This formed a rare union of rural and urban communes, all of which enjoyed imperial immediacy in the Holy Roman Empire.

Territories of the confederacy came to be known collectively as Schweiz or Schweizerland (Schwytzerland in contemporary spelling), with the English Switzerland beginning during the mid-16th century.

King Rudolf I added large amounts of territory in Switzerland and Swabia to his domain, and sieged down Bern in 1289 to enforce imperial taxes.

Since 1889, the Federal Charter of 1291 among the rural communes of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden has been considered the founding document of the confederacy.

This union of rural and urban communes, which enjoyed the status of imperial immediacy within the Holy Roman Empire, was engendered by pressure from Habsburg dukes and kings who had ruled much of the land.

In several battles with Habsburg armies, the Swiss were victorious; they conquered the rural areas of Glarus and Zug, which became members of the confederacy.

In the original 3 cantons, citizens all held equal rights, but in the newly acquired urban cities, power was in the hands of the wealthy Burgomeisters.

Their perfection of the Pike Square made them excellent defensive warriors in their home mountain terrain, and they became highly sought after mercenaries throughout Europe (ex Swiss Guard).

Individual cantons concluded pacts with Fribourg, Appenzell, Schaffhausen, the abbot and the city of St. Gallen, Biel, Rottweil, Mulhouse and others.

In the Swabian War against Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, the Swiss were victorious and exempted from imperial legislation.

The associated cities of Basel and Schaffhausen joined the confederacy as a result of that conflict, and Appenzell followed suit in 1513 as the thirteenth member.

[10] Zürich, Bern, Basel, Schaffhausen and associates Biel, Mulhouse, Neuchâtel, Geneva and the city of St. Gallen became Protestant; other members of the confederation and the Valais remained Catholic.

At the Peace of Westphalia, the Swiss delegation was granted formal recognition of the confederacy as a state independent of the Holy Roman Empire.

Growing social differences and an increasing absolutism in the city cantons during the Ancien Régime led to local popular revolts.

True reform, however, was impossible; the individual interests of the thirteen members were too diverse, and the absolutist cantonal governments resisted all attempts at confederation-wide administration.

In the Pfaffenbrief, a treaty of 1370 among six of the eight members (Glarus and Bern did not participate) forbidding feuds and denying clerical courts jurisdiction over the confederacy, the cantons for the first time used the term Eidgenossenschaft.

The city-states of Fribourg and Solothurn wanted to join the confederacy, but were mistrusted by the central Swiss rural cantons.

The compromise by the Tagsatzung in the Stanser Verkommnis restored order and assuaged the rural cantons' complaints, with Fribourg and Solothurn accepted into the confederation.

[8] While the treaty restricted freedom of assembly (many skirmishes arose from unauthorised expeditions by soldiers from the Burgundian Wars), it reinforced agreements amongst the cantons in the earlier Sempacherbrief and Pfaffenbrief.

The Catholic cantons were excluded from administering the condominiums in the Aargau, the Thurgau and the Rhine valley; in their place, Bern became co-sovereign of these regions.

Bern initially did not participate in the administration of some of the eastern condominiums, as it had no part in their conquest and its interests were focused more on the western border.