II. MONT VELAN 515

and then, in the year 1191, laid the foundations of the town of BERNE.¹

He chose for its site a spot in the royal domain, for he intended the new city to be called the Imperial city; and the place he chose was near a manor which had served in the preceding century for occasional residence to the Rodolphian kings. It was a long high promontory, nearly an island, whose cliff sides were washed by the Aar. The Duke of Zæhringen’s Marshal, Cuno of Babenberg, received orders to surround with walls the little island on which stood the simple hamlet of Berne, now become the powerful city of Berne, praiseworthy at first in the democratic spirit of its bourgeois, and afterwards in its aristocracy, whose policy, at once elevated, firm, consistent, and ambitious, mingled itself in all the great affairs of the neighbouring countries, and became a true power, upon which the sovereigns of the first order had sometimes to count.

Lastly, Berthold built the Castle of Thun, where the Aar issues out of its lake; castle which, as may be seen at the present day, commanded the whole level plain,² opening to Berne, and the pass into the Oberland.

42. Thus the three towns Fribourg, Berne, and Thun, form, at the close of the twelfth century, the triple fortress of the Dukes of Zæhringen, strengthened by a body of burghers to whom the Dukes have granted privileges till then unknown; this Ducal and Civic allied power asserting itself in entire command of Switzerland proper, against the Counts of Savoy in the south, the Burgundian princes in the east, and the ecclesiastical power of Italy, vested in the Bishops of Sion, in the Valais,-thence extending from the mouth of the Rhone into the Pays de Vaud, and enthroned there at Payerne by the bequests of Queen Bertha. The monks of her royal abbey at Payerne, seeing that all the rights they possessed over the Pays de Vaud were endangered by the existence of Fribourg, opposed the building

¹ [See Gaullieur, p. 111.]

² [See Plate XXXVI.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]