Throughout the fifteenth and into the sixteenth centuries, Rhaetians drew upon their experience of communal life to construct the system of alliances that culminated in the Bundesbrief of 1524. After 1524, communal values and practices continued to provide organizational models for the institutions and political culture of the Freestate. Public assembly, majority decision, and publicly controlled division of benefits and resources were characteristic practices that deeply influenced both the form of the Freestate and the political ideas of its inhabitants. Yet the application of local practices to larger problems was not automatic and reflexive; instead, federal institutions derived from a range of possibilities among which local practice was only one. The extension of communal values to the Freestate did not, therefore, result in structures identical to those found in the communes. Rhaetians also drew on other models of political order to arrive at results consistent with, but not directly based on, communal principles.