On 22 June 1476, in the Burgundian Wars, an army of the Swiss Confederation and its allies attacked Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, who had been besieging the small town of Murten (Morat in French) for almost two weeks. The duke, warned but unprepared, was taken by surprise; the Swiss broke through his fortified line and its guns, and his army was cut down or drowned in the lake. Murten finished Burgundy as a great power, and Charles was killed at Nancy six months later.
Revenge for Grandson
On 2 March 1476 Charles had been routed by the Swiss at Grandson, losing his camp and its riches, and he set out to take his revenge. He rebuilt his army at Lausanne; the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland puts it at more than 20,000 fighting men with a large baggage train, the Swiss National Museum at some 21,000, and Britannica at 25,000. Taking Murten would give him a fortified base for the march on Bern and Fribourg.1
Bern had seen it coming. In April it sent Adrian von Bubenberg with 1,500 men to reinforce the garrison of Murten, and he set about strengthening the walls. The Burgundians reached the town and opened the siege on 9 June. The garrison held out against repeated attacks; when Charles's heavy guns arrived they smashed a tower and part of the wall, but the general assault that followed failed, on 17 June according to the Historical Dictionary and the next day according to the National Museum's account.2
The attack on the Grünhag
Meanwhile a relief army of some 24,000 men gathered near Bern: contingents from all over the Confederation, with allies from Lorraine, Alsace and Austria and more than 1,000 horsemen. Its captains set the attack for 22 June, the feast of the Ten Thousand Knights, a date which, the Historical Dictionary notes, also recalled for the Bernese their victory at Laupen in 1339. The National Museum's account says Charles did not expect a battle on a feast day.3
The Confederates advanced in three bodies of pikemen, halberdiers and handgunners. The Historical Dictionary says the attack came around midday, after heavy rain had stopped. Charles, who had ignored warnings days earlier, was taken completely by surprise. The Swiss stormed his fortified hedge, the Grünhag, and overran the guns behind it, and the Burgundian counterattacks were beaten off. The garrison of Murten sallied out to join the attack, and the duke fled from his camp on the hill above the town.4
A lake red with blood
The victors gave no quarter. The National Museum's account describes Burgundians killed as they tried to surrender and hundreds, many of them Lombard mercenaries, drowning in their armor as they fled into the lake, while the Savoyard contingent north of the town escaped around the shore. The death toll is uncertain: the Historical Dictionary cites estimates from 8,000 to 20,000 Burgundian dead against a few hundred Confederates killed and wounded, the National Museum gives about 10,000 Burgundians and fewer than 600 Confederates, and Britannica says more than a third of the Burgundian army was destroyed. The accounts agree, the Historical Dictionary adds, that most of the Burgundian foot died while most of the horsemen got away.5
All of Charles's guns fell to the Swiss, with his camp and the goods of the merchants who followed his army. The Historical Dictionary says the more than 3,000 women of the Burgundian baggage train were shared out as human booty, and that little is known of what became of them. The duke escaped to Franche-Comté and turned against Lorraine, and on 5 January 1477 he was killed in the Battle of Nancy. An old Swiss saying, quoted by the National Museum, sums up his fall: at Grandson he lost his goods, at Murten his courage, at Nancy his blood.6
Remembering Murten
Contemporaries understood at once that Burgundian power had been broken, and the Swiss became the most sought-after mercenaries in Europe. According to the Historical Dictionary, Fribourg and Bern built an ossuary for the Burgundian dead in 1486, which French troops destroyed in 1798; an obelisk replaced it in 1822, and Louis Braun's great panorama of the battle followed in 1893 and 1894. The battle belongs to the same campaign as Grandson, told on our 2 March page, and the wider age of the battle in the greatest battles of the Middle Ages.7
