Flags and arms of cantons of Switzerland Schwenkel. Zürich attached the Swiss cross in the red Schwenkel rather than in the main flag, and this may have contributed to the development of the flag of Switzerland (placing the white cross in a red field by default). The city of Bern is a Zähringer foundation of 1160. In the 13th century, its flag showed a black bear in a white field, changed to the current red-and-yellow diagonal arrangement in 1289. Bern also had a war flag with a simple red-and-black horizontal division. The cantonal colours remain red and black. The blue-and-white flag is attested from 1386. The vertical
Flag of Switzerland The Swiss cross is defined as Swiss Standard German consistently uses (cognate with "vane") rather than the term used for national flags in Germany. The name of the flag of the Swiss Confederation is a nominal compound, . While the proportions of the cross have been fixed since 1889, the size of the cross relative to the flag (the width of the margin separating the "cross couped" from the edge of the flag) had not been officially fixed prior to 2017. The annex to SR 232.21 provides an image specifying that the margin is to be of the same width