The Battle of Marignano was a disaster for the Swiss Confederation. But a salutary one: Afterward, they waged war only for foreign masters, no longer for themselves.

Even that morning, it seemed impossible that the Swiss would rush into battle a few hours later. Certainly, the people of Central Switzerland were pushing for war, but the people of Zurich and Zug were hesitant, and the people of Bern, Fribourg, and Solothurn had long since left anyway. They were probably already at home with their wives and children.

Days of chaos in Milan. It was September 13, 1515, and even though it was a glorious autumn day, as everyone who had been there later assured us, no Swiss would remember this day fondly. The Confederate war council had been meeting in the castle for hours, where the captains were unable to reach a consensus, while outside, their troops were also holding a warriors' meeting and were just as unable to reach a consensus.

"Now or never!" cried the war party. "What for? We already have peace," grumbled the pacifists. "What are we doing in Lombardy?" replied the isolationists, who urged territorial moderation.

In fact, the Swiss had recently negotiated a peace treaty with the French that seemed extremely favorable: If the Swiss were willing to give up Lombardy as their protectorate, Francis I, the French king, would pay them 700,000 crowns. A gigantic sum when converted: It would be equivalent to about half a billion francs today. And at the same time, a ridiculous sum, considering that Lombardy was one of the richest regions in the world at the time. In any case, the Swiss were never happy with it.

In 1512, they had conquered Lombardy. It was a sensation that terrified half of Europe—not because the Swiss were capable of it; people had grown accustomed to that, especially since they were considered the toughest and most brutal warriors of the era. The manner of it was astonishing. As if they were dealing with complete novices, the Swiss annihilated the French in a mere three weeks. They drove them out of territory that the French had already considered part of their kingdom.

When they repeated their success a year later, in 1513, decisively defeating the French at the Battle of Novara, contemporaries began to wonder what else these Swiss Confederates had planned for Italy. Intellectuals like Niccolò Machiavelli considered the Swiss Confederates the new Romans and expected them to take over all of Italy.

He was wrong. Even though the Swiss seemed like a superpower to their contemporaries—and probably behaved like one, the nightmare was over shortly afterward. It ended in Marignano.

This by no means means that the Swiss Confederation didn't try to become the new Romans: When they took over Lombardy in 1512, they initially behaved like ordinary imperialists—there were even those who recommended declaring the region a new canton. But as is the case when something had to be decided in Switzerland: no binding decision could be expected within 25 years when 13 sovereign, stubborn, and jealous cantons were involved.

The Swiss ostensibly installed an incompetent puppet duke, with power resting with their troops in Milan, for which they even charged outrageous sums. But they soon lost interest. The payments they had saddled the Italians with for "military aid" never arrived, maintaining law and order was expensive, Milan's highly developed industry failed to deliver what had been hoped for, the artisans sat idle, and the peasants preferred to eat what they had produced themselves rather than send it over the Gotthard to the barbarians.

It is therefore not surprising that France had always maintained its territorial claims, all the more so after a new king, Francis I, ascended the throne in January 1515. Only 21 years old, but ambitious and impatient, as if he had been waiting for his moment for centuries, he considered Julius Caesar his role model and viewed Lombardy as his Gaul.

Soon he stood before Milan with 45,000 troops, where the Swiss Confederation was guarding with only 6,000 soldiers. Although the Tagsatzung immediately mobilized around 30,000 troops, whom it hurried across the Alps in forced marches, their enthusiasm for battle was limited—or rather, it varied from canton to canton.

The people of Uri and Schwyz, who had always advocated southern expansion, were unwilling to give up Lombardy at any price. The western cantons, on the other hand, namely Bern, Solothurn and Fribourg, were more interested in conquering Burgundy or Savoy, and Italy left them cold: "We don't sell cheese, cider or butter in Lombardy," the representative of Solothurn had earlier mocked when the acquisition of Bellinzona was at stake.

Negotiations began. Agreement was reached—or not. While Francis I believed he had struck a deal with the difficult Swiss, and the people of Bern, Solothurn, and Fribourg quickly packed up, knowing the ink wasn't dry yet, the people of Central Switzerland did everything they could to thwart the "peace treaty."

Until the morning of September 13th.

"Now or never!" cried the captains and warriors from central Switzerland, but the people of Zurich, Zug, and their allies from eastern Switzerland remained unwavering. It was no use that Cardinal Matthäus Schiner from Valais appeared to persuade the hesitant. Schiner, who would later almost be elected pope, was considered one of the most powerful and shrewd politicians of the era. He gave the speech of his life. Nevertheless, his views were not achieved. The people of Zurich prepared to withdraw.

Suddenly, a soldier rushed into the hall: "By God's five wounds, I hope you die from your chatter!" – which, by the standards of the time, was a tremendous insult: "How long will you continue to deliberate? We'll fight the enemy and stab each other to death!"

