Walser
Nation | Active
976 CE to 2057 CE
The Walser are the speakers of the Walser German dialects, a variety of Highest Alemannic.
They inhabit the Alps of Switzerland and Liechtenstein, as well as on the fringes of Italy and Austria.
The Walser people are named after the Wallis (Valais), the uppermost Rhône River valley, where they settle from roughly the tenth century in the late phase of the migration of the Alamanni, crossing from the Bernese Oberland; because of linguistic differences among the Walser dialects, it is supposed that there were two independent immigration routes.From the upper Wallis, they begin to spread south, west and east between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the so-called Walser migrations (Walserwanderungen).
The causes of these further population movements, the last wave of settlement in the higher valleys of the Alps, are not entirely clear.
A provocative series of events not too far from the Walser settlements may have precipitated the migration.
In 1307, Knights Templar in France, under severe persecution, are arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and then burned at the stake by King Philip IV of France.
The Alps provide an ideal and easily defended refuge, a place already settled by other Templars in a town named after Jerusalem: Sion, Switzerland, the capital of Valais, the namesake region of the Walser.
This wholesale evacuation of Templars likely has the effect of displacing localized Walser settlements.
Walser legend asserts that the migration and subsequent "free man" status was granted expressly because of their association with Templar resettlement.
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The Three Leagues is the alliance of the League of God's House, the League of the Ten Jurisdictions and the Grey League in 1471, which will lead eventually to the formation of the Swiss canton of Graubünden.
The current settlement of the Davos area started back in High Middle Ages with the immigration of Rhaeto-Romans.
Most of the lands of Graubünden had been part of the Roman province Raetia in 15 BCE.
The area later became part of the lands of the Bishopric of Chur.
A mile-high town comprising two villages, Davos-Platz and Davos-Dorf, in present Grisons canton, eastern Switzerland, it is first mentioned in written records in 1213 as Tavaus.
The barons of Vaz had allowed German-speaking Walser colonists to settle from about 1280, and conceded them extensive self-administration rights, causing Davos to become the largest Walser settlement area in eastern Switzerland.
The League of the Ten Jurisdictions, the last of the Three Leagues founded during the Middle Ages in what is now Canton Graubünden of Switzerland, was founded in Davos in 1436.