RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 621 gundy to the status of a kingdom. Charles then wasted a year in a war on the Rhine in alliance with the Archbishop of Cologne, when he should have been crushing more dan- gerous enemies of his own. Sigismund of Hapsburg, Archduke of Austria and Count of the Tyrol, had mortgaged his somewhat uncertain feudal rights in Alsace and the Black Forest to Charles, Ch . an action which aroused the fears of the Rhine defeated cities and of the Swiss. The Swiss had previously y t e W1SS been at war with Sigismund, who was their ancestral enemy, but now both of them combined with Louis XI in a triple alliance against Charles. The Swiss helped Sigismund to recover his mortgaged possessions, and then, encouraged by Louis XI, they declared war on Charles. He, however, in- duced his ally Edward IV to invade France in 1475 and distract Louis's attention. Meanwhile Charles conquered Lorraine, whose young duke had rebelled against his inter- ference, became himself its duke, and planned to make it the center of his dominions. But in 1476 he was defeated by the Swiss at Granson and Morat and lost Lorraine; the next year came his final defeat and death at Nancy. He left no son to try to carry out his plans, but his daughter Mary married Maximilian within a year, thereby still holding most of the Burgundian possessions together and greatly increasing the family possessions of the House of Haps- burg. Bones of the Burgundian dead were still to be seen on the battlefield of Morat when Lord Byron visited it in 181 6, although it was the custom of every Burgundian who passed that way to remove a bone to his native land, while the Swiss postillions sold them for knife handles. Byron himself carried away enough to make " a quarter of a hero," and wrote his lines on " the patriotic field," . . . "Won by the unambitious heart and hand Of a proud, brotherly, and civic band." The Swiss at this period form an exception to the general rule of the increase of absolute monarchy in Europe, but fit in well enough with the rise of the middle class. After they had further raised their military reputation by defeating
