♦Franconia.♦
The next among the great duchies, that of Eastern Francia, Franken, or Franconia, is of much less importance in European history than that of Saxony. ♦Bishops of Würzburg Dukes.♦ It gave the ducal title to the Bishops of Würzburg; but it cannot be said to be in any sense continued in any modern state. ♦Extent of the Circle.♦ Its name gradually retreated, and the circle of Franken or Franconia took in only the most eastern part of the ancient duchy. ♦The Rhenish Circles.♦ The western and northern part of the duchy, together with a good deal of territory which was strictly Lotharingian, became part of the two Rhenish circles. Thus Fulda, the greatest of German abbeys, passed away from the Frankish name. In north-eastern Francia, the Hessian principalities grew up to the north-west. Within the Franconian circle lay Würzburg, the see of the bishops who bore the ducal title, the other great bishopric of Bamberg, together with the free city of Nürnberg, and various smaller principalities. ♦Ecclesiastical States on the Rhine.♦ In the Rhenish lands, both within and without the old Francia, one chief characteristic is the predominance of the ecclesiastical principalities, Mainz, Köln, Worms, Speyer, and Strassburg. The chief temporal power which arose in this region was the Palatinate of the Rhine, a power which, like others, went through many unions and divisions, and spread into four circles, those of Upper and Lower Rhine, Westfalia, and Bavaria. ♦Bavaria.♦ This last district, though united with the Palatine Electorate, was, from the early part of the fourteenth century, distinguished from the Palatinate of the Rhine as the Oberpfalz or Upper Palatinate. To the south of it lay the Bavarian principalities. These, united into a single duchy, formed the power which grew into the modern kingdom. But neither this duchy nor the whole Bavarian circle at all reached to the extent of the ancient Bavaria which bordered on Italy. ♦Shiftings between Bavaria and the Palatinate, 1623.
Electorate of Bavaria, 1648.♦ The early stages of the Thirty Years’ War gave the Rhenish Palatinate, with its electoral rights, to Bavaria; the Peace of Westfalia restored the Palatinate, leaving Bavaria as a new electorate. ♦Union of the two, 1777.♦ Late in the eighteenth century, Bavaria itself passed to the Elector Palatine, thus forming what may be called modern Bavaria with its outlying Rhenish lands. ♦Cession to Austria, 1778.♦ This acquisition was at the same time partly balanced by the cession to Austria of the lands east of the Inn, known as the Innviertel. ♦Archbishopric of Salzburg.♦ The other chief state within the Bavarian circle was the great ecclesiastical principality of the archbishops of Salzburg in the extreme south-east.
♦Lotharingia.♦
The old Lotharingian divisions, as we see them in the time of the great duchies, utterly died out. ♦Lower Lotharingia.♦ The states which arose in the Lower Lotharingia are among those which silently fell off from the German Kingdom to take a special position under the name of the Netherlands. ♦Duchy of Lothringen or Lorraine.♦ The special duchy of Lothringen or Lorraine was held to belong to the circle of Upper Rhine. ♦Elsass.♦ Elsass also formed part of the same circle, the circle which was specially cut short by the encroachments of France. ♦Circle of Swabia.♦ The Swabian circle answered more nearly than most of the new divisions to the old Swabian duchy, as that duchy stood without counting the marchland of Elsass. No part of Germany was more cut up into small states than the old land of the Hohenstaufen. A crowd of principalities, secular and ecclesiastical, among them the lesser principalities of the Hohenzollern House, of free cities, and of outlying possessions of the houses of Austria made up the main part of the circle. ♦Ecclesiastical towns of Swabia.♦ Strassburg, Augsburg, Constanz, St. Gallen, Chur, Zürich, are among the great bishoprics and other ecclesiastical foundations of the old Swabia. ♦Part of Swabia becomes Switzerland.♦ But, as I shall show more fully in another section, large districts in the south-east, those which formed the Old League of High Germany, had practically fallen away from the kingdom before the new division was made, and were therefore never reckoned in any circle. ♦Baden.
Württemberg.♦ Two Swabian principalities, the mark of Baden, and Württemberg, first county and then duchy, came gradually to the first place in this region. As such they still remain, preserving in some sort a divided representation of the old Swabia.
Two important parts of the old kingdom, two circles of the division of Maximilian, still remain. These are the lands which form the circles of Burgundy and Austria. These are lands which have, in earlier or later times, wholly fallen off from the German Kingdom. ♦Circle of Austria.♦ The Austrian circle was formed of the lands in southern Germany which gradually gathered in the hands of the second Austrian dynasty, the House of Habsburg. ♦Growth of the House of Austria.♦ Starting from the original mark on the Hungarian frontier, those lands grew, first into a great German, and then into a great European, power, and the latest changes have made even their German lands politically non-German. The growth of the Austrian House will therefore be properly dealt with in a separate section. ♦Extent of its German lands.♦ It is enough to say here that the Austrian dominion in Germany gradually took in, besides the original duchy, the south-eastern duchies of Steiermark or Styria, Kärnthen or Carinthia, and Krain or Carniola, with the Italian borderlands of Görz, Aquileia, and part of Istria. ♦Tyrol.♦ Joined to these by a kind of geographical isthmus, like that which joins Silesia and Brandenburg, lay the western possessions of the house, the Bavarian county of Tyrol and various outlying strips and points of lands in Swabia and Elsass. ♦Loss of Swabian lands.♦ The growth of the Confederates cut short the Swabian possessions of Austria, as the later cession to France cut short its Alsatian possessions. Still a Swabian remnant remained down to the dissolution of the Kingdom. ♦Bohemia and its dependencies.♦ The kingdom of Bohemia, with the dependent lands of Moravia and Silesia, though held by the Archdukes of Austria and giving them electoral rank, was not included in any German circle. ♦Trent and Brixen.♦ The Austrian circle moreover was not wholly made up of the dominions of the Austrian house; besides some smaller territories it also took in the bishoprics of Trent and Brixen on the debateable frontier of Italy and old Bavaria.
♦Circle of Burgundy.♦
The Burgundian circle was the last and the strangest use of the Burgundian name. ♦Dominion of the Valois Dukes within the Empire.♦ It consisted of those parts of the dominions of the Dukes of Burgundy of the House of Valois which remained to their descendants of the House of Austria at the time of the division into circles. These did not all lie strictly within the boundaries of the German kingdom. ♦The Imperial Netherlands.♦ Within that kingdom indeed lay the Northern Netherlands, the Frisian lands of Holland, Zealand, and West-Friesland, as also Brabant and other Lotharingian lands. ♦County of Burgundy.♦ But the circle also took in the County of Burgundy or Franche Comté, part of the old kingdom of Burgundy, and lastly Flanders and Artois, lands beyond the bounds of the Empire. ♦Flanders and Artois released from homage to France, 1526.♦ These were fiefs of France which were released from their homage to that crown by the treaty between Charles the Fifth and Francis the First of France. The Burgundian circle thus took in all the Imperial fiefs of the Valois dukes, together with a small part of their French fiefs. As all, or nearly all, of these lands altogether fell away from the German kingdom, and as those parts of them which now form the two kingdoms of the Low Countries have a certain historical being of their own, it will be well to keep their more detailed mention also for a special section.
§ 2. The Confederation and Empire of Germany.
♦Germany changed from a kingdom to a confederation.♦