page_title: Swabian War
section_title: Imperial reform of 1495
hierarchical_section_title: Swabian War / Background / Imperial reform of 1495
context_page_description: The Swabian War of 1499 was the last major armed conflict between the Old Swiss Confederacy and the House of Habsburg. What had begun as a local conflict over the control of the Val Müstair and the Umbrail Pass in the Grisons soon got out of hand when both parties called upon their allies for help; the Habsburgs demanding the support of the Swabian League, and the Federation of the Three Leagues of the Grisons turning to the Swiss Eidgenossenschaft. Hostilities quickly spread from the Grisons through the Rhine valley to Lake Constance and even to the Sundgau in southern Alsace, the westernmost part of Habsburg Further Austria.
  Many battles were fought from January to July 1499, and in all but a few minor skirmishes, the experienced Swiss soldiers defeated the Swabian and Habsburg armies. After their victories in the Burgundian Wars, the Swiss had battle tested troops and commanders.
context_section_description: Maximilian I, like other Holy Roman Emperors before and after him, had to face struggles with other powerful princes in the empire and he thus sought to secure his position and the imperial monarchy by furthering centralisation. At the Imperial Diet held in Worms in 1495, he was partly successful, but he also had to make concessions in favor of the princes. The imperial reform proclaimed an "eternal public peace" (Ewiger Landfriede) to put an end to the abounding feuds and the anarchy of the robber barons and it defined a new standing Imperial Army to enforce that peace, to which each imperial estate (Reichsstand) would have had to send troops. It also mandated the common penny (Reichspfennig), a new head tax to finance this army. Among the concessions Maximilian had to make was the institution of a new supreme court, the Reichskammergericht, thus separating the highest judicial authority from the person and the whereabouts of the emperor. He also had to agree to the formation of a governmental council of princes called the Reichsregiment. It would never play a significant role: it convened for the first time in 1500, but was dissolved by Maximilian two years later.
  The Swiss did not accept these resolutions of the Imperial Diet, and they explicitly refused to pay the common penny. They had no interest whatsoever in sending troops to serve in an army under Habsburg authority, nor in paying taxes, nor would they accept any foreign court's jurisdiction; and they had succeeded in securing public peace within their territories reasonably well by themselves. They simply considered the whole proposal a curtailing of their freedom. The Swiss were by far not the only members of the empire who refused to accept the resolutions, but Maximilian would use their refusal later as a pretext to place the Swiss Confederacy under an imperial ban (Reichsacht).
caption: Emperor Maximilian I in a painting from 1519 by Albrecht Dürer
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