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ABSTRACT
The evolution of the Swiss Confederation from a local alliance among Imperial estates to a national entity on the European stage can be mapped by tracking the way that federal business was archived from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. The original Diet (Tagsatzung) established after the allied cantons gained shared territories in the Aargau in the 1420s lacked the personnel or institutional identity necessary to undertake any archival activity. As the Confederation gained institutional definition and became a regional player in the politics of the Holy Roman Empire and of Central Europe, however, documentary practices became increasingly routinized, and stable federal collections began forming in parallel in the archives of the leading cantons. Consisting of durable representations of ongoing debates and negotiations and preserved in documents (Abschiede) that were circulated differentially depending on the matters and parties involved, the emerging confederal archive was distributed in that no single location possessed a complete version, and imaginary in that contemporaries regarded it as a comprehensive unity despite its very real physical and material fragmentation. In the later sixteenth century, a separate archival collection reflecting the Confederation’s shared business emerged in the administrative centre of Baden (Aargau), reflecting the consolidating identity of Confederation as it moved out of the Empire’s orbit. Repeated efforts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to complete and protect this collection referred to it as an archive despite its unusual characteristics. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, projects to create a Swiss national archive, either virtually or in print, culminated in the printed Eidgenössische Abschiede that created a documentary record of a Swiss state since the thirteenth century that had never existed historically.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Vinzenz Bartlome, Ariane Huber Hernández, Annkristin Schlichte, Andreas Steigmeier and Andreas Würgler for specific references and discussions about this material, and to the archive and library staff at the Staatsarchiv Aargau, Staatsarchiv Bern and Zentralbibliothek Zürich.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Elliott, “A Europe,” 68–9. Elliott mentions the Dutch Republic in passing, other European republics and confederations not at all.
2. Ibid., 71.
3. The nineteenth-century published collection, the Amtliche Sammlung, is usually abbreviated as EA in Swiss historical literature. On the emergence of the Abschied as a distinct genre around 1450, Jucker, Gesandte, 132–6.
4. In this paper, Baden refers to the Swiss town in the Aargau, never to the German margraviate and town in modern Baden-Württemberg.
5. Head, “Records, Secretaries, and the Information State,” 104–27.
6. Jucker, Gesandte; Würgler, Die Tagsatzung.
7. The two documents, [Hirzel], ‘Vorschlag’ and [Hirzel], ‘Versuch’, were published anonymously. The identification of the author is confirmed by a 1764 manuscript by Salomon Hirzel in the Hirzel family library in the Zurich central library, Zentralbibliothek Zürich [ZBZ], FA Hi 248.1, ‘Projekt eines allgemeinen systematisch-chronologischen Registers der deutschen Abscheide.’
8. For a Swiss perspective on the acquisition of the Aargau, see Sauerländer, “Der Aargau.”
9. As with all Swiss political history, the details are complicated. Peyer, Verfassungsgeschichte, 30–5.
10. Jucker, Gesandte, 73–130. ‘Tagsatzung’ was a term used across the Empire in the fifteenth century for a formal meeting among political estates (lordly or communal). Peter Moraw, “Versuch.” On the Swiss political system in general from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, see Stettler, Die Eidgenossenschaft, and Maissen, Die Geburt.
11. Location of meetings graphed in Würgler, Die Tagsatzung, 192. Concerns about prostitution at the Baden meetings surfaced with some regularity. Ibid., 368–74.
12. Hoegger, Aargau VI, 214.
13. Jucker, Gesandte, 131–6.
14. Jucker, Gesandte, 136–58. Such immediate minutes for the scribe’s consultation do survive as the Manualia of the Tagsatzung from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. Staatsarchiv Aargau [StAAg] AA 2476–2508, dating from 1533 to 1711.
15. The term ‘persistent representation’ comes from Yeo, “Concepts.”
16. Würgler, Die Tagsatzung, 66–7.
17. Jucker, Gesandte, 136.
18. The distribution of locations in Würgler, Die Tagsatzung, 187–93. Of 1765 Tagsatzungen after 1470, nearly half (794) took place in Baden. Nearly all general Tagsatzung from 1535 to 1712 took place in Baden.
19. An extended dispute in the late 1600s over this office reveals the patterns and expectations. Staatsarchiv Bern [StABe], A V 850 (Badener Bücher, K), 555–684.
20. Financial reviews, known as a Jahrrechnungstag, met in Frauenfeld for the Thurgau and in various locations for the Ticino and other bailiwicks; matters of general interest could also be discussed. The EA collected in Frauenfeld, mostly from after 1712, are currently inaccessible during reorganization by Dr Annkristin Schlichte, who provided valuable information; no collection appears to survive in the Ticino (Archivio di Stato Ticinese, https://www3.ti.ch/DECS/dcsu/ac/asti/cf/index.php, accessed May 11, 2022).
21. See Würgler, Die Tagsatzung, 74.
22. Würgler, Die Tagsatzung, 283–93.
23. A letter by archivist Paul Schweizer from 1890 in a volume of Instruktionen collected by the Hirzel family explains the Zurich pattern. ZBZ FA Hi 11, inside front cover. Zurich later bound its drafts beginning from 1490 (Staatsarchiv Zürich, B VIII, vols. 1–72); Bern archived Instruktionen from 1527 to 1798 (StABe A IV, vols. 189–231).
