Kingdom of Württemberg

A Swabian duchy that Napoleon made a kingdom and that spent the nineteenth century inventing things. Wurttemberg was a county, then a duchy from 1495, Protestant after 1534, and unusual in having a genuinely powerful estates assembly - the Tubinger Vertrag of 1514 gave the Landtag control of taxation in exchange for assuming ducal debts, and Charles James Fox reportedly said only Britain and Wurttemberg had real constitutions. Duke Friedrich took the French side, was made an elector in 1803 and king in 1806, doubled his territory through mediatisation, and abolished the old constitution immediately; his son had to negotiate a new one in 1819. The kingdom's Pietist religious culture produced both emigration and reform movements, and hunger in the 1810s and 1840s sent large numbers to Russia and America. Its engineering record is remarkable for a small state: Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach built an early motorcycle and car at Cannstatt, Karl Benz worked at Mannheim just over the Baden border, Robert Bosch founded his workshop at Stuttgart, and Ferdinand von Zeppelin flew his first airship over Lake Constance in 1900. The kingdom joined the German Empire in 1871 keeping its own army and postal service. The monarchy ended in 1918. Baden-Wurttemberg was formed in 1952. Stuttgart was the capital and remains the regional centre. The Swabian Alb runs across the state. Hegel, Schiller, Holderlin and Kepler were all Wurttembergers. The Tubingen seminary trained several of them. Its engineering firms still dominate German manufacturing. The kingdom covered about nineteen thousand square kilometres and had roughly two million people at its founding. Swabian remains one of the most distinctive German dialects.

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