In the brilliant cortège which followed Duke Leopold to Italy, Count Pierre, accompanied by a number of his relatives, was notable by the command of a hundred horsemen and a force of archers. Mounted on horses, armored like their riders and covered with emblazoned velvets, such a force of cavalry was the strongest as well as the most imposing instrument of warfare in this time, when the knights, willing only to conquer by personal bravery, despised all arms except their lances and their swords. Contested by the warring Guelphs and Ghibellines, the city of Milan and the palace of the newly crowned German emperor himself was with difficulty protected by the imperial guard. The soldiers of Duke Leopold, arriving without the city walls, under a hail of stones and arrows, broke through the outer barricades and burst the city gates, and then Gruyère again, at the head of his horsemen dashed through, bringing release to the imprisoned emperor and victory to the Austrian arms.
Not long was the alliance between the houses of Hapsburg and Savoy to endure. The rising powers of the cities, still more the prowess of the mountaineers, the Waldstetten, who soon after Duke Leopold's Italian campaign had vanquished him and his shining warriors at the famous battle of Morgarten, resisted with growing success the Savoyard and the Hapsburg sovereignty, and divided in ever changing alliances the fermenting elements of the tottering feudal society. The horn of the Alps, sounding the tocsin over the rocky defile of the Swiss Thermopylae, announced the approaching end of the feudal rule of the middle ages and the dawn of liberty in Switzerland.
Although at first a willing ally of Pierre de Savoy, the city of Berne, greatly enlarging its possessions by conquests and alliances and growing rapidly in independence and republican enlightenment, warred incessantly with the nobles of the surrounding country and with particular virulence attacked the counts of Gruyère. So serious a menace did the proud city become to all the knights of Romand Switzerland, that they were driven to attempt its humiliation. All the great lords of Helvetia west and east joined the brave alliance. The banners of Hapsburg and Savoy were united in the determined onslaught upon the powerful city, and a large force from Fribourg, eager to aid in bringing her rival low, swelled the forces of the nobles in a glittering army of three thousand knights, who with their attendant vassals gayly and confidently practised feats of arms before the little fortified city of Laupen while awaiting the arrival of the Bernois.