24. Major collections are found in ZBZ, Neuere Handschriften and Familienarchive; at the Berner Burgerbibliothek, Familienarchive and Mss.h.h.; and the Acta Helvetica in the Sammlung Zurlauben, held at the Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek in Aarau.
25. Hirzel, “Versuch,” 50.
26. That is, the EA formed a separate provenance, in modern terms, from the County of Baden’s administrative archive. Additionally, most charters pertaining to the county remained in the local bailiff’s Schlossarchiv until the later eighteenth century, physically separate from the Landschreiber’s chancellery archive.
27. StAAg AA 2310, 268 r-v.
28. The transaction was protocolled in several Abschiede, which are summarized in Amtliche Sammlung, 6.1.2, 1289. On the architectural history, Hoegger, Aargau VI, 214–18, although it is not entirely clear which building is involved. Thanks to Baden city archivist Dr Andreas Stegmeier for his assistance.
29. Amtliche Sammlung 6.2.2, 1921. The dispute over the office continued for some years; see StABE A V 850 Vol. K, pp. 589fff.
30. StAAg AA 2320: Abschied, July 1697, ff. 104 v-105 r.
31. StAAg AA 2320: Abschied, July 1697, f. 105 r.
32. Friedrich, Der Lange Arm, esp. 252–94. The Dutch Republic preserved decisions in a series known as the Resolutiën, whose archival history appears to have some overlapping features with the Swiss EA. Thomassen, Instrumenten, esp. 2: 54ff.
33. From the original Abschied at StAAg 2328, f. 366 r-v; also Amtliche Sammlung 7.1, 992.
34. The inventory is StAAg AA 2250b; for the repeated calls to register, or simply obtain, relevant Abschiede for the collection in Baden, Amtliche Sammlung, 7.1, 92–93.
35. StABe A V 848 Vol. H, 341–6.
36. StAAg AA 2263–2265.
37. StAAg AA 2251. A copy was prepared in 1787 for the Zurich archive but is now back in Baden (AA 2259). This inventory was the direct basis for at least two ‘transfer inventories’ now in Zurich: ZBZ NH Msc G 67 (1784), from Salomon Escher to Samuel Rudolf Jenner from Bern; ZBZ FA Rahn 1302 (1794), from Jenner to Salomon Rahn.
38. StAAg AA 2253, Loci communes Gemein Eidgenößischer Abscheiden, Tomus 1, 3.
39. StAAg AA 2251, 3.
40. The house cost 2600 gulden, with 400 more appropriated for improvements. Details and confirmation in StAAg AA 2311, 140 (May 1668).
41. Hoegger, Argau VI, 239.
42. Hoegger, Aargau VI, 217. A timeline of the costs and negotiations in StABe A V 860 Vol. V, 191, followed by documentation on remodelling carried out by Franz Anton Schwartz, the Baumeister of the small neighbouring town of Bremgarten, for 3441 Gulden.
43. Würgler, “Boten und Gesandte,” 289.
44. Head, “Documents,” 918.
45. Critical perspectives on the massive 19th century Amtliche Sammlung in Jucker, Gesandte, 33–72; and Würgler, Die Tagsatzung, 64–79.
46. Hirzel, “Versuch,” 54.
47. Hirzel, “Vorschlag,” 78.
48. Hirzel’s proposal for the Zurich Abschiede, ZBZ FA Hi 241.1, was in preservation and not accessible at the time this article was researched.
49. Hirzel, “Vorschlag,” 68.
50. Ibid., 79.
51. See Hirzel, “Versuch,” 37, with the remarkable line: ‘Urkunden heissen überhaupt alle Beweise von geschehenen Handlungen.’
52. Hirzel, “Versuch,” 50.
53. Jucker, Gesandte, 35.
54. See Würgler, Die Tagsatzung, 67–72. One of the project’s editors, Joseph Kopp, published a volume of federal charters in 1835; Kopp, Urkunden. Projects to publish charters flourished in most cantons as well.
55. The Amtliche Sammlung was published in 8 parts and 21 volumes over more than 50 years, with the first volume reworked after the civil war of 1848.
56. A critical analysis of what it meant for an early modern monarch to be ‘fully informed’ in Brendecke, Imperium.
57. On Simancas and Philip’s archival network, see Bouza Alvarez, Del Escribano, chapter 3; and Grebe, Akten, 393–436.
58. Head, Making Archives, 170–4.
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Randolph C. Head
Randolph C. Head is Professor of the Graduate Division in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside. He has published extensively on archival history in early modern Europe (including Making Archives in Early Modern Europe, 2018) and on the history of Switzerland (including A Concise History of Switzerland, 2013). Recently, he has concentrated on how archival theory developed by archivists, such as the records continuum model, can enrich historians’ work. His projects have been supported by the Newberry Library and National Endowment for the Humanities, by the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, and by the Swiss National Science Foundation, among other funders.