"If it's so bad," replied Mayor Markus Röist of Zurich, "why didn't you stay with our people?" But when another warrior, Heini Erb from Uri, appeared shortly afterwards and announced: "The battle has begun!" all the captains jumped up in alarm and rushed to their troops. Even the hesitant Zurichers could no longer stop them; they grabbed their weapons and ran for miles outside the city in search of the enemy. They didn't find him. He was camped on a plain near a small town. The town was called Marignano.

As it later turned out, what was thought to be a French attack was actually faked. It was never proven by whom, but the suspicion was that Cardinal Schiner and a few of his warmongering confidants were behind it, thus breaking the deadlock in the Swiss War Council.

Now events took their course. The Swiss plunged into a battle they should never have dared to attempt. The terrain was too unfavorable—a narrow plain crisscrossed by canals and streams. The balance of power was too unequal: 45,000 French (including 23,000 German mercenaries) faced 30,000 Swiss. The enemy was too well entrenched behind the canals. Moreover, they had brought 74 modern cannons with them, while the Swiss had only eight used guns.

If they had waited a day or two, their allies, the Pope and the Spanish, might have arrived. According to the treaty, they were to contribute cavalry and artillery, which the Swiss were notoriously lacking—perhaps, it must be said, because these allies were considered unreliable. Whatever the case, it was the wrong battle in the wrong place at the wrong time. Especially since, with all the war councils and grassroots warrior communities, it was now late afternoon.

It wasn't until three o'clock in the afternoon that the Swiss attacked – as they always did, spreading terror, as if out of their minds, as if life could only be felt by taking it away from others. First, the "lost band," the youngest and most intrepid fighters, rolled into the French troops, then the rest followed, their pace so rapid that the enemy soon lost track of the earth. It was a kind of medieval blitzkrieg, for which the Swiss were notorious. For a good 200 years, they had been considered virtually unbeatable.

The numbers illustrate how unbeatable: Between 1315 and 1511, a total of 48 military conflicts took place between the Swiss Confederation (and their allies) and the Habsburgs. Of these, the Swiss won 42 and the Habsburgs only 6. However, nothing contributed more to their military glory than the Burgundian Wars (1474–1477), where they massacred Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy and one of the richest and militarily strongest princes in Europe.

The battle came to a standstill. The French, Germans, and Swiss were locked in a war of rage. The struggle could not have become more cruel, bloody, merciless, or hateful as the Swiss now encountered the "Black Bands" – an elite formation of mercenaries from northern Germany and Holland, dressed entirely in black like holy warriors: black armor, black flags, black as death.

Werner Schodeler, a contemporary witness, reports: "That's when the bitter reality began, with the beating, cutting, and stabbing. Although the Black Bands defended themselves bravely, they ultimately had to yield to the superior strength of the Swiss Confederates." About half of the 6,000 Black Bands fell. "It was up to the remaining Landsknechts and the Welsch [French] cavalry to stop the Swiss Confederates. Once again, things became very violent and very difficult."

Who was closer to victory? On the first day, it seemed as if the Swiss Confederation was prevailing, but time was running out. Galeazzo Visconti, the leader of the Milanese cavalry that had supported the Confederation at Marignano, later wrote to Henry VIII, King of England: "Had the Swiss had had two more hours of daylight, they would have won the battle that evening."

It was getting dark. Dusk began at six o'clock, and by eleven o'clock it was pitch black. Nevertheless, the fighting continued until most of the warriors—wedged together for a good seven hours—could no longer stand from exhaustion and lay down on the battlefield. Sometimes very close to one another, not knowing whether it was an enemy or a friend sleeping beside them.

The Swiss held a council of war. Not only had they pushed back the enemy, but their confidence had also been shattered: Was it time to withdraw? Cardinal Schiner advised a return to Milan, where the Swiss could recover under the protection of the city walls and await reinforcements from home.

The majority of the captains refused to hear of breaking off the battle now. The outcome seemed too imminent. The fact that there was hardly any water to drink, that most of the warriors were starving, that no one could sleep, that everyone was terribly cold and shivering, that many were sneaking away: this seemed to have escaped the Confederate captains.

The fact that the French were receiving much better supplies at the same time—and that the king was taking advantage of the darkness to rearrange his many artillery pieces, now that he knew exactly where to hit the Swiss Confederates most effectively—remained a mystery to the captains. They underestimated the young king and the French—and they overestimated their own men. For on the short, cold night of Marignano from September 13 to 14, 1515, the Swiss Confederates' morale collapsed.

