At first Charles tried to increase his territory in the west at the expense of Louis XI of France, and even gained some showy triumphs, but gradually he found that he was no match in diplomacy for that astute king, ‘the universal spider’, as a contemporary christened him; and so he turned his attention to his eastern border. Here he discovered that a Habsburg, Sigismund of the Tyrol, had become involved in a quarrel with the Swiss Cantons, and had been forced to promise them a large sum of money that he was quite unable to pay. When Charles offered to lend him the sum required if he would hand over as security his provinces of Alsace and Breisgau, Sigismund, seeing no other alternative, reluctantly agreed. So remote was the prospect of repayment that the Duke of Burgundy at once began to rule the territories that he held in pawn as though they were his own, and might indeed have absorbed them quietly amongst his possessions had not the French ‘Spider’ chosen to take a hand in the game. Louis XI had never forgiven Charles for his clumsy attempts to rob him of French territory, and now, weaving a web that was to entangle the Burgundian to his ultimate ruin, he secretly pointed out to the Swiss how much more dangerous a neighbour was Charles ‘the Bold’ than Sigismund ‘the Penniless’. Let Sigismund, he suggested, agree to withdraw all Habsburg claims to towns and lands belonging to the Cantons, and let the Cantons in return pledge themselves to pay for the restoration of the lost provinces. This compromise was finally arranged, and the exasperated Charles called upon to hand back the lands he already considered his own. Instead of complying he made overtures to both Louis and the Emperor, with such success that when the Swiss troops invaded Alsace in order to gain possession of that province for Sigismund, they found themselves without the powerful allies on whose support they had counted. [Sidenote: Battles of Granson and Morat] Charles, ever too prone to over-estimate his importance, now believed that he was in a position to crush these presumptuous burghers once and for all. With a splendidly equipped army of some fifty thousand men, and some of the new heavy artillery that had already begun to turn battle-fields into an inferno, he crossed the Jura mountains and marched towards the town of Granson, that had been occupied by the Swiss. This he speedily reduced, hanging the entire garrison on the trees without the gates as an indication of how he intended to deal with rebels, and then continued on his way, since he heard that the army of the Cantons, some eighteen thousand men in all, had gathered in the neighbourhood.