William Tell and the Apple

In the early fourteenth century, so the Swiss tell it, the tyrant Gessler, a bailiff of the Habsburg emperor, raised his hat on a pole in the market square of Altdorf and ordered every passer-by to bow to it. William Tell, a mountaineer and famed marksman from Burglen, walked past without bowing and was seized. Knowing his skill with the crossbow, Gessler devised a cruel test: Tell must shoot an apple from the head of his own young son at fifty paces, or both would die. Tell split the apple with a single bolt. When the bailiff asked why he had drawn a second arrow, Tell answered that had the first killed his child, the second was meant for Gessler. For that defiance he was arrested, but escaped during a storm on Lake Lucerne and later ambushed and killed the tyrant, striking a spark for Swiss independence. No document proves Tell ever lived, and similar marksman tales exist across Europe, yet he became the founding hero of Switzerland, celebrated in Schiller's play and Rossini's overture.