The Burgundian Wars (1474–1477) were a conflict between the Burgundian State and the Old Swiss Confederacy and its allies. Open war broke out in 1474, and the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, was defeated three times on the battlefield in the following years and was killed at the Battle of Nancy in 1477. The Duchy of Burgundy and several other Burgundian lands then became part of France, and the Burgundian Netherlands and Franche-Comté were inherited by Charles's daughter, Mary of Burgundy, and eventually passed to the House of Habsburg upon her death because of her marriage to Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor.
Background
The dukes of Burgundy had succeeded, over a period of about 100 years, in establishing their rule as a strong force between the Holy Roman Empire and France. The consolidation of regional principalities with varying wealth into the Burgundian State brought great economic opportunity and wealth to the new power. A deciding factor for many elites in consolidating their lands was the relatively safe guarantee of making a profit under the economically stable Duchy of Burgundy. Their possessions included, besides their original territories of the and the Duchy of Burgundy, the economically-strong regions of Flanders and Brabant as well as Luxembourg.
The dukes of Burgundy generally pursued aggressive expansionist politics, especially in Alsace and Lorraine, seeking to unite their northern and southern possessions geographically. Having already been in conflict with the French king, Burgundy had sided with the English in the Hundred Years' War but then the Yorkists in the Wars of the Roses, when Henry VI sided with France. The conflict had left the regional powers of France and England in a weakened state and allowed for the rise of the Burgundian power, alongside its fierce French rivals. The repercussions of the Black Death also continued to affect Europe and assisted in maintaining a diminished society. According to some historians, the extremely profitable region of the Low Countries supplied the Duchy of Burgundy with sufficient funds to support their ambitions internally but especially externally. In this period of expansion, treaties of trade and peace were signed with Swiss cantons, and would benefit the security of each power against Habsburg and French ambitions. Charles's advances along the Rhine brought him into conflict with the Habsburgs, especially Emperor Frederick III.
According to a Cambridge publication on Swiss history, both the Swiss and the Burgundians had made aggression a significant impact on the region's foreign affairs. In the effort of consolidating the Swiss Confederacy and for independence from Habsburg rule, Swiss forces gained control of the Habsburg town of Thurgau in an effort to expand its borders and influence. The Bernese people were more frequently being attacked by Charles the Bold's Lombard mercenaries. That raised concern to the Bernese as they began to call on their Swiss allies for assistance in the conflict with Burgundy. The aggressive actions of Charles the Bold would eventually culminate in the Swiss giving him the nickname, "the Turk in the West", and make Burgundy as fierce a rival as the Ottomans in the East.
Conflict
Initially in 1469, Duke Sigismund of Habsburg of Austria pawned his possessions in the Alsace in the Treaty of Saint-Omer as a fiefdom to the Duke of Burgundy for a loan or sum of 50,000 florins, as well as an alliance with Charles the Bold, to have them better protected from the expansion of the (the Old Swiss Confederacy). Charles's involvement west of the Rhine gave him no reason to attack the confederates, as Sigismund had wanted, but his embargo politics against the cities of Basel, Strasbourg and , directed by his reeve , prompted them to turn to Bern for help. Charles's expansionist strategy suffered a first setback in his politics when his attack on the Archbishopric of Cologne failed after the unsuccessful Siege of Neuss (1474–75).