Toggenburg Succession

Toggenburg Succession, in Swiss history, a long territorial dispute that gave rise to the Old Zürich War (1436–50) and the Second Villmergen War (1712). In the Middle Ages the counts of Toggenburg, as vassals of the German kings or Holy Roman emperors, held extensive possessions in what is now northeastern Switzerland. When the male line of the dynasty died out in 1436, it left undecided the question of who would rule a large territory that was bounded to the west and to the southwest by Zürich, by Schwyz, and by Glarus—all three of which were members of the Swiss Confederation—and to the southeast by lands held by two of the three leagues later known collectively as the Grisons. While the southeasternmost part of the territory was taken over by the newly formed Zehngerichtenbund (League of Ten Jurisdictions), the rest of the inheritance was open to dispute: most of the countship was assigned to the lords of Raron (in distant Valais); but the dependencies nearest to Lake Zürich and a tract to the east of them were promptly invaded by the men of Schwyz—to the fierce resentment of Zürich, which wanted at least to control the shore of the lake. A meeting of the Swiss confederates in 1437 authorized Schwyz and Glarus to retain nearly all the occupied zone; Zürich’s rejection of this settlement led to the Old Zürich War, in which Schwyz, and later other members of the confederation, successfully opposed Zürich.

The main countship of Toggenburg, having been sold by the Raron to the prince-abbot of Sankt Gallen in 1468, was twice again a ground for discord: during the Swiss Reformation a period of anti-Catholic rule in the 1520s was followed, in 1531, by a restoration of the abbot’s regime, subject to the toleration of Protestant observances in Toggenburg; and in 1712 the abbot Leodegar Bürgisser’s efforts to reassert his traditional rights over Toggenburg in order to strengthen Swiss Catholicism provoked the leading Protestant confederates, Zürich and Bern, to undertake the Toggenburg (or Second Villmergen) War, in which they quickly defeated the Abbot’s five Catholic supporters, Luzern, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, and Zug. The final settlement, under which the ancient Toggenburg inheritance was divided between the secularized canton of Sankt Gallen and Graubünden (the Grisons areas), came in 1802–03, with Napoleon I’s Act of Mediation for a new Switzerland of 19 cantons.