Three Leagues
After about 1471 the three separate Leagues were allied together as the Three Leagues. The Bundesbrief of September 23, 1524 created a constitution for the Three Leagues that would remain until the Napoleonic dissolution of the League. However the League was not a unified state in the modern sense. The Three Leagues worked together as a federation of three states and virtually all affairs of the League were settled by referendum. The Three Leagues were also unique in early modern Europe in that it was the only territory were all decisions were made by communalism, with the Leagues founded, governed and defended by cooperative decisions.
The Three Leagues were normally allied with the Old Swiss Confederacy. Initially this was a response to the expansion of the Habsburgs. The Musso war against the Duchy of Milan in 1520 pushed the League closer to the Swiss Confederacy. The League would remain an associate to the Swiss until the Napoleonic Wars, when it was absorbed into the Helvetic Republic. After the Napoleonic Act of Mediation, the Three Leagues became the canton of Graubünden.
Read more about this topic: Grey League
Famous quotes containing the word leagues:
“Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summon’d am to a tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end:
Methinks it is no journey.”
—Unknown. Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song (l. 57–60)