Aargau

• 1. Introduction

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  Aargau sits at a crossroads that has drawn settlers, conquerors, and pilgrims for more than two thousand years. The name itself is a clue: Aar-gau means "Aare province," a canton defined by the river running through it. Today it is one of the most densely populated cantons in Switzerland, divided into eleven districts, with Aarau as its capital on the western border. Yet the story of how this territory became a single canton is tangled and improbable, stitched together from three short-lived Napoleonic creations in 1803. What did it take for this borderland between dueling empires and rival faiths to become one coherent place? And why did it spend so many centuries as a contested object rather than a subject of its own history?

• 2. Romans, Franks, and Early Lords

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  As far back as 200 BC, the Helvetians, a Celtic tribe, controlled the territory that would become Aargau. Roman forces eventually pushed them out, building a major settlement called Vindonissa near the present site of Brugg. By the 6th century, the Franks had moved in.

  The name Argowe first appears in writing in 795, in the spelling Argue. At that moment the term described a territory considerably larger than the modern canton, stretching between the Aare and Reuss rivers and including pieces of what are now Bern, Solothurn, Basel-Landschaft, Lucerne, Obwalden and Nidwalden. The region east of the Reuss, including what is now Baden District, belonged instead to Zürichgau.

  Within the Frankish Empire of the 8th to 10th centuries, the area was a disputed border zone between the duchies of Alamannia and Burgundy. A line of the von Wetterau family, known as the Conradines, held the countship of Aargau intermittently from 750 until around 1030, eventually taking the name von Tegerfelden. By roughly 1200, the ducal house of Zähringen and the comital houses of Habsburg and Kyburg had divided the region between them, setting up the next five centuries of conflict.

• 3. Habsburg Rule and the 1415 Conquest

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  Habsburg Castle, the original seat of the House of Habsburg, stood in this territory. For much of the medieval period, the Habsburgs were the dominant force in Aargau, until a diplomatic crisis gave their rivals an opening they were waiting for.

  When Frederick IV of Habsburg sided with Antipope John XXIII at the Council of Constance, Emperor Sigismund placed him under the Imperial ban. In July 1414, the Pope visited Bern and extracted assurances that the Swiss would move against the Habsburgs. A few months later the Swiss Confederation denounced the Treaty of 1412, and in 1415 Bern led the Confederation in invading Aargau. The towns of Aarau, Lenzburg, Brugg, and Zofingen fell quickly, along with most Habsburg castles. Habsburg Castle itself was taken by Bern in April 1415.

  The Confederation divided the spoils. Bern kept the southwest, running northward to the confluence of the Aare and Reuss. The important city of Baden was governed jointly by all eight members of the Confederation. Frederick eventually humbled himself before the Pope, who ordered the seized lands returned. The Swiss refused, and after no serious attempt at recapture, Frederick officially gave up his claim.

  The monasteries the Habsburgs had founded left a long afterecho. Several structures survived in Wettingen and Muri, and when the Aargau government closed them in 1841, the dispute contributed to the outbreak of the Sonderbund War six years later in 1847.

• 4. Faith, Division, and the Wars of Villmergen

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  The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century cut through Aargau like a second invasion, and the canton's patchwork administration made the religious fracture especially complicated to manage.

  When Bern converted in 1528, the Unteraargau, its portion of the territory, converted alongside it. At the beginning of that century, a wave of Anabaptists had migrated into the upper Wynen and Rueder valleys from Zürich. Despite sustained pressure from Bernese authorities across the 16th and 17th centuries, Anabaptism never fully disappeared from the region.

  The Freie Ämter, the "free bailiwicks" governed collectively by the Confederation, followed a different path. In 1529, iconoclasm swept through the area and dismantled much of the old Catholic infrastructure. But after Zürich's defeat at the Second Battle of Kappel in 1531, five victorious Catholic cantons marched troops into the Freie Ämter and reconverted them by force.

  The tension erupted again in 1656 during the First War of Villmergen and then again in 1712 during the Toggenburg War, also called the Second War of Villmergen. After the 1656 conflict, the status quo held. But the fourth Peace of Aarau in 1712 reshuffled power decisively. Zürich used its victory to expel Catholic cantons from the county of Baden. The Freie Ämter were literally divided by a line drawn from the gallows in Fahrwangen to the church steeple in Oberlunkhofen, creating a northern section ruled by Zürich, Bern, and Glarus, and a southern section ruled by eight cantons including Bern.

• 5. The Jewish Community of Aargau

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  In the 17th century, Aargau was the only federal condominium in Switzerland where Jews were tolerated at all. By 1774, even that tolerance had narrowed to two towns: Endingen and Lengnau.

  The conditions were severe. Jews and Christians could not live under the same roof. Jews could not own land or houses. They paid taxes at far higher rates than the general population, and in 1712 the Lengnau community was pillaged. Marriage licenses carried exorbitant taxes and were often refused outright. From 1696, Jews were required to renew a letter of protection from the governor every sixteen years.

  Because they could not be buried in Swiss soil, the deceased were interred on a river island called Judenäule, meaning Jews' Isle, on the Rhine near Waldshut. Beginning in 1603, this island served the Surbtal communities. The island flooded repeatedly, and in 1750 the Surbtal Jews petitioned the Tagsatzung to establish the Endingen cemetery closer to their homes.

  The slow legal thaw came in stages. The Helvetic Republic abolished special tolls in 1799 and removed the poll tax in 1802. On the 5th of May 1809, Jews were declared citizens with broad rights in trade and farming. They were still confined to Endingen and Lengnau until the 7th of May 1846, when they won the right to move freely within the canton. On the 24th of September 1856, the Swiss Federal Council granted full political rights within Aargau, though the Christian majority resisted compliance with the new rules. A vote to grant local suffrage was passed in 1860 and then repealed before it could take effect, under pressure from the Ultramonte Party. Full citizenship finally arrived in July 1863 by federal decree. The residents of Endingen and Lengnau had to wait longer still; the Grand Council granted them formal citizens' rights on the 15th of May 1877, creating official communities under the names New Endingen and New Lengnau. The Swiss Jewish Kulturverein, founded in 1862, advocated throughout this struggle and was dissolved twenty years after its founding.

• 6. Napoleon's Gift: The Canton Is Born

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  French forces occupied Aargau from the 10th of March to the 18th of April 1798. When they withdrew, the old territorial patchwork was reorganized into short-lived Helvetic Republic cantons: Aargau, Baden, and the briefly separate Fricktal.

  The Act of Mediation in 1803 dissolved those temporary arrangements and merged them into a single canton. The Fricktal, ceded by Austria to Napoleonic France in 1802 and then briefly its own canton under a Statthalter, was incorporated into Aargau on the 19th of March 1803. Some pieces traded hands: the Amt of Hitzkirch went to Lucerne, while Hüttikon, Oetwil an der Limmat, Dietikon, and Schlieren joined Zürich. In return, Lucerne's Amt of Merenschwand was transferred to the new canton's district of Muri.

  The flag and coat of arms adopted in 1803 were an original design by Samuel Ringier-Seelmatter; the current official specification, fixing the coat's stars as five-pointed, was not settled until 1930. The canton celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2003.

  The formerly agrarian Baden District tells the sharpest story of transformation. After World War II the region grew rapidly; by 1990 it had become the largest and most densely populated district in the canton, with 110,000 residents and a density of 715 persons per square kilometre. Three of Switzerland's five nuclear power plants now stand in Aargau, at Beznau I, Beznau II, and Leibstadt, earning it the informal title of the energy canton.