The Swabian League of Cities is formed on November 20, 1331, when twenty-two Imperial Cities of the former Duchy of Swabia band together in support of the Emperor Louis IV, who in return promises not to mortgage any of them to any imperial vassal.

Among the founding cities are Augsburg, Heilbronn, Reutlingen and Ulm.

Henry Suso, author of an influential book of meditations, had shared in the exile of the Dominican community from Constance between 1339 and 1346, during the most heated years of the quarrel between Pope John XXII and the Holy Roman Emperor.

He is transferred to the monastery at Ulm in about 1348, where he seems to have remained for the rest of his life.

Early in his life, Henry Suso had subjected himself to extreme forms of mortifications; later on he reported that God told him they were unnecessary.

During this period, Suso devised for himself several painful devices.

Some of these were: an undergarment studded with a hundred and fifty brass nails, a very uncomfortable door to sleep on, and a cross with thirty protruding needles and nails under his body as he slept.

In the autobiographical text in which he reports these, however, he ultimately concludes that they are unnecessary distractions from the love of God.

Suso and Johannes Tauler were students of Meister Eckhart, forming the nucleus of the Rhineland school of mysticism.

Suso's first work was the Büchlein der Wahrheit (Little Book of Truth) written between 1328 and 1334 in Constance.

This was a short defense of the teaching of Meister Eckhart, who had been tried for heresy and condemned in 1328-9.

In 1330 this treatise and another (possibly the Little Book of Eternal Wisdom) had been denounced as heretical by Dominican opponents, leading Suso to travel to the Dominican General Chapter held at Maastricht in 1330 to defend himself.

Suso's next book, Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit (The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom), written around 1328-1330, is less speculative and more practical.

At some point between 1334 and 1337 Suso had translated this work into Latin, but in doing so added considerably to its contents, and made of it an almost entirely new book, which he called the Horologium Sapientiae (Clock of Wisdom).

This book is dedicated to the new Dominican Master General, Hugh of Vaucemain, who appears to have been a supporter of his.

Suso will be very widely read in the later Middle Ages.

There are 232 extant manuscripts of the Middle High German Little Book of Eternal Wisdom.

The Latin Clock of Wisdom was even more popular: over four hundred manuscripts in Latin, and over two hundred manuscripts in various medieval translations (it was translated into eight languages, including Dutch, French, Italian, Swedish, Czech, and English).

Many early printings survive as well.

The Clock was therefore second only to the Imitation of Christ in popularity among spiritual writings of the later Middle Ages.

Among his readers and admirers were Thomas à Kempis and John Fisher.

Attempts by Habsburg duke Leopold III of Austria to gain territory in Swabia in southern Germany spill over into Swiss Confederation territory.

By the end of 1385, Lucerne’s forces occupy the Habsburg-controlled towns of Rothenburg and …

...Sempach.

The disintegrating Holy Roman Empire’s landholding nobles have established themselves as individual entities with private armies and the system of secret courts known as the Holy Vehm, or Veme.

The nobles, their strengths deriving from ancient feudal privileges, war frequently between and among themselves, as do Imperial (free) towns, cities and even units of the church.

Nobles and church units fight to stop annexations by the oligarchical towns, whose increasing wealth draws many rural workers; the towns fight to halt excessive and illegal tolls on their trade in raw materials and manufactured commodities.

The ineffective Emperor Wenceslas, king of Germany and Bohemia, a weak and lazy ruler made weaker by alcoholism, attempts to reign from Bohemia, but finds it nearly impossible to control the private powers.

One of these, the exceptionally oppressive Duke Leopold of Austria, had provoked the large Swabian League of Cities, whose forces, allied with those of the Swiss Confederation, had fought and defeated Leopold’s forces at Sempach in 1386.

A general war between towns and had nobles ensued.

By 1389, the towns, especially in southern Germany, have had the worst of it, being isolated pockets of autonomy surrounded by feudal territory.

Wenceslas, who sides with the nobles, arranges an unsatisfactory peace, which tones down the so-called German Town War but does not completely end it.