The most feared soldiers in medieval Europe were dairy farmers. Their enemies had a name for them, and it was meant as an insult. They called them the cow-Swiss. The cantons of the high Alps had almost no land that would grow grain. What they had was summer pasture. From the 1300s the people there turned over almost entirely to cattle. They lived on milk, butter, cheese and meat, drove their surplus animals over the passes to sell in Italy, and bought in what little bread they wanted. Their overlords were the Habsburgs. In 1315 a duke rode in with an army of armoured knights to bring them to heel. About 1,500 herdsmen caught the column in a narrow pass beside a lake and destroyed it. At Sempach in 1386 they did it again, on open ground, and killed the duke. In the 1470s they wiped out three armies of the richest prince in Europe, one after another, and left him dead in a frozen ditch. Contemporaries could not get over the size and stamina of these men. Every king in Europe wanted to hire them. In 1506 the Pope chose them as his bodyguard, and they are still at the gates of the Vatican in the same uniform. The Germans to the north mocked them as cowherds and milkers, and made cruder jokes than that. The Swiss went to war over the insult in 1499 and won that as well. Machiavelli, who had seen them fight, put it in a single phrase. The Swiss, he wrote, are the most armed and the most free. They had no king, no nobles and no wheat. Europe laughed at them for living on cows, and for 200 years could not beat them.