During the twelfth century, about a third of the dense forests of central Switzerland were cleared for ploughing and settlement, and the noble dynasties who had emerged from the conflicts of previous centuries – among them the houses of Habsburg, Zähringen, Savoy and Kyburg – established towns such as Bern, Fribourg, Murten and Winterthur from which to assert their control over the increasingly prosperous countryside.

Around 1220, the road over the great St Gotthard Pass was opened up for traffic, and those communities lying on the northern approaches to the pass – specifically Uri and Schwyz – suddenly took on massive importance to the imperial rulers further north. A resurgence in trade with the Mediterranean world, and especially Byzantium and the Arab east, after almost a millennium of isolation led to luxury goods making their way across the Alpine passes into northern Europe. Local lords, merchants, princes and the valley communes squabbled with each other for control of the lucrative pass routes. The situation needed resolution, and the Holy Roman Emperor himself stepped in, granting to Uri in 1231 and to Schwyz in 1240 the privilege of freedom from feudal overlordship. With the dying out of the Zähringen and Kyburg lines, the Austrian house of Habsburg had seized the chance to extend its influence over much of Switzerland, but the proud, independent people farming the remote, high valleys of Uri and Schwyz, and their neighbours in forested Unterwalden, remained self-reliant and more or less free.

Rudolf of Habsburg, who had ruled since 1273, died in 1291, thus pitching the region into uncertainty. Popular revolts arose all across the Habsburg realm, especially directed against entrenched power bases such as the monastery at Einsiedeln. In response, a number of Swiss communities forged new partnerships, or renewed old ones, to give themselves a degree of protection against an uncertain future. The legendary founding of the Swiss Confederation on the Rütli meadow on August 1, 1291, by representatives of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, was just one of these alliances, and is thought to have been a renewal of an earlier agreement of unknown date declaring that an attack on any one of the partners was an attack on them all. The legend of William Tell, which is first documented more than two centuries after the signing at Rütli, probably arose both as a justification of the sporadic rebellions against authority that followed the death of Rudolf, and as a neat way to embody the concept of Swiss liberty in a single heroic figure – there is no mention either of Tell or of any organized resistance to the Habsburgs in contemporary thirteenth-century chronicles. The Rütli document is no Declaration of Independence: it has no vision of founding a lasting political entity, and enshrines no basic human rights or privileges. It is expedient, but it nonetheless came to symbolize freedom to the Swiss. The name they gave themselves after 1291 – Eidgenossen – is untranslatable in English (approximating to “comrades bound by oath into a co-operative”), but has a special significance even today. Switzerland still calls itself the Eidgenossenschaft, and the word Eidgenosse is listed in dictionaries as a synonym for “Swiss”.