Steffisburg
municipality in the canton of Bern in Switzerland
Steffisburg is a municipality in the administrative district of Thun in the canton of Bern in Switzerland. On 1 January 2020 the former municipality of Schwendibach merged into the municipality of Steffisburg.
History
Steffisburg is first mentioned in 1133 as Stevensburc. The municipality was formerly known by its French name Steffisbourg.
The area around Steffisburg has been inhabited since the Neolithic era and remained occupied during the Bronze Age. Traces of a Roman site were discovered in Schwäbis. Early medieval graves have been discovered at Zelgmatte and Klosterhubel. By the High Middle Ages the entire Zulgtal, including Steffisburg, was owned by the local Freiherr von Heimberg family. Under the Zähringer family, the Grafschaft of Thun expanded to include the village. When they died out in 1218 it passed to the Kyburgs, who made Steffisburg a fief for several different Ministerialis (unfree knights in the service of a feudal overlord) families.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Steffisburg” as municipality in the canton of Bern in Switzerland. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as municipality in the canton of Bern in Switzerland. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q69668. VIAF identifies the subject as 158307907. The Library of Congress control number is n82250190. Authority coordinates are 46.783, 7.633. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1133 and 1218.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Steffisburg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.