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former principality of the Holy Roman Empire
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The Duchy of Brunswick and Lüneburg (German: Herzogtum Braunschweig und Lüneburg), commonly known as the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg or Brunswick-Lüneburg, was an imperial principality of the Holy Roman Empire in the territory of present day Lower Saxony.
In 1235, Otto I was enfeoffed with the newly founded Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg at the Court of Mainz. It was based on the two castles in Brunswick and Lüneburg and the associated estate of the House of Welf. In 1269 there was a first division between the brothers Albrecht and Johann. The resulting principalities of Brunswick and Lüneburg together continued to form the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg.
The history of the duchy and the constituent principalities was marked by further divisions and mergers of the principalities. The constituent principalities existed until the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. At the Congress of Vienna, the Kingdom of Hanover and the Duchy of Brunswick were created as successor states. To this day, members of the House of Hanover call themselves Duke of Brunswick and Lüneburg.
When the Imperial ban was placed on Henry the Lion in 1180, he lost his titles as Duke of Saxony and Duke of Bavaria. He went into exile for several years, but was then allowed to stay on the (allodial) estates inherited from his mother's side until the end of his life.
At the Imperial Diet of 1235 in Mainz, as part of the reconciliation between the Hohenstaufen and Welf families, Henry's grandson, Otto the Child, transferred his estates to Emperor Frederick II and was enfeoffed in return with the newly created Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, which was formed from the estates transferred to the Emperor as well as other large areas of the imperial fisc. After his death in 1252, he was succeeded by his sons, Albert the Tall and John, who ruled the dukedom jointly.
In 1269, the duchy was divided, Albert receiving the southern part of the state around Brunswick and John the northern territories in the area of Lüneburg. The towns of Lüneburg and Brunswick remained in the overall possession of the House of Welf until 1512 and 1671 respectively. In 1571 the Amt of Calvörde became an exclave of the Duchy. The various parts of the duchy were further divided and re-united over the centuries, all of them being ruled by the Welf or Guelph dynasty, who maintained close relations with one another—not infrequently by marrying cousins—a practice far more common than is the case today, even among the peasantry of the Holy Roman Empire, for the contemporary Salic inheritance laws encouraged the practice of retaining control of lands and benefits. The seats of power moved in the meantime from Brunswick and Lüneburg to Celle and Wolfenbüttel as the towns asserted their independence.
In the 18th century, a number of soldiers and officers from the duchy fought for the British in the American Revolutionary War, such as at the Battle of Bennington and Battles of Saratoga.
The subsequent history of the dukedom and its subordinate principalities was characterised by numerous divisions and reunifications. The subordinate states that were repeatedly created, and which had the legal status of principalities, were generally named after the residence of their rulers.
The estates of the different dynastic lines could be inherited by a side line when a particular family died out. For example, over the course of the centuries there were the Old, Middle and New Houses (or Lines) of Brunswick, and the Old, Middle and New Houses of Lüneburg. The number of simultaneously reigning dynastic lines varied from two to five.
In 1269, the Principality of Brunswick was formed following the first division of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg. In 1432, as a result of increasing tensions with the townsfolk of Brunswick, the Brunswick Line moved their Residenz to Wolfenbüttel, into the water castle, which was expanded into a Schloss, whilst the town was developed into a royal seat. The name Wolfenbüttel was given to this principality. From 1546, Wolfenbüttel became the residence of the senior prince of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Henry, Duke of Brunswick-Dannenberg.
With sole rights to the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, he provided a conditional sub-lease of the Principality of Lüneburg to the princes of Calenberg with the conditions of payment to the Wolfenbüttel heirs (Chief of the House), together with the guarantee that only his descendants would inherit this senior principality of Wolfenbüttel. Not until 1753/1754 was the Residenz moved back to Brunswick, into the newly built Brunswick Palace.
Following the Congress of Vienna and territorial adjustments the principality formed the basis of the new Duchy of Brunswick.
In 1432, the estates gained by the Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel between the Deister and Leine split away as the Principality of Calenberg. To the north, this new state bordered on the County of Hoya near Nienburg and extended from there in a narrow, winding strip southwards up the River Leine through Wunstorf and Hanover where it reached the Principality of Wolfenbüttel. In 1495, it was expanded around Göttingen. In 1584, it returned to the Wolfenbüttel Line.
In 1634, as a result of inheritance distributions, it went to the House of Lüneburg, before becoming an independent principality again in 1635, when it was given to George, younger brother of Prince Ernest II of Lüneburg, who chose Hanover as his Residenz. New territory was added in 1665 in the vicinity of Grubenhagen and in 1705 around the Principality of Lüneburg. In 1692, Duke Ernest Augustus from the Calenberg Line, acquired the right to be a prince-elector as the Prince-Elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Colloquially, the Electorate was also known as the Electorate of Hanover or as Kurhannover. In 1814, it was succeeded by the Kingdom of Hanover.
