Luzern’s founding is lost in history. The town’s name probably derives from the Celtic word lozzeria, meaning “a settlement on marshy ground”, and that’s more or less all Luzern was in the mid-eighth century when the small Benedictine monastery which existed here is thought to have come under the control of the Alsatian Abbey of Murbach. Nothing concrete is known about Luzern until 1178, when an abbot established a lay order at the Kapellkirche (now St Peter’s Chapel), indicating that quite a substantial settlement must have existed in the area. Around 1220, the opening of the Gotthard pass further south created new impetus for growth, with merchants and travellers setting sail from Luzern for the long trans-Alpine journey (the first lakeside road was built only in 1865).

Eyeing the prosperity flowing into the communities on the northern side of the new pass, Rudolf of Habsburg bought Luzern outright from Murbach in 1291, intending to subdue it and channel its profits into the imperial coffers. At the same time, though, the peasant farmers of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden on the eastern shores of the lake had formed a pact of mutual defence at Rütli against the Austrian threat, and after some instability, Luzern joined them in 1332, the first major city to do so. This pact was the beginning of the Swiss Confederation, which survives today. Pro-Habsburg attempts to undermine the pact continued to flourish; one legend from the time tells of a boy who overheard conspirators meeting in the marketplace at Unter der Egg, on the riverside. The plotters caught the boy and forced him to swear under oath that he would tell no living soul what he had heard them discuss, so the boy ran straight to a nearby guildhall and interrupted a confederate meeting to tell his whole story to the tiled stove in the corner of the room. The confederates “overheard” the boy’s tale, and so were able to thwart the plot. (The stove which stands today in the corner of the restaurant Metzgern on Weinmarkt is allegedly the self-same one). The defeat of Austrian forces in the Battle of Sempach in 1386 severed the Habsburg claim to Luzern, and the city’s elders reinforced their independence by building the Musegg fortifications, which survive today.

Luzern remained Catholic throughout the Reformation and, like much of the country, was ruled by patrician families up until the late eighteenth-century revolutions. The early nineteenth-century quarrels in politics and religion led to civil war, with Luzern at the heart of the Catholic rebel Sonderbund– an association which, after Confederate forces had reasserted their control in 1847, led to Luzern being passed over for the choice of federal capital.

By this time, though, tourism to Switzerland had already begun, and with

Luzern’s founding is lost in history. The town’s name probably derives from the Celtic word lozzeria, meaning “a settlement on marshy ground”, and that’s more or less all Luzern was in the mid-eighth century when the small Benedictine monastery which existed here is thought to have come under the control of the Alsatian Abbey of Murbach. Nothing concrete is known about Luzern until 1178, when an abbot established a lay order at the Kapellkirche (now St Peter’s Chapel), indicating that quite a substantial settlement must have existed in the area. Around 1220, the opening of the Gotthard pass further south created new impetus for growth, with merchants and travellers setting sail from Luzern for the long trans-Alpine journey (the first lakeside road was built only in 1865).

Eyeing the prosperity flowing into the communities on the northern side of the new pass, Rudolf of Habsburg bought Luzern outright from Murbach in 1291, intending to subdue it and channel its profits into the imperial coffers. At the same time, though, the peasant farmers of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden on the eastern shores of the lake had formed a pact of mutual defence at Rütli against the Austrian threat, and after some instability, Luzern joined them in 1332, the first major city to do so. This pact was the beginning of the Swiss Confederation, which survives today. Pro-Habsburg attempts to undermine the pact continued to flourish; one legend from the time tells of a boy who overheard conspirators meeting in the marketplace at Unter der Egg, on the riverside. The plotters caught the boy and forced him to swear under oath that he would tell no living soul what he had heard them discuss, so the boy ran straight to a nearby guildhall and interrupted a confederate meeting to tell his whole story to the tiled stove in the corner of the room. The confederates “overheard” the boy’s tale, and so were able to thwart the plot. (The stove which stands today in the corner of the restaurant Metzgern on Weinmarkt is allegedly the self-same one). The defeat of Austrian forces in the Battle of Sempach in 1386 severed the Habsburg claim to Luzern, and the city’s elders reinforced their independence by building the Musegg fortifications, which survive today.

Luzern remained Catholic throughout the Reformation and, like much of the country, was ruled by patrician families up until the late eighteenth-century revolutions. The early nineteenth-century quarrels in politics and religion led to civil war, with Luzern at the heart of the Catholic rebel Sonderbund – an association which, after Confederate forces had reasserted their control in 1847, led to Luzern being passed over for the choice of federal capital.

By this time, though, tourism to Switzerland had already begun, and with the cessation of hostilities Luzern became a focus for the increasing tide of foreign visitors, both for its own lakeside location, and as the gateway to the high Alps. In 1834, the mid-thirteenth-century Hofbrücke, which had linked the Hofkirche to the Old Town across a now-vanished marshy inlet, was torn down in favour of redeveloping the city centre and creating new lakeside promenades. Many old buildings and part of the medieval fortifications – with over forty towers and gates – were destroyed. The railway arrived in 1859, and over the following fifty years, Luzern’s population quadrupled to forty thousand, with tourism, then as now, the mainstay of the city’s economy. All through the twentieth century, Luzern has clung tight onto its conservative, traditional roots: these days, the city is renowned as the heartland of Switzerland’s SVP, an extreme right-wing political party with a strident and increasingly successful set of anti-immigration, anti-EU policies.