Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
In May 1594, several hundred farmers armed with pikes and matchlocks gathered on a wooded ridge beside Castle Wildenstein and looked down on the soldiers of their own city. Nobody fired. A week later, both sides sat down together to share bread, cheese, and wine.What brought them to the brink was a single penny. Crushed by the debt it took on to buy out a Counter-Reformation bishop, the Reformed city of Basel laid one extra Rappen on every measure of wine sold in its countryside. Hungry after years of failed harvests in Europe’s Little Ice Age, the villages refused to pay. Petitions became appeals, appeals became arrests, and church bells summoned whole valleys to arms.Drawing on chronicles, council records, and the vivid memoir of Andreas Ryff, the merchant-captain who chose talk over slaughter, this sweeping narrative history reconstructs the forgotten Rappenkrieg and the forces behind it: climate shock, confessional rivalry, sovereign debt, and the stubborn self-government of Swiss village communes. It follows the story forward through the bloody Peasant War of 1653 to the countryside’s final break from the city in 1833.A war that never happened, it reveals how power might ask before it takes, and how rarely it does.
