Geneva

Geneva stands where the Rhône leaves the lake, at the crossing of roads from Lyon, Italy and Switzerland. The bishop, a prince of the Empire since 1162, held the city against the counts of Geneva and, from the thirteenth century, the house of Savoy, which wanted this rich town as its capital. In 1309 the bishop was forced to recognise the commune of merchants and craftsmen. The fairs of Geneva were among the chief marts of Europe at their height in the middle of the fifteenth century, and the Medici of Florence opened a bank here in 1424. In 1462 Louis XI forbade French merchants to attend them in order to favour Lyon, and trade shrank.

One party in the city wanted union with the Swiss, another stood with Savoy. In 1535 the mass was suspended, and in May 1536 the Reformation was formally adopted. John Calvin arrived that July, was banished in 1538 and returned in September 1541 to draw up the Ecclesiastical Ordinances. Geneva became the "Protestant Rome": its academy opened in 1559, and refugees from France and Italy doubled the population in the 1550s. On the night of 11 December 1602 the Savoyards tried to take the city by scaling its walls and failed, and the Treaty of Saint-Julien in 1603 secured its independence.

In the eighteenth century the patricians who governed the city faced repeated revolts by the burghers. In 1762 the council ordered Rousseau's Émile and Social Contract burned. The revolution of 1782 ended when French, Sardinian and Bernese troops besieged the city and restored the patricians. Revolutionary France annexed Geneva in 1798, and in 1814 and 1815 it joined the Swiss Confederation.