while Europe was torn by the Thirty Years' War. The cities generally lay low and watched the destruction from afar, the Republic of Zürich investing in building state-of-the-art city ramparts.
Bern (Swiss Standard German: ⓘ), or Berne (French: ⓘ), [note 1] is the de facto [note 2] capital of Switzerland, referred to as the "federal city". [note 3] [3] With a population of about 146,000 (as of 2024), Bern is the fifth-most populous city in Switzerland, behind Zürich, Geneva, Basel and Lausanne. [4]
Map of the Helvetic Republic (1798) Map of Switzerland in 1815 New cantons were added only in the modern period, during 1803–1815; this mostly concerned former subject territories now recognized as full cantons (such as Vaud, Ticino and Aargau), and the full integration of territories that had been more loosely allied to the Confederacy (such as Geneva, Valais and Grisons).
They founded many cities, including Fribourg in 1157, and Bern in 1191. The Zähringer dynasty ended with the death of Berchtold V in 1218, and their cities subsequently became reichsfrei (essentially a city-state within the Holy Roman Empire), while the dukes of Kyburg competed with the house of Habsburg over control of the rural regions of ...