During the 1290s and into the 1300s, while the imperial throne remained vacant, revolts continued against symbols of Habsburg power. In 1315, at Morgarten near Schwyz, an army of peasants from the newly formed Confederation clashed with and defeated a force of Austrian knights sent to quell the trouble. Ludwig of Habsburg, the new emperor, was forced to concede yet more privileges to the three cantons, this time guaranteeing them freedom from any threat of imperial intervention. Instead, the Habsburgs shifted their attention to the rapidly growing market town of Luzern, transport hub for the journey to and from the Gotthard, and tried to force it to take up arms against its lakeside neighbours. Rather than submit to Habsburg domination, Luzern instead threw in its lot with the self-dubbed “Schwyzers”, and joined the Confederation in 1332. Unable to bring the Swiss to heel, Habsburg bailiffs withdrew altogether from the region after about 1350 and left the hard-nosed peasants to their own devices. The local economy flourished, centred on the Gotthard Pass.

The feudal system that had been instituted by the Franks gradually began to collapse under pressure from an increasingly prosperous and ambitious free peasantry, who formed an array of democratic rural communes. This form of direct rural democracy went hand in hand with the rise in the power of urban workers: Zürich, which had already experienced a revolution by its guilds that had overthrown the city’s ruling nobility, joined the Confederation in 1351 to protect its trade interests against a resurgence in power of the nobles. Very soon afterwards, tiny Glarus and Zug were roped into the Confederation in order to secure overland transport routes; and then Bern, which was looking to expand its territory westwards, joined in 1353 to defuse the possibility of attack from by the east by the increasingly powerful Confederation.

Suddenly, in a little over sixty years, the insignificant Schwyzers – born out of a pact of farming folk – were able to call on an army of over 100,000, and had control of a large swathe of former Habsburg territory across the northern foothills of the Alps. Similar leagues of alliance among ordinary farmers in impenetrable Rhaetia to the east were coalescing into an organized opposition to noble Habsburg rule. While blue-blooded Habsburg armies swept victorious through the great cities of Swabia, in southern Germany, the very same armies experienced crushing defeats in Switzerland in the face of the increasingly sophisticated Confederate soldiery, most notably at Sempach in 1386 and Näfels in 1388 – both names resonant even today for the patriotic Swiss. Following their successes, the eight cantons formed an independent state within the Habsburg empire that was ruled – uniquely – by city-based burghers and merchants and founded on the principles of tight-knit social co-operation … this at a time when elsewhere across Europe kings, princes and noble dynasties held unchallenged sway.