Swiss Peasant War of 1653 - Military Confrontation

Military Confrontation

Both sides began to prepare openly for an armed conflict. The cities faced the problem that their armies were militias, recruited from the rural population of their subject territories, but that precisely this rural population had turned against them. Bern began raising troops in the Vaud and the Bernese Oberland, two regions unaffected by the uprising. The authorities of Bern and Lucerne were supported by the other cantons at the Tagsatzung. In a dispatch from Zürich, the uprising was termed for the first time a "revolution".

On May 18, 1653, the peasants delivered ultimatums to Bern and Lucerne and raised 16,000 troops. When the city of Bern replied with a protest note, the peasants marched to Bern under the leadership of Leuenberger, arriving on May 22, 1653. A second army led by Emmenegger laid siege to Lucerne. The city authorities were unprepared for an armed conflict and immediately engaged in negotiations. Within days, peace agreements were concluded. In the peace on the Murifeld (Murifeldfrieden, named after the field just outside of Bern where the peasant army's camp lay) signed by Leuenberger and the mayor of Bern, Niklaus Dachselhofer, the city council of Bern promised on May 28, 1653, to fulfill the peasants' fiscal demands in return for the dissolution of the Huttwil League. In view of this development, the city of Lucerne and the besieging peasants agreed on a truce. Leuenberger's army lifted the siege of Bern and retreated, but the people refused to follow their leaders and objected to dissolving the Huttwil League.

On May 30, 1653, following an earlier resolution of the Tagsatzung and earlier Bernese demands, Zürich assembled an army with recruits from its own territories, from the Thurgau, and from Schaffhausen under the command of Conrad Werdmüller with the task to break any armed resistance once and for all times. Some 8,000 men with 800 horses and 18 cannons marched towards the Aargau. Already three days later, Werdmüller's army controlled the important crossing of the river Reuss at Mellingen. In the hills around the nearby villages Wohlenschwil and Othmarsingen a peasant army of some 24,000 men assembled, led by Leuenberger and Schybi. A peasant delegation tried to negotiate with Werdmüller, showing him the peace treaty concluded on the Murifeld. Werdmüller, who had been until then unaware of this treaty that had been signed only days before, refused to acknowledge the validity of the contract and demanded the unconditional surrender of the peasants. Thus rebutted, the peasants attacked Werdmüller's troops on June 3, 1653, but being poorly equipped and lacking any artillery, they were defeated decisively in the Battle of Wohlenschwil. The peasants were forced to agree to the peace of Mellingen, which annulled the Huttwil League. The peasant troops returned home and an amnesty was declared, except for the leaders of the movement.

Bernese troops under the command of Sigmund von Erlach then advanced from Bern to the Aargau to meet the forces of Zürich. Under this double pressure, the peasants' resistance collapsed. Von Erlach's troops numbered about 6,000 men and 19 cannons. The operation was a veritable punitive expedition: the troops plundered the villages along their way and even razed the defenses of the small town of Wiedlisbach, which lost its town privileges and was declared a village again. On June 7, 1653, the Bernese army met with a troop of about 2,000 men of Leuenberger's army who were on their way back from Wohlenschwil. The peasants retreated to Herzogenbuchsee, where they were defeated by von Erlach's troops; the little town went up in flames in the course of the battle. Niklaus Leuenberger fled and went hiding, but he was betrayed by a neighbour and was apprehended by the Bernese district sheriff Samuel Tribolet on June 9, 1653.

The Entlebuch valley, where the revolt had begun, resisted a little longer. Peasant troops under the command of Schybi tried in vain on June 5, 1653, to gain the bridge at Gisikon, held by a joint army of the city of Lucerne and the central Swiss cantons commanded by Sebastian Peregrin Zwyer of Uri. In the following weeks, Zwyer's troops slowly advanced through the valley, until they controlled it completely by June 20, 1653. Schybi was captured a few days later and incarcerated at Sursee.