#earl or other feudal lord who sold it off when he got too broke to maintain his castle or too bored to want to | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

weidli · 2 days ago

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(catholic and protestant soldiers on the battlefield at kappel am albis in 1531) "uhhh what are we doing this for again?" "gerrymandering" "what's that" "strategy of playing with borders of electoral districts in order to functionally deprive certain people of fully realizing their political rights that the USA is going to invent something over two hundred years in the future" "political rights? do we have those?" "no" "okay ♥ whats the USA?" "don't even worry about it bro" (dies)

i feel like we don't make fun of swiss kantonsgrenzen enough (probably this is due to the fact that if you're not swiss you must likely have never had any reason to look at them and don't care and frankly rightly so lol). like i Understand that the choices made are based on a long history and undoubtedly some people feel very strongly and personally connected to them but also you've gotta acknowledge that some of them are just silly bullshit

#On a more serious note: the cantonal borders have been pretty much the same since 1848 (when the modern swiss state was founded #with the exception of those four changes listed above (plus Moutier which voted to be part of Jura instead of Bern a while ago which is #gonna happen in like 2026 i think)#and the reason for why they're Like That is usually either religious (the third screenshot for example - those borders afaik first ended up #Like That after the second kappelerkrieg in 1531 and have a lot to do with waadt/bern being mainly protestant and fribourg being #heavily catholic) or geographical (borders along mountains/valleys that end up looking fucked up and squiggly on a map that doesn't #display terrain) or have to do with the state of europe post-napoleon and the political climate at the vienna congress in 1815 (the first #screenshot! that weird exclave of obwalden is the former Abtei Engelberg which used to be in charge of itself until Napoleon marched in #and then got firmly taken away from Nidwalden and given to Obwalden in 1815 because of how those two behaved respectively in 1798 #Nidwalden got to keep the rest of the valley kind of as a consolation prize as far as i can tell)#and when it's not any of those explanations it's usually just that that little bit of land was the property of some particular duke or #earl or other feudal lord who sold it off when he got too broke to maintain his castle or too bored to want to #long post #no id #if u want to know more i can heartily recommend going to https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sidonius and looking at maps #and then looking at wikipedia pages until 3am. it's free it's easy it'll get you a neat six in swiss matura history exams!

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