William Tell

Seven hundred years ago, William Tell shot an arrow through an
apple on his son’s head and launched the struggle for Swiss independence. Or
did he?

In the center of the town square stands a heroic bronze figure, a stern, sturdy,
bearded man in homespun clothes, crossbow over his shoulder, his arm around a
barefooted boy.

The bronze statue is of William Tell, who with one shot of his crossbow started the
centuries long series of events that turned a few isolated settlements of poor,
backward medieval mountaineers into the prosperous modern nation of
Switzerland.

In a.d. 1307, according to the statue’s inscription— Tell, a local farmer and
famous hunter, came striding with his son through the market square of Altdorf,
then as now the only town of any size in the canton of Uri.

In the center of the town square those many years ago, bailiff Gessler, agent of
the Hapsburg duke of Austria, placed a Hapsburg hat on a pole and, to the blare
of trumpets, announced that all passersby must uncover their heads before it.
But William Tell of Uri kept his hat on his head. He was promptly dragged
before Gessler, who ordered an apple placed on the head of Tell’s son and told
the farmer that if he failed to shoot it off with a single arrow at a distance
of 120 paces, both he and the boy would be put to death.

Tell paced off the distance, loaded and aimed his crossbow, shot his arrow, and the
apple fell. “Your life is now safe,” Gessler said to him, “but kindly tell me
why I saw you putting a second arrow inside your jacket?”

“If my first arrow had killed my son,” Tell answered, “I would have shot the second
at you, and I would not have missed.”

Enraged, Gessler ordered Tell bound, carried down to LakeLucerne and thrown on a boat
that would take him to a dungeon in the grim castle of Küssnacht. There, he
declared, “You will never more see sun or moon.”

Tell’s
story is cherished by the Swiss and central to their sense of origins—witness
the image of Tell’s crossbow stamped on every item of export that passes
Switzerland’s borders, as proof that it is truly made in Switzerland.

There is just one small problem: many historians doubt that Tell ever made the two
famous arrow shot in 1307

For one thing, his story wasn’t set down fully until 1569- 70, some 250 years after

the events it describes, by historian Aegidius Tschudi,

Source:

nhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com...August 2004