Events in the Italian Wars have helped…
September 1499 CE
Events in the Italian Wars have helped bring the Swabian War to an end.
The French king Louis XII is trying to bring the Duchy of Milan under his control.
As long as the Swabian War continues, the Milanese ruler Ludovico il Moro—whose niece Bianca Maximilian had married in 1493—cannot expect help from either Swiss mercenaries or Maximilian, and thus his envoy Galeazzo Visconti tries to mediate between the Swiss and the king.
The French delegation at the Tagsatzung, the federal diet and war council of the Swiss, try to prevent any agreement for the same reason.
The Milanese delegation prevail and succeeds in persuading both sides to moderate their demands.
Finally, a peace treaty between Maximilian I and the Swiss is signed in Basel on September 22, 1499.
The peace treaty carefully plays down the entire conflict from the "imperial war" that Maximilian had tried to make it by declaring the ban over the Confederacy to what it actually has been: a war between two equal members of the empire (Imperial estate, or Reichsstände), namely the House of Habsburg and the Swiss Confederacy.
The document refers to Maximilian only as "duke of Habsburg", not as "king of the Germans" or even "Holy Roman Emperor".
With the Peace of Basel, the relations between the Old Swiss Confederacy and the empire return to the status quo ante from before the Diet of Worms in 1495.
The imperial ban is dropped silently.
Maximilian has to accept the refusal of the cantons and to abandon implicitly the Habsburg claims on their territories, acknowledging their independence.
Consequently, the ten members of the Swiss Confederacy remain exempt from the jurisdiction of the Reichskammergericht.
The Swiss henceforth exercises also the high justice over the Thurgau.
The war had not caused any territorial changes, except in the area around Schaffhausen, where the city has succeeded to assert its hegemony over some places that had formerly belonged to the Bishop of Constance.