Old Swiss Confederacy

The Old Swiss Confederacy existed from 1291 to 1798, forming at the end of the thirteenth century from a nucleus of rural communes in central Switzerland; the Federal Charter of 1291 among the communes of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden has been regarded as the confederacy's founding document since 1889. A loose confederation of independent small states holding imperial immediacy within the Holy Roman Empire, it had no single official capital, though its confederation council, the Tagsatzung, moved between locations until Zurich permanently took the chair, called the Vorort, during the sixteenth century, with Baden serving as its meeting seat. The confederacy grew from three founding cantons to eight by the fourteenth century, ten by 1481, twelve by 1501 and thirteen cantons by 1513, and it also controlled a range of associated territories, condominiums and subject lands beyond the cantons themselves. It fell to a French invasion in 1798, after which it was replaced by the short-lived Helvetic Republic.