Turning Swiss : cities and empire, 1450-1550
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Turning Swiss : cities and empire, 1450-1550
(Cambridge studies in early modern history / edited by John Elliott, Olwen Hufton, and H.G. Koenigsberger)
Cambridge University Press, 1985
Available at 16 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Bibliography: p. 246-283
Includes indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book examines politics in the free cities of South Germany during the era of the Protestant Reformation, an age of German national awakening. The author's main theme is why Germany, unlike the other large European countries, failed to create a centralised dynastic monarchy during the sixteenth century. Two possible paths of political development faced the oligarchical governments of the autonomous towns: either they could support a strong monarchy based on a partnership between Austria and the free cities under Habsburg leadership, or they could try to form federations of self-governing cities with peasant leagues along Swiss lines. Fear of how a wave of liberation might affect the peasantry, and their own lower classes, inclined the oligarchies away from the 'Swiss way', but the Reformation and the distraction by wars and by other imperial concerns of Emperor Charles V and his brother, Archduke Ferdinand, prevented a partnership developing between the cities and the monarchy. In the end, the region went the 'German way' - of aristocratic particularism that dominated the Germanspeaking world until 1871.
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