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THE COUNTS OF GRUYERE
BY
MRS. REGINALD DE KOVEN
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1916
Copyright, 1916, by DUFFIELD & CO.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PROLOGUE 3
I. ORIGIN OF THE PEOPLE 7
II. INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH 14
III. SOVEREIGNTY OF THE HOUSE OF SAVOY 25
IV. FOREIGN WARS 46
V. THE BURGUNDIAN WARS (COUNT
FRANCOIS I) 57
VI. THE BURGUNDIAN WARS (COUNT
LOUIS) 67
VII. STRUGGLE FOR SUCCESSION 85
VIII. RELIGIOUS REFORM 94
IX. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF GRUYERE 105
X. GRUYERE WITHOUT ITS COUNTS 128
APPENDIX 139
BIBLIOGRAPHY 141
ILLUSTRATIONS
LA PLACE DE GRUYERE _Frontispiece_
_From a watercolour by Colonel R. Goff_
THE CHATEAU _Facing p._ 10
GATEWAY " 22
LACE-MAKERS " 38
FORTIFIED HOUSES--NORTH WALL " 56
THE CITY ON THE HILL " 72
TERRACE OF THE CHATEAU " 90
CHURCH OF ST. THEODATE " 112
JOUSTING COURT " 132
* * * * *
THE COUNTS OF GRUYERE
* * * * *
BIS SEPTEM SEACULA CURRENT
MOENIA FUNDAVIT BELLO FORTISSIMUS
HAEROS VANDALUS ATQUE SUO SIGNAVIT
NOMINE MUROS GRUS VIXIT AGNOMEN
COMITE DEDIT ADVENA PRIMO
RUBEA GRUEM VEXILLA AC SCUTI PILOSI SUSTENTENT
QUORUM EUTIS PARRIDA RUGIS AC ARMATA MANUS
VULSIS RADICIBUS ARAE EST
HUIC CELEBRIS SERVES ET LONGA PROPAGO NEPOTUM
DIVES OPUM OLIVES PIETA
VESTIS AURIS EXTITIT ET NOSTRIS
PER PLURIMA SAECULA TERRAS PRAEFUIT
GRUERIUS SEXTAE LEGIONIS VANDALORUM DUX
ANNO 436
_Behold now twice seven centuries.--That a Vandal hero bravest
among warriors.--Founded this fortress.--This fortified city has
since preserved the name of the Grue.--The stranger became the
first count.--His descendants carried the Grue on their scarlet
banners.--And on their hairy shields.--To the Vandal hero succeeded
a long line of illustrious descendants.--Rich in fortune, rich in
their piety.--These Counts won the order of the golden vest.--And
for many centuries the posterity of Gruerius.--Chief of the
sixteenth Vandal legion who lived in the year 436 governed our
country._
PROLOGUE
On the edge of a green plain around which rise the first steps of the
immense amphitheatre of the Alps, a little castled city enthroned on a
solitary hill watches since a thousand years the eternal and surpassing
spectacle.
Around its feet a river runs, a silver girdle bending northward between
pastures green, while eastward over the towering azure heights the
sunrise waves its flags of rose and gold.
In the dim hours of twilight or by a cloudy moonlight, the city pitched
amid the drifting aerial heights seems built itself of air and cloud,
evanescent and unreal.
By the fair light of noonday, sharp and clear upon its eminence, it is
like a Duerer drawing, massed lines of crenelated bastions,
sharp-pointed belfreys, and towered gateways completing a mediaeval
vignette ideal in composition. Strange as the distant vision seems to
the traveler fresh from the rude and time-stained chalets of the
mountains, still more surprising is the scene which greets his arrival
by the precipitous road, past the double towered gateway, within the
city walls. Expressly set it seems for a theatrical _decor_ in its
smiling gayety, its faultlessly pictorial effect. Every window in the
blazoned houses is blossoming with brightest flowers, as for a perpetual
fete. The voices of the people are soft with a strange Italianate
patois, and the women at the fountain, the children at their play, the
old men sunning themselves beside the deep carved doorways are seemingly
living the happy holiday life which belongs to the picture. The one
street in the city, opening widely in a long oval _place_, is bounded by
stone houses fortified without and bearing suspended galleries for
observation and defence, forming thus a continuous rampart along the
whole extent of the hillside.
