Grand Duchy of Hesse

The Hessian line that guessed right about Napoleon and was rewarded with a grand duchy. The landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt was one of several fragments of a medieval landgraviate divided among heirs in 1567, and it spent two centuries as a middling German territory of no great weight. Ludwig X joined the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806, was elevated to grand duke as Ludwig I, and gained substantial territory from the mediatisation of smaller neighbours - a state roughly doubled by taking the correct side. He then changed sides in 1813 in time to keep it, and the Congress of Vienna confirmed the grand duchy, awarding it Rhenish territory around Mainz that left it in two separate pieces. It backed Austria against Prussia in 1866, lost, and was forced into the North German Confederation for its northern half only, then joined the German Empire entire in 1871. Darmstadt became an unexpected centre of art nouveau under Ernst Ludwig, who founded the Mathildenhohe artists' colony in 1899. The dynasty married outward with remarkable consequence: Alice of Hesse's daughter Alix became the last Russian empress, and haemophilia entered the Romanov line through her. The monarchy ended in November 1918. Darmstadt was heavily bombed in 1944. The state was merged into modern Hesse in 1945. Darmstadt was the capital and Mainz its largest Rhenish city. The grand duchy covered roughly seven and a half thousand square kilometres. Justus von Liebig taught chemistry at Giessen within it. Its flag's red and white bands are still used by the modern state of Hesse.

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