involved in the Italian Wars between the Valois and the Habsburgs over the control of northern Italy. When the power of the Duchy of Milan perished in these wars, the Swiss finally managed to bring the whole Ticino under their control. In 1500, they occupied the strategically important fortress of Bellinzona, which the French king Louis XII, who ruled Milan at that time, ceded definitively in 1503. From 1512 on, the confederates fought on the side of Pope Julius II and his Holy League against the French in territories south of the Alps. After initial successes and having conquered large parts of the territory of Milan, they were utterly defeated by a French army in the Battle of Marignano in 1515, which put an end to military territorial interventions of the confederation, mercenary services under the flags of foreign armies excepted. The result of this short intermezzo were the gain of the Ticino as a common administrative region of the confederacy and the occupation of the valley of the Adda river (Veltlin, Bormio, and Chiavenna) by the Drei Bünde, which would remain a dependency of the Grisons until 1797 with a brief interruption during the Thirty Years' War. Dreizehn Orte Both Fribourg and Solothurn, which had participated in the Burgundy Wars, now wanted to join the confederation, which would have tipped the balance in favour of the city cantons. The rural cantons were thus strongly opposed. In 1477 they marched upon the cities in protest. At Stans in 1481 a Tagsatzung was held in order to resolve the issues, but war seemed inevitable. A local hermit, Niklaus von der Flüe, was consulted on the situation. He requested that a message be passed on to the members of the Tagsatzung on his behalf. The details of the message have remained unknown to this day, however it did calm the tempers and led to the drawing up of the Stanser Verkommnis. Fribourg and Solothurn were admitted into the confederation. After isolated bilateral pacts between the leagues in the Grisons and some cantons of the confederation had already existed since the early 15th century, the federation of the Three Leagues as a whole became an associate state of the confederation, in 1498, by concluding alliance agreements with the seven easternmost cantons. When the confederates refused to accept the resolutions of the Diet of Worms in 1495, the Swabian War (Schwabenkrieg, also called the