Landgraviate of Hesse-Homburg

The smallest of the Hessian fragments, and a useful demonstration of how many such states Germany contained. Hesse-Homburg was split off from Hesse-Darmstadt in 1622 for a younger son, covering barely two hundred and seventy square kilometres in two disconnected pieces - the town of Homburg in the Taunus hills and the lordship of Meisenheim far to the west. It had a few tens of thousands of subjects, no army worth the name, and no independent foreign policy, and its landgraves survived by marriage and by attaching themselves to larger relatives. Napoleon's reorganisation mediatised it into Hesse-Darmstadt in 1806, and the Congress of Vienna restored its independence in 1815 largely because Britain's Prince Regent had a brother-in-law's interest in it. It joined the German Confederation as a sovereign member in 1817, which meant one of Europe's smallest states sat as an equal alongside Austria and Prussia. Bad Homburg's casino, opened by the Blanc brothers in 1841, made the place famous and paid the state's bills; when Prussia banned gaming the brothers moved to Monaco and founded Monte Carlo. The male line died out in 1866. Hesse-Darmstadt inherited it and Prussia annexed it within months. Dostoevsky gambled there and set The Gambler in a version of it. Bad Homburg vor der Hohe was the capital and remains a spa town. The landgraviate never had more than about thirty thousand subjects. Its surviving Schloss houses a museum. The Saalburg Roman fort, reconstructed nearby, sits on land that was once its territory. Its landgraves supplied officers to the Prussian and Austrian armies for generations, which was the usual career for the sons of a state too small to employ them.

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