Swiss Peasant War of 1653 - Formation of The Huttwil League

Formation of The Huttwil League

The negotiations between the city authorities and the peasants were not continued. While the authorities debated at the Tagsatzung how to deal with the insurrection, the peasants worked to gain support for their cause amongst the rural population of other regions and lobbied for a formal alliance. A peasant delegation sent to Zürich was turned back promptly: the city authorities, who had put down local unrests in their territory already in 1645 and again in 1646, had already recognized the danger of the agitation. On April 23, 1653, representatives of the people of the countryside of Lucerne, Bern, Basel, and Solothurn met at Sumiswald and concluded an alliance to help each other to achieve their goals. A week later, they met again at Huttwil, where they renewed that alliance and elected Niklaus Leuenberger from Rüderswil in the Emmental as their leader.

On May 14, 1653, the peasants met again at a Landsgemeinde at Huttwil and formalized their alliance as the "League of Huttwil" by signing a written contract in the style of the old Bundesbriefe of the Old Swiss Confederacy. The treaty clearly established the league as a separate political entity that considered itself equal to and independent from the cities. The tax revolt had become an independence movement, based ideologically on the traditional Swiss founding legends, especially on the legend of William Tell. Legally, the peasants justified their assemblies and their union by the rights of old and in particular the Stanser Verkommnis of 1481, one of the important coalition treaties of the Old Swiss Confederacy.

The peasants by then had assumed full sovereignty over the territory they controlled. They refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the city authorities and also had the military control over the area. The Huttwil League openly declared its intention to expand until it encompassed the rural population in the whole Confederacy. The majority of the rural population supported the rebellion; the dissenting minority was silenced by threats of violence and sometimes violence indeed. Communications between the cities were interrupted, official envoys were shaken down and ships on the rivers were captured. The peasants even sent a letter to the French ambassador at Solothurn assuring the French king Louis XIV of their good intentions.

The confessional conflicts that dominated the relations between the ruling city authorities were only secondary to the peasants of the Huttwil league. The peasant alliance bridged the confessional divide, uniting Catholic people from the Entlebuch and from Solothurn with Protestant peasants from the Emmental and from Basel. The treaty of Huttwil explicitly recognized this biconfessionalism. The cities remained in all their manoeuvring and negotiations for military support within their respective confessional spheres: Catholic Lucerne had requested mediation and then military help from the Catholic central Swiss cantons, while Protestant Bern had turned to Protestant Zürich for help. The distrust between the authorities of the Catholic and Protestant cantons was so deep that none would allow troops of the other confession to operate on their territories.