Swabian War - Peace Negotiations

Peace Negotiations

Early mediation attempts in March 1499 had failed because of mutual distrust between the parties. But after the battle of Dornach, the Swabian League was war-weary and had lost all confidence in the king's abilities as a military leader, and thus refused Maximilian's demands to muster a new army. The Swabian and Habsburg armies had suffered far higher human losses than the Swiss, and were also short on artillery, after repeatedly having lost their equipment to the Swiss. The Swiss also had no interest to prolong the war further, though they refused a first peace proposal that Maximilian presented at Schaffhausen in August 1499.

However, events in the Italian Wars helped bring the Swabian War to an end. The French king Louis XII tried to bring the Duchy of Milan under his control. As long as the Swabian War continued, the Milanese ruler Ludovico il Moro—whose niece Bianca Maximilian had married in 1493—could not expect help from either Swiss mercenaries or Maximilian, and thus his envoy Galeazzo Visconti tried to mediate between the Swiss and the king. The French delegation at the Tagsatzung, the federal diet and war council of the Swiss, tried to prevent any agreement for the same reason. The Milanese delegation prevailed in these intrigations and succeeded to persuade both sides to moderate their demands. Finally, a peace treaty between Maximilian I and the Swiss was signed in Basel on September 22, 1499. The peace treaty carefully played down the whole war from the "imperial war" that Maximilian had tried to make it by declaring the ban over the Confederacy to what it actually was: a war between two equal members of the empire (Reichsstände), namely the House of Habsburg and the Swiss Confederacy. The document referred to Maximilian only as "duke of Habsburg", not as "king of the Germans" or even "Holy Roman Emperor".

With the Peace of Basel, the relations between the Old Swiss Confederacy and the empire returned to the status quo ante from before the Reichstag of Worms in 1495. The imperial ban was dropped silently. Maximilian had to accept the refusal of the cantons and to abandon implicitly the Habsburg claims on their territories, acknowledging their independence. Consequently, the then ten members of the Swiss Confederacy remained exempt from the jurisdiction of the Reichskammergericht. The Swiss henceforth exercised also the high justice over the Thurgau. The war had not caused any territorial changes, except in the area around Schaffhausen, where the city had succeeded to assert its hegemony over some places that had formerly belonged to the Bishop of Constance.

In the Grisons, the situation also reverted to pre-war conditions. The Habsburgs could keep their rights over eight of the communes of the Zehngerichtebund, but also had to accept that league's alliance with the two other leagues and with the Swiss Confederacy. Ultimately, this arrangement would lead to the Habsburgs losing the Prättigau to the Three Leagues, with the exception of a temporary re-occupation during the Thirty Years' War nearly 130 years later.