At the eastern extremity of this enclosure beyond the slender belfrey of
the Hotel de Ville and the ancient shrine where a great crucifix looks
down upon the scene, a flagged pathway rises sharply under a tall clock
tower within the enceinte of the castle set at the steep extremity of
the ridge. There behind strong walls a terrace looks from a crenelated
parapet over the descending sunset plains, a prospect as fair as any in
all Italy. Within a second rampart, semi-circular in form, the castle
with its interior court looks eastward and southward over the encircling
valley with its winding river, up to the surrounding nether heights of
the Bernese Oberland. Walls twelve feet in thickness tell the history of
its ancient construction, and chambers cut in the massive stone
foundations recall the rude life of the early knights and vassals who
defended this _chateau-fort_ from the Saracen invasion. Noble halls,
later superimposed upon the earlier foundations, with stone benches
flanking the walls and recessed windows overlooking the jousting court,
evoke the glittering days of chivalry and the vision of the sovereign
race of counts who here held their court.
Ten centuries have passed over this castle on the hill; six told the
story of its sovereignty over the surrounding country, but unlike most
of the chateaux of Switzerland it has been carefully restored and
maintains its feudal character. The caparisoned steeds no longer gallop
along the ancient road, the crested knights no longer break their lances
in the jousting court; but in the wide street of the little city is
heard a speech, and in the valleys and from the hillsides echo
herdsmen's songs, which contain Latin and French words, Greek, Saracen
and German, a patois holding in solution the long story of the past.
GRUYERE
CHAPTER I
ORIGIN OF THE PEOPLE
Triply woven of the French, German and Italian races, the Swiss nation
discovers in its Romand or French strain another triple weave of
Celtic-Romand-Burgundian descent.
While the high mountainous regions of eastern Switzerland were early
scaled and settled by the Germanic tribes, the western were still
earlier inhabited by the ancient Celtic-Helvetians and then civilized
and cultivated by the most luxurious of Roman colonies. Resisting first
and then happily mingling with their Roman conquerors, the Celtic people
were transformed into a Romand race, similar in speech and origin to the
French. In the heart of this Romand country was an ancient principality
where the essential qualities of the beauty loving and imaginative
races, Roman and Celtic, expressed themselves uniquely. A fountain of
Celtic song and legend, a centre of chivalry and warlike power, this
principality is known only to the outer world by the pastoral product
which bears its name "Gruyere."
Remarkable in the interest of the unbroken line of its valorous and
lovable princes, and in the precious and enchanting race mixture of its
brave, laughter-loving people, its supreme historical interest lies in
its little recorded and astonishing political significance among the
independent feudal principalities of Europe.
When the Teuton barbarians came to devastate the enchanting loveliness
of the templed Roman garden which was Switzerland for three idyllic
centuries, they stopped at last at the penultimate peaks of the
Occidental Alps, at a certain region called _aux fenils_ (_ad fines_),
where a glacial stream rushes across the narrow valley of the Griesbach,
among the southern mountains of the Bernese Oberland. Thus western or
Romand Switzerland preserves a character definitely apart from the
eastern, and this barrier across the Bernese valley, unpassed for a
thousand years, still divides the German from the Romand speaking
peasantry. To the north and west lies Gruyere, greenest of pastoral
countries, uniquely set in a ring of azure heights, where like a lost
Provence, the Romand spirit has preserved its eternal youthfulness and
charm. Greatly loved by all the Swiss, its annals piously preserved by
ancient chroniclers, this country is German only in its eastern rocky
portion; but where the castle stands and in all the wide valleys which
open towards the setting sun, it is of purest Romand speech and
character. Here ruled for six hundred years a sovereign line of counts
whose history, a pastoral epic, is melodious with song and legend, and
glowing with all the pageantry and chivalry of the middle ages. Although
skirted by the great Roman roads, and flanked by outpost towers, Gruyere
was never romanized, being settled only in its outlying plains by
occasional Gallo-Roman villas, while the interior country, ringed by a
barrier of almost inaccessible mountains, was left to the early
Helvetian adventurers who had first penetrated its wild forests and its
mountain fastnesses. Here, unaffected alike by Roman domination or
Teuton destruction, they had set up the altars of their Druid faith and
here preserved their ancient customs and their speech.
Here also traveled the adventurous Greek merchants from old Massilia
(Marseilles), leaving in their buried coins and in the Greek words of
the Gruyere dialect the impress of their ancient visitation.
