How is william tell

Production place Published in: Berlin city. Production place Published in: Paris France. Production date early 19th century. Production place Published in: Augsburg. Production place Published in: Gotha. Modern Gallery of British Artists. Production place Published in: London England. Tell, au lac des quatres Cantons. Production place Printed in: Paris France. Production place Published in: Karlsruhe town. Museum number Y,5. Tell, pres de Kusnacht, C.

Helvetius, Patriae Lib, Primus Vindex. There, he encountered Gessler, the Austrian bailiff who represented the authority of the ruling Hapsburgs. The bailiff subsequently ordered Tell imprisoned anyway, but Tell escaped, killed Gessler, and went on to become the stuff of legends. Friedrich von Schiller dramatized the story in his play, ''Wilhelm Tell,'' which is performed every summer in Altdorf, the town where Tell supposedly snubbed Gessler.

Rossini further immortalized the name in his. And Swiss schoolchildren are taught the story of the defiant Swiss farmer as if he really lived. But questions persist about whether Tell ever really did exist. The most recent comprehensive history of Switzerland— a thousand-page tome published in in French, Italian and German—dismisses Tell in just 20 lines.

But he insists that something very important did happen in the mountains of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden the latter now split into Obwalden and Nidwalden around the beginning of the 14th century.

There, in a remarkable break with the past, was established the principle that a people could revolt against a great power and constitute themselves as a self-governing entity. History did unquestionably turn around in those obscure gorges, although exactly how remains a matter of speculation and debate. The ancestors of the inhabitants of these forest cantons—among them Celts, Teutons, Helvetians, Burgundians— had come, in distant centuries, eastward or westward over the great plateaus north of the Alps in search of richer lands to cultivate or to loot, or in hopes of escaping the law.

They pushed their way up the narrow Alpine valleys till they came up against sheer rock walls and settled down. They lived in splendid isolation. Forced to cooperate among themselves, they elected officials at assemblies of landowners. As in mountain communities everywhere, they were bound by a common devotion to their own long-settled ways, and they presented a united front against foreigners on the other side of their mountains.

It all began to change, though, with the climatic warming trend that started around a. As the snow line receded, there was more pastureland and there were more cows to sell. The mountain men began looking for wider markets and found them just over the Alps in Italy. The St. Gotthard pass leading south was easy to navigate, but an impassable gorge blocked access from the north.

Sometime in the midth century, somebody—perhaps the men of Uri, who had learned to build sturdy houses on impossibly steep slopes—stretched a bridge across the gorge, changing the economic map of Europe. Gotthard now offered the most convenient route between northern Europe and Italy, and all who traveled that way had to take a three-day journey through Uri, paying the men of the canton for food, shelter and the use of their mules.

But even as Uri was becoming more prosperous, it was torn by internal strife. In desperation, the community appealed, in , to a neighboring nobleman, Count Rudolph von Hapsburg, to settle a feud among warring clans.

Since his underlings wore the arms of the Hapsburgs and had soldiers to back them up, they soon came to feel that they owned the place. The people resisted, first sullenly, then violently.

Each time, they came in great force, and each time they let themselves get caught in unfavorable terrain, where their gaudily armored knights were mowed down by the stolid, fierce mountaineers hurling boulders and wielding their pikes, battle-axes and crossbows.