Short answers, pulled from the story.
Swabia is a cultural, historical, and linguistic region in southwestern Germany, now divided between the states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. It corresponds broadly to the former Swabian Circle of the Holy Roman Empire. The main population centers of the Swabian region include Tübingen, Stuttgart, and Bavarian Swabia.
The name Swabia derives ultimately from the Suebi, a Germanic tribal group. The Roman historian Tacitus used a form of the name in the 1st century to describe a vast northern zone, calling the Baltic Sea the Mare Suevicum, the Suebian Sea. Over the following centuries the name migrated southward as the Suebi merged with the Alamanni and settled in what is now southwestern Germany.
The Duchy of Swabia effectively ended after the execution of Conradin, the last Hohenstaufen, on the 29th of October 1268. The duchy was not reappointed during the Great Interregnum that followed his death, and it gradually broke apart into many smaller units.
Several major dynasties originated in medieval Swabia, including the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, the dukes of Württemberg, and the margraves of Baden. The Welf family moved from Swabia to rule Bavaria and Hanover. They are the ancestors of the British royal family, which has held the throne since 1714.
SIL Ethnologue estimated 819,000 speakers of Swabian German as of 2006. This represents roughly ten percent of the population of the Swabian region and about one percent of the total population of Germany.
The Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803 secularized all the ecclesiastical estates in Swabia and absorbed most of the smaller secular states and nearly all the free cities into larger units. The reorganization left the Kingdom of Württemberg, the Grand Duchy of Baden, and the Principality of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen as the surviving sovereign states. Eastern Swabia was incorporated into Bavaria, forming its current Swabian administrative region.