The Principality of Lüneburg emerged alongside the Principality of Brunswick in 1269 when the inheritance of the Duchy was divided. After the death of Duke George William of Brunswick-Lüneburg in 1705, King George I inherited the state of Lüneburg, being both the benefactor of Georges William's 1658 renunciation in favour of his younger brother Ernest Augustus and the husband of the Duke's morganatic daughter, Sophie Dorothea, later known as the "Princess of Ahlden". It was united with the Principality of Calenberg, which had been elevated in 1692 into the Electorate.
The southernmost principality in the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg stretched from Münden in the south down the River Weser to Holzminden. In the east it ran through Göttingen along the River Leine via Northeim to Einbeck. It emerged in 1345 as the result of a division of the Principality of Brunswick and was united in 1495 with Calenberg.
From 1291 to 1596, Grubenhagen was an independent principality, its first ruler being Henry the Admirable, son of Albert of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. The state lay along the northern part of the Solling hills and the River Leine near Einbeck and north of the Eichsfeld on and in the southwestern Harz. After being split in the course of the years into smaller and smaller principalities, Grubenhagen returned in 1596 to Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and was ceded to the Calenberg line in 1665.
Other branches that did not have full sovereignty included the states of Dannenberg, Harburg, Gifhorn, Bevern, Osterode, Herzberg, Salzderhelden, and Einbeck.
While a total of about a dozen subdivisions that existed, some were only dynastic and not recognised as states of the Empire, which at one time had over 1500 such legally recognized entities. In the List of Reichstag participants (1792), the following four subdivisions of Brunswick-Lüneburg had recognized representation:
By 1705 only two Dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg survived, one ruling Calenberg, Lüneburg and other possessions, and the other ruling Wolfenbüttel.
One of the dynastic lines was that of the princes of Lüneburg, which, in 1635, acquired Calenberg for George, a junior member of the family who set up residence in the city of Hanover. His son Christian Louis, and his brothers inherited Celle in 1648 and thereafter shared it and Calenberg between themselves; a closely related branch of the family ruled separately in Wolfenbüttel.
The territories of Calenberg and Lüneburg-Celle were made an Electorate by the Emperor Leopold I in 1692 in expectation of the imminent inheritance of Celle by the Duke of Calenberg, though the actual dynastic union of the territories did not occur until 1705 under his son George I Louis, and the Electorate was not officially approved by the Imperial Diet until 1708.
The resulting state was known under many different names: Brunswick-Lüneburg, Calenberg, Calenberg-Celle; its ruler was often known as the "Elector of Hanover". Coincidentally, in 1701, the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg found himself in the line of succession for the British crown, later confirmed in 1707 by the Act of Union, which he subsequently inherited, thereby creating a personal union of the two crowns on 20 October 1714.
After a little over a decade, the matter of the disputed electorate was settled upon the heir, and the new Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (acceded as duke on 23 January 1698), George I Louis, was able to style himself the Elector of Brunswick and Lüneburg from 1708. It was not just happenstance but also religion-driven politics that brought about the circumstance that he was also put into the line of succession for the British crown by the Act of Settlement— which was written to ensure a Protestant succession to the thrones of Scotland and England at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment ran high in much of Northern Europe and much of Great Britain.
In this event, George I succeeded his second cousin Anne, Queen of Great Britain—the last reigning member of the House of Stuart—and subsequently formed a personal union on August 1st, 1714 between the British crown and the duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg (electorate of Hanover), which would last until well after the end of the Napoleonic Wars more than a century later—including even through the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the rise of a new successor kingdom. In that manner, the "Electorate of Hanover" (the core duchy) was enlarged with the addition of other lands and became the Kingdom of Hanover in 1814 at the peace conferences (Congress of Vienna) settling the future shape of Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.
The first Hanoverian King of Great Britain, George I of Great Britain, was the reigning Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and was finally made an official and recognized prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire in 1708. His possessions were enlarged in 1706 when the hereditary lands of the Calenberg branch of the Dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg merged with the lands of the Lüneburg-Celle branch to form the Electorate of Hanover. Subsequently, George I was referred to as Elector of Hanover.
In 1700 and 1701, when the English Parliament had addressed the question of an orderly succession, with a particular religious bias toward a Protestant ruler, from the childless ruling Queen Anne (House of Stuart), it passed the provisions of the Act of Settlement 1701 to Sophia of Hanover, granddaughter of James I. Sophia predeceased Queen Anne by a few weeks, but her son and heir, George I, succeeded as King of Great Britain when Anne, his second cousin, died in August 1714. Great Britain and Hanover remained united in personal union until the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.
George I was followed by his son George II and then his great-grandson George III, the latter retaining the position of elector even after the Holy Roman Empire was abolished by its last emperor in 1806. George III contested the validity of the dissolution of the Empire and maintained separate consular offices and staff for the Electorate of Hanover until the Congress of Vienna at the war's end. After the fall of Napoleon, George III regained his lands plus lands from Prussia as King of Hanover, whilst giving up some other smaller scattered territories.
The Wolfenbüttel Line retained its independence, except from 1807 to 1813, when it and Hanover were merged into the Napoleonic Kingdom of Westphalia. The Congress of Vienna of 1815 turned it into an independent state under the name Duchy of Brunswick. The Duchy remained independent and joined first the North German Confederation and then the German Empire in 1871.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.