A constitution of co-owners: the common lordships and their rulers

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The Italian bailiwicks were governed under a legal model that has no exact modern equivalent. The ruling cantons held them as joint owners, in a relationship that the German sources call Gemeine Herrschaft (common lordship) and the Italian sources baliaggio comune. Each canton exercised its share of sovereignty in turn, through a governor it appointed, while the body of co-owners collectively heard appeals, audited the accounts and issued general ordinances. The subject population had no share in that sovereignty. It kept its own communal institutions and its own statutes, but it could not vote in the bodies that governed it and could appeal only to the rulers themselves.¹

The common lordship as a legal form

The common lordships were the most important shared institution of the Old Confederation apart from the Tagsatzung (the Diet of the cantonal envoys). North of the Alps they included the County of Baden, the Freie Ämter, Thurgau, the Rheintal and Sargans, all acquired in the fifteenth century.² In each case the ruling cantons stood in the position of the former territorial lord: they held the high jurisdiction, the regalian rights (tolls, mining, hunting and fishing rights, the right to coin money), military command and the power to legislate for the territory as a whole. What they held in common was therefore a bundle of lordly rights, which the Confederates administered much as a group of heirs would administer an undivided estate. Decisions required a majority of the co-owners, revenue was divided in agreed shares, and every co-owner had a turn in appointing the manager.

For the Italian bailiwicks the model produced three distinct regimes. The Leventina was a bailiwick of Uri alone and was governed through the institutions of Uri: the Landsgemeinde elected the landfogto, the government of Uri heard appeals and the valley's own council dealt with Altdorf. Bellinzona, the Riviera and Blenio were governed by Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden, which rotated the offices among themselves. Lugano, Locarno, Mendrisio and the Vallemaggia were governed by the twelve cantons, which sent their delegates to an annual meeting in Lugano and Locarno, the sindacato, to transact the common business.³ Because Appenzell had no share, and because Obwalden and Nidwalden took turns for Unterwalden, a full cycle of landfogti in the four lake bailiwicks lasted twenty-four years.

The Tagsatzung and the recesses

The Tagsatzung was the forum in which the cantons coordinated their policy, and much of the governance of the Italian bailiwicks can be followed in its recesses (Abschiede), the written records of what the envoys had agreed and what they had to report back to their governments.⁴ The recesses were published in the nineteenth century in the Amtliche Sammlung der älteren Eidgenössischen Abschiede, which remains the principal printed source for the constitutional history of the common lordships.⁵ They show how questions of the south reached the Diet: disputes between the ruling cantons over appointments and revenue, complaints from subject communities against a landfogto, conflicts with Milan over grain, tolls and the extradition of criminals, and, after the Reformation, confessional disputes.

The Diet was a meeting of ambassadors bound by instructions. It could agree, but it could not impose. For the subject lands this meant that every significant change in the law required the assent of twelve governments, each of which had its own interests and its own political rhythm. The legal order of the bailiwicks was therefore remarkably stable: because it was difficult to change anything, the rulers preferred to confirm what they had found. The price of that stability was slowness. An abuse that had become notorious could persist for decades if one or two cantons benefited from it.

Notes

1. Holenstein, "Gemeine Herrschaften" (above); Hans Conrad Peyer, Verfassungsgeschichte der alten Schweiz (Zürich: Schulthess, 1978). ↩
2. Holenstein, "Gemeine Herrschaften" (above), which lists Baden (eight cantons), the Freie Ämter, Thurgau and Sargans (seven cantons without Bern) and the Rheintal (seven cantons without Bern, with Appenzell), and dates the first common lordship over Baden and the Freie Ämter to the conquest of the Aargau in 1415. ↩
3. Andreas Würgler, "Diète fédérale", in DHS, version of 25 September 2014, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/010076/, according to which the syndicate of the Italian bailiwicks held its sessions in Lugano and Locarno from 1513; Negro, "Lugano (pieve, baliaggio, distretto)" (above) ("Ogni anno i rappresentanti dei 12 cant. si riunivano a L. per tenervi il sindacato"). ↩
4. Würgler, "Diète fédérale" (above), on envoys voting according to their instructions, decisions ad referendum and the recesses as summaries of the deliberations; Andreas Würgler, Die Tagsatzung der Eidgenossen. Politik, Kommunikation und Symbolik einer repräsentativen Institution im europäischen Kontext (1470–1798) (Epfendorf: Bibliotheca Academica, 2013). ↩
5. Amtliche Sammlung der älteren Eidgenössischen Abschiede; Catherine Santschi, "Recessi", in DSS, version of 3 May 2012, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/008955/ (German: "Abschiede"), on the printed edition of the summaries (regesti) of the recesses of the Old Confederation, published under the direction of the Federal Archives from 1852, with a reference to A. Häberle, "Die amtliche Sammlung der älteren eidgenössischen Abschiede", Der Geschichtsfreund 113 (1960), pp. 5–80. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of October 2026.