History of the Alps

Most of the local Gallic tribes allied themselves with the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War, for the duration of which Rome lost control over most of Northern Italy.

With the division of the Roman Empire and the collapse of its Western part in the fourth and fifth centuries, power relations in the Alpine region reverted to their local dimensions.

The German emperors, who received the imperial investiture from the Pope in Rome between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, had to cross the Alps along with their entourages.

For "mainstream" history, the Frankish and later the Habsburg empire, the Alps had strategic importance as an obstacle, not as a landscape, and the Alpine passes have consequently had great significance militarily.

[4][5] Not until the final breakup of the Carolingian Empire in the 10th and 11th centuries is it possible to trace out the local history of different parts of the Alps, notably with the High Medieval Walser migrations.

The French historian Fernand Braudel, in his famous volume on Mediterranean civilisation, describes the Alps as "an exceptional range of mountains from the point of view of resources, collective disciplines, the quality of its human population and the number of good roads.

In a few regions of the northern slope of the Alps, cattle farming became increasingly oriented toward long-range markets and substituted agriculture completely.

In the case of the Western Alps (excluding the part from the chain of Mont Blanc to the Simplon Pass, which followed the fortunes of the Valais), a prolonged struggle for control took place between the feudal lords of Savoy, the Dauphiné and Provence.

In 1349 the Dauphiné fell to France, while in 1388 the county of Nice passed from Provence to the house of Savoy, which also then held Piedmont as well as other lands on the Italian side of the Alps.

The final act in this long-continued struggle took place in 1860, when France obtained by cession the rest of the county of Nice and also Savoy, thus remaining sole ruler on the western slope of the Alps.

From the High Middle Ages and throughout the Early Modern era, the political history of the Eastern Alps can be considered almost totally in terms of the advance or retreat of the house of Habsburg.

They won the duchy of Austria with Styria in 1282, Carinthia and Carniola in 1335, Tirol in 1363, and the Vorarlberg in bits from 1375 to 1523, not to speak of minor "rectifications" of frontiers on the northern slope of the Alps.

In 1797 they obtained Venetia proper, in 1803 the secularized bishoprics of Trento and Brixen (as well as that of Salzburg, more to the north), besides the Valtellina region, and in 1815 the Bergamasque valleys, while the Milanese had belonged to them since 1535.

But in 1859 they lost to the house of Savoy both the Milanese and the Bergamasca, and in 1866 Venetia proper also, so that the Trentino was then their chief possession on the southern slope of the Alps.

This new interest is also reflected in literature, most notably by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s best-selling romantic novel "Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloise" (1761).

[11] This process amplified the imbalanced distribution of the population within the Alps, because the urban centres at lower altitudes experienced strong growth and clearly became the most important dynamic localities during the twentieth century.

First of all, the agriculture sector started to lose importance, and sought to survive by introducing specialised crops in valley bottoms and reinforcing cattle-raising at higher altitudes.

On the one hand, activities such as iron manufacturing, which had become prominent during the early modern era, reached their limits due to transportation costs and the increasing scale of business operations.

[13] On the other hand, at the turn of the twentieth century, new opportunities emerged for the manufacturing sector, due largely to electric power, one among the main innovations of the second industrial revolution.

The traditional routes and activities began to face strong competition from the construction of railway lines and tunnels such as the Semmering (1854), the Brenner (1867), the Fréjus/Mont-Cenis (1871), the Gotthard (1882), the Simplon (1906) and the Tauern (1909).

In general, it is noteworthy that even if modern industry – tourism, the railway and later the highway system – represented opportunities for the Alps, complementing its traditional openness to new challenges, it also produced negative consequences, such as the human impact on the environment.

Like other parts of Europe, the Alpine region was affected by the formation of the nation states that produced tensions between various groups and had consequences for border areas.

In the nineteenth century, there had been a tension between the romantic advocates of the "sacredness" of the Alpine peaks (such as John Ruskin), and modern mountain climbers (such as Leslie Stephen), who promoted the notion of the Alps as the "playground of Europe".

In the twentieth century, the mountains acquired a clearly positive, iconic, status as places unsullied by undesirable urban influences such as pollution, noise and so on.

[18] The fascination that the Alps exerted on the British has to be related to the general increase in charm and appeal of this mountain range during the eighteenth century.

With Thomas Cook in particular, the Alps appeared, as early as 1861, in the catalog of tourist offers and were instrumental in the establishment of a "truly international industry" of tourism.

[20] The conquest of the Alps by British tourists was achieved along with their domestication and with the passionate participation of local, regional and national élites, be they political, economic or cultural.

In fact, the British continued to view winter sports in particular (such as skiing, skating, bobsleigh, curling) as significant grounds for justifying their travel and their perpetuation of a unique culture.

The personalities of Gavin de Beer and Arnold Lunn represent this attitude through a prolific interpretation of this mountain range from every possible perspective.

As a result of the complicated history of the Alpine region, the native language and the national feelings of the inhabitants do not always correspond to the current international borders.