A country fit for mysterious rites, for the habitation of the nature
deities of the Druid mythology, was Gruyere in those early days. The
deep caverns, the "black" lakes, and the terrifying depths of the
precipitous defiles through which the mountain streams rushed into
marshy valleys, were frequented by wild beasts and birds, and haunted in
the imagination of the people by fairies and evil spirits holding unholy
commerce for the souls of men. Here until the Teuton invasion the early
Celts lived unmolested, when some fugitives from the once smiling cities
and the cultivated plains came to join them in the refuge of their
mountain homes. Strange to their half-savage brothers were these
softened and romanized Celts who had tended the olives and the vines on
sunny lake sides, and who in earlier days had mingled in Dionysian
revels with Roman maidens with curled locks and painted cheeks. Strange
their tales of the white pagan temples, and all the glories of the
imperial cities left smouldering in ashes after the Teuton hordes had
worked their will. The arduous pioneer life of their predecessors and
the task of clearing and cultivating their wild asylum among the
mountains and the marshes was now their lot. Adopting slowly the altered
speech of these later romanized inhabitants and converted to the
Christian faith by Gallo-Roman priests, the indigenous inhabitants
finally lost all memory of the teachings of their Druid bards and the
firm belief in reincarnation which sent the Celtic warrior laughing to
his death; but in the traditions of the peasantry, abounding with nature
myths, sorcerers still haunt their mountain caves, fairies and May
maidens still flutter about their crystal streams.
[Illustration: THE CHATEAU]
One more strain, that of the heroes of the Nibelungen, the blond
Burgundian giants who had forced the Romans to share with them a portion
of their conquered territories, was destined to add height and virile
force to the Celto-Roman people of this country. Strangely differing
from their ancient enemies the merciless Teutons, these mighty
Burgundians, most human of all the vandal hords, in an epic of tragic
grandeur rivaling the classic tales of mythology, for a century
maintained an autonomous and mighty kingdom. Gentle as gigantic,
indomitable in war, invading but not destroying, their greatest monarch,
Gondebaud, who could exterminate his rival brothers, and enact a
beneficient code of laws which forms the basis of the Gallic
jurisprudence, was their protagonist and prototype. Beside his figure,
looming in the mists of history, is Clothilde, his niece, the
proselyting Christian queen, who fled in her ox cart from Geneva to the
arms of Clovis the Merovingian, first king of France. Enthroned at
Lyons, Gondebaud issued the laws which regulated the establishment of
his people in their new domains, which spread over what was later the
great French Duchy of Burgundy, the whole extent of occidental
Switzerland and Savoy. "Like brothers," it is related by the Latin
chroniclers, they mingled with the resident inhabitants, dividing lands
and serfs by lot, marrying their daughters, and quickly adopting their
language and their Christian faith.
Thus the whole of Romand Switzerland was deeply impregnated with the
Burgundian influence, assimilating its vigorous race type and ruled by
its laws. Although the country later passed under the universal
domination of Charlemagne, the character of the people was little
affected by the distant rule of the great monarch, and when the
Carlovingian Empire fell apart and Rodolph I, of the second Burgundian
line, crowned himself king in the monastery of St. Maurice, his subjects
were of the same race and customs as those of his predecessors.
Differing in blood from the early Burgundian rulers, these Rodolphian
kings, allied to the Carlovingian emperors and long governors of lower
or Swiss Burgundy, ruled pacifically and under the beloved Rodolph II
and his still better loved Queen Berthe, and their son Conrad, resisted
the Saracen invasion and preserved for a hundred and fifty years the
autonomy of their kingdom. Nobles with their serfs and freemen already
divided the land, their prerogatives and vassalage long since
established by the laws of Gondebaud. The Oberland, or Pays-d'en-Haut,
Hoch Gau, or D'Ogo, in the German tongue, a country no longer wild but
rich in fertile valleys and wooded mountain sides, was given to a
Burgundian lord, under the title of King's Forester or Grand Gruyer;
Count he was or Comes D'Ogo, first lord of the country afterwards called
Gruyere. Although Burgundian, the subjects of Count Turimbert were of
different races. In the country of Ogo, called Haute Gruyere, they were
German, while in the lower northern plains, called Basse Gruyere, they
were Celtic or Celto-Roman. Between these two divisions the mountain
torrent of the Sarine rushes through a deep gorge called the Pas de la
Tine. For many years the Gallo-Roman peasants feared to penetrate this
terrifying barrier between the rising valleys and the frowning heights,
until, according to a legend, a young adventurer broke his way through
the primeval woods and the rocky depths of the gorge to find out-spread
before him the fertile upper plateaux of the Pays-d'en-Haut.
"It happened," so runs another legend, "that the Roman peasants who had
passed the Pas de la Tine and led their herds along the course of the
Sarine, wished to cut their way through the thick forest, but
encountered other peasants who spoke a different language. Here
peacefully they halted on the hither side of the dividing Griesbach,
'where it touched the limit of the Alamanni.'" (_In ea parte quae facit
contra Alamannos._)