When it returned to daylight, the Swiss realized in a fatal way that the French had made better use of the night than they had: A storm of French artillery rained down on them, which they were no longer able to cope with. They were no longer able to penetrate the cannons. At Novara, they had captured some of them and turned them against the enemy. In Marignano, they only captured 15 guns. They continued to rip apart, smash, and tear apart 49.

At some point, the Venetians arrived and drove their cavalry against them. Whether this was the decisive factor or not is debatable, but in any case, the Swiss called for a retreat. "In considerable order," as one Frenchman noted with respect, but nevertheless decimated, depressed, and exhausted.

14,000 dead remained on the field of Marignano, more than half of whom, it is estimated, were Swiss. The Bernese chronicler Valerius Anshelm wrote shortly afterward: "The Swiss Confederation had never lost such a large number of good men, including councilors and mayors, in a battle since its existence."

It was a catastrophe—and that's not the impression of later generations; that's how contemporaries saw it just one day after the battle: "Soon the people at home also learned of the defeat," wrote Ludwig Schwinkhart, a contemporary witness, "and great grief gripped the country, especially those whose friends and relatives had died. Every place had deaths to mourn, no one was exempt."

Was it a turning point? Huldrych Zwingli, the great reformer, had been present in Marignano as a chaplain, and although he had previously repeatedly expressed his criticism of mercenary service and the Swiss expansion into Italy, only now did he return to Switzerland as an uncompromising opponent of the war, either on his own account or for foreign powers.

The defeat at Marignano was of world-historical significance because, thanks in no small part to his anti-mercenary fervor in Zurich, Zwingli soon pushed through the Reformation. It was of world-historical significance because Zwingli rose to become one of the fathers of non-Lutheran, Reformed Protestantism, which was later spread by John Calvin to America. Without Zwingli's specifically republican form of the Reformed Church, history would have been different. Marignano ushered in a new era. But not only in world politics.

For Switzerland, the defeat proved to be one of the most momentous in its history. Not that neutrality was established on the battlefield, as is sometimes claimed, usually as a distorted caricature by those who claim that Switzerland's neutrality was actually granted at the Congress of Vienna in 1815—in a way, without its doing anything. Gracious Great Powers! That's nonsense. Just as it would be nonsense to let everything start with Marignano.

The fact is: shortly after Marignano, no one wanted to know anything about neutrality. The Swiss even prepared for a campaign of retaliation, especially the people of Central Switzerland, who had not forgotten Lombardy for a long time. But war weariness soon proved too pronounced in Switzerland, resistance arose, even uprisings, and the politicians were forced to make peace.

This suited Francis I, who realized that he would benefit more from employing the Swiss Confederation for himself than from waging war against them. In 1516, the "Eternal Peace" was concluded in Freiburg, which was supplemented shortly thereafter, in 1521, with a mercenary treaty granting the king almost exclusive access to our mercenaries.

Switzerland lost Lombardy but retained Ticino and Valtellina. In return, Swiss merchants and industrialists received access to the vast French domestic market, something no one else in Europe had, as well as privileges for the important Lyon Fair and constant supplies of salt. This was crucial. Switzerland lacked salt, even though salt was essential for cheese production. And cheese was already an important export commodity at that time. And finally, Francis I paid the Swiss Confederation the enormous sum of 700,000 crowns.

The two treaties say it all: Francis I, who had won the war, treated the Swiss like victors. This shows how militarily dangerous, but also useful, he still considered them. He was keen to remove Switzerland from the "Great Game" of the great powers, where they had played the role of military spoilsport, and to bring them over to his side.

He succeeded. Switzerland remained a close ally of France until 1798. But the Swiss were clever. Shortly before, in 1511, they had also reached a compromise with the Habsburgs, their old hereditary enemies. While this compromise was less far-reaching than the one with the French, it nevertheless ensured that Switzerland would be placed between the two rival great powers for the next 300 years. At one point closer to Paris, at another closer to Vienna. It was a survival strategy that no one had designed, but over the decades it evolved into a state maxim. At some point it was called neutrality.

Seen in this light, Marignano certainly marked a turning point. Because shortly thereafter, the Swiss abandoned their great power ambitions—forever, as we can see in retrospect. And that was an indispensable prerequisite for their later neutrality. When the Swiss waged war, it was only for foreign masters, never for themselves.

Although the Bernese, Fribourg, and Valais cantons conquered significant areas of Savoy in 1536, essentially present-day French-speaking Switzerland, these cantons did so alone—not in the name of the Confederation, where the people of Central Switzerland, in particular, had barely swallowed this war with grumbling and complaining. Shortly afterward, however, it was over: Switzerland never expanded again. It withdrew from world history.

Journalist and historian Markus Somm is publisher and editor-in-chief of the "Nebelspalter" (Nebelspalter). In 2015, his book "Marignano: Why Switzerland Didn't Become a Great Power" was published by Stämpfli Verlag.