The Federal Charter of 1291
An overview of the Bundesbrief — Switzerland’s founding pact
📖 Read the full official translation
What follows below is a plain-English overview, not the complete original text. For the full English translation of all thirteen articles, see the Swiss Federal Chancellery’s official page on the Bundesbrief of 1291.
In the first days of August 1291, the leaders of three small alpine communities — Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden — sealed a short Latin document pledging to help one another against anyone who threatened their people or their property. It was one of many regional defense pacts common in medieval Europe, and it did not create a country overnight. But it is the oldest surviving written agreement among the valleys that grew into the Swiss Confederation, and the Swiss have marked its anniversary as their National Day every August 1st since 1891 — six hundred years after it was sealed.
What the charter promised
The Bundesbrief (“federal letter” or “federal charter”) opens by explaining, in its own words, that “honor and the public weal are promoted when leagues are concluded for the proper establishment of quiet and peace.” From there, its clauses are practical and specific rather than philosophical:
The three communities agreed to assist each other “with aid, with every counsel and every favor, with person and goods,” at each community’s own expense, against violence done to any of them or their property within their valleys.
They agreed to refuse outside judges: no official could be imposed on them who had “obtained his office for any price, or for money in any way whatever,” or who was not a native or resident of the community — an early insistence on local, incorruptible justice.
They set up internal arbitration, so that disputes between residents of the allied valleys would be settled by their own wise men rather than by outside authority, with escalation only if local arbitration failed.
They preserved existing feudal obligations rather than abolishing them outright — the charter is explicit that “every man, according to his rank, shall obey and serve his overlord as it behooves him,” making clear this was a defensive alliance between communities, not yet a declaration of independence from the Holy Roman Empire.
The document closes by declaring that these “statutes, decreed for the commonweal and health, shall endure forever, God willing,” and is dated to the beginning of August 1291.
Why it mattered later
The Bundesbrief did not by itself create modern Switzerland — it was one alliance among several renewed and expanded over the following centuries as more cantons joined the confederation. But Swiss national memory fixed on this particular document (preserved today in the Bundesbrief Museum in Schwyz) as the symbolic birth certificate of the country, the moment communities chose mutual defense and local self-governance over rule imposed from outside. That principle — local communities federating for common defense while keeping their own institutions — remains the structural idea behind Switzerland’s cantonal system today.
Overview prepared for the Boston Made Reader. Original document: Uri, Schwyz & Unterwalden, early August 1291.
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