king Rudolf I, and 1307 falls into the reign of king Albert I, both members of the House of Habsburg ruling in a time of political instability, when the Holy Roman Empire had been without emperor for several decades. The politically weak kings of this period had to make frequent concessions to their subjects and vassals in order to remain in power. The founding cantons received confirmations of the Freibriefe establishing their reichsfrei status. Even Unterwalden was finally properly granted this status by Albert's successor Henry VII in 1309. This did not prevent the dukes of Habsburg, who originally had had their homelands in the Aargau, from trying to reassert their sovereignty over the territories south of the Rhine. In the struggle for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire in 1314 between duke Frederick I of Austria and the Bavarian king Louis IV, the Waldstätten sided with Louis for fear of the Habsburgs trying to annex their counties again, like Rudolph I had done. When a long-simmering conflict between Schwyz and the abbey of Einsiedeln escalated once more, the Habsburgs responded by sending a strong army of knights against these peasants to subdue their insurrection, but the Austrian army of Frederick's brother Leopold I was utterly defeated in the Battle of Morgarten in 1315. The three cantons renewed their alliance in the pact of Brunnen, and Louis IV reconfirmed their Reichsfreiheit. The Swiss chronicles of the Burgundy Wars period (1470s) refer to a rebellion against the local bailiffs, with a coordinated destruction of their forts or castles, known as the Burgenbruch ("slighting") in Swiss historiography. The earliest reference for this is the White Book of Sarnen (1470), which records that wa böse Türnli waren, die brachen sy vnd viengen ze Uere am ersten an die hüser brechen "wherever there were hostile forts (towers), they broke (slighted) them and first began in Uri to break these buildings" The text names Zwing Uri at Amsteg as the first castle slighted, followed by castle Schwandau in Schwyz, Rötzberg in Stans, and finally the castle at Sarnen, the storming of which is told in a graphic manner. The Burgenbruch was long seen as historical, substantiated by the numerous ruined castles in Central Switzerland, but archaeological excavations have shown that these castles were abandoned gradually, not during a sudden uprising, during the period of roughly 1200 to 1350. By the 1970s, the "demythologization" of