neighbors. The Swiss Confederation had been in frequent conflict with the Ottomans for decades and led up in the 1470s to papal calls for a crusade against the Ottomans. The idea of the "German nation" () was used as a unifying force. 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). In the conflict's second phase, Sigismund sought to achieve a peace agreement with the Swiss confederates, which eventually was concluded in in 1474 (later called the or Perpetual Accord). He wanted to buy back his Alsace possessions from Charles, who refused. Shortly afterwards, was captured and executed by decapitation in Alsace, and the Swiss, united with the Alsace cities and Sigismund of Habsburg in an anti-Burgundian league, conquered part of the Burgundian Jura () by winning the Battle of in November 1474. King Louis XI of France joined the coalition by the Treaty of Andernach in December. The next year,