Walser migrations

The Walser are the speakers of the Walser German dialects, a variety of Highest Alemannic. They inhabit the Alps of Switzerland and Liechtenstein, as well as on the fringes of Italy and Austria. The Walser people are named after the Wallis (Valais), the uppermost Rhône valley, where they settled from roughly the 10th century in the late phase of the migration of the Alamanni, crossing from the Bernese Oberland; because of linguistic differences among the Walser dialects, it is supposed that there were two independent immigration routes.

From the upper Wallis, they began to spread south, west and east between the 12th and 13th centuries, in the so-called Walser migrations (Walserwanderungen). The causes of these further population movements, the last wave of settlement in the higher valleys of the Alps, are not entirely clear. Some think that the large Walser migrations took place because of conflicts with the valley's feudal lords. Other theories contend it was because of overpopulation and yet others that they were reinforced by the respective local authorities in order to settle previously unpopulated regions.

In 1882 Professor Arturo Galanti had ventured the figure of 100,000 German inhabitants in the foothills from Piedmont to Friuli (excluding Trentino Alto Adige not yet part of Italy), a number that is in no way justified by the alleged sporadic immigration of medieval settlers and miners, but assumed a more ancient presence. In the years 1180 to 1318 at least 28 of 36 mayors of Conegliano were of German origin. According to historian Andrea Gloria in "sculdascia" of Montagnana (from the Old High German skuld "debt" and heyssen "impose") and its surrounding towns half of the population was of German origin, confirmed by ancient documents of the churches that were written in old high German. The inhabitants of Vicenza until the fifteenth century called themselves "cymbriaci viri" and called Cymbria the city of Vicenza. It was the Council of Trent (1545-1563), strongly influenced by the Jesuits, who gave a moral blow to the Germanic languages in northern Italy banning functions in German to stem the expansion of Lutheran heresy.

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