Duchy of Oldenburg

• 1. Introduction

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  The Duchy of Oldenburg sat in the north-west of what is now Germany, a small territory whose rulers punched far above their weight. From a single county seat, the House of Oldenburg spread across the thrones of Europe, eventually claiming crowns in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Greece, and Russia. Through Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a descendant of a junior Greek branch of that same family came to hold the throne of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms. How does a modest German county end up shaping so much of European royal history? That story begins with a count named Elimar I, who died in 1108, and runs all the way to Napoleon's annexation in 1810, a seizure that helped ignite the war that would bring down the French Empire itself.

• 2. From County to Kingdom

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  Elimar I, who died in 1108, was the first known count of Oldenburg, and his descendants spent the following centuries navigating a dangerous web of feudal obligations. They served as vassals, sometimes rebellious ones, to the dukes of Saxony. Their fortunes changed in 1180, when Emperor Frederick I broke up the Saxon duchy and elevated Oldenburg's counts to princes of the empire.

  The county of Delmenhorst kept splitting off and rejoining the main line in repeating cycles across the centuries, between 1262 and 1447, between 1463 and 1547, and again between 1577 and 1617, as younger family branches used it as an appanage. Meanwhile, the counts fought a running series of wars through the early 13th century against Frisian princes to the north and west, gradually expanding Oldenburg's territory. The Free Hanseatic City of Bremen and the bishop of Münster were also frequent adversaries.

  The single most consequential moment came in 1440, when Christian succeeded his father Dietrich, known as Fortunatus, as Count of Oldenburg. Eight years later, in 1448, Christian was elected King of Denmark as Christian I, partly because of his maternal descent from earlier Danish kings. Overnight, Oldenburg became a Danish exclave deep inside German territory. In 1450 Christian added Norway to his crowns, and Sweden in 1457. Then in 1460 he inherited the Duchy of Schleswig and the County of Holstein, an event the source calls of high importance for Oldenburg's future history.

• 3. Anthony Günther's Long Peace

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  Anthony I, who ruled from 1529 and lived until 1573, brought Lutheranism into the county and shut down the monasteries. He stayed loyal to Charles V during the Schmalkaldic War, and that loyalty paid off: he recovered Delmenhorst in 1547, enlarging Oldenburg's territory once again. One of his brothers, Christopher, who lived roughly from about 1506 to 1560, earned a modest reputation as a soldier.

  Anthony's grandson, Anthony Günther, who was born in 1583 and died in 1667, took up the rule in 1603 and considered himself the wisest prince Oldenburg had yet seen. He acquired Jever before becoming count, then in 1624 added Kniphausen and Varel. In 1647, Delmenhorst was permanently united with his lands.

  His shrewdest move was staying out of the Thirty Years' War entirely. He donated valuable horses to the warlord the Count of Tilly, buying immunity from the devastation that ravaged nearly every other German state of the period. He also extracted from the emperor the right to levy tolls on ships passing along the Weser River, a grant that quickly became a substantial addition to his treasury. In 1607 he built a schloss in the Renaissance architectural style. His death in 1667 closed an era of careful, prosperous neutrality.

• 4. The Treaty That Reshuffled Everything

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  The 1773 Treaty of Tsarskoye Selo was a diplomatic exchange with consequences that rippled for decades. Christian VII of Denmark surrendered the county to Catherine the Great of Russia. In return, her son and heir Paul gave up his share in the joint royal-ducal government of Holstein and his claims to the ducal government of Schleswig. Oldenburg then passed to Frederick August, the Administrator of the Prince-Bishopric of Lubeck and a representative of a younger branch of the family. In 1777, four years after the treaty, the county was formally raised to the rank of a duchy.

  The duchy's early years were troubled. Frederick August's son William succeeded him in 1785, but suffered from mental illness and could not rule effectively. His cousin Peter, also Administrator of the Prince-Bishopric of Lubeck, stepped in as regent and eventually inherited the throne outright in 1823, ruling Lubeck and Oldenburg together in personal union. Peter also formally assumed the title of Grand Duke of Oldenburg that year.

  Before that, the German Mediatisation of 1803 handed Oldenburg new territories: the Oldenburg Munsterland and the Prince-Bishopric of Lubeck itself, enlarging the state considerably just before the Napoleonic storm hit.

• 5. Napoleon's Seizure and Its Consequences

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  Between 1810 and 1814, Oldenburg was occupied by Napoleonic France, and in 1810 it was formally annexed into the French Empire. That annexation was not merely a blow to a small German duchy. According to the source, it was one of the causes of a diplomatic rift between the former allies France and Russia, a dispute that led to war in 1812 and eventually contributed to Napoleon's downfall.

  The Jewish communities living within the duchy were caught up in their own version of Napoleon's reach. The oldest records of Jews in Oldenburg date to the Middle Ages, and by 1900 the combined Jewish population across the Delmenhorst, Jever, Varel, Vechta, and Wildeshausen communities reached 1,359 people. The duchy was the last part of Napoleon's conquered territories to carry out his 1808 decree requiring Jews to adopt surnames. The surnames chosen at that time are the ones still common today among Ashkenazi Jews.

  The Jewish population declined to 1,015 by 1925. By 1933, only 279 remained in the area, and most were annihilated during the Holocaust, though the source notes that some survived and returned after the war.

• 6. Grand Duchy and Its Final Shape

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  After Napoleon's defeat, the restored territory was elevated in 1815 to a grand duchy, and that same year it acquired the Principality of Birkenfeld. Duke Peter I took the formal title of Grand Duke of Oldenburg in 1823. Oldenburg joined the German Empire in 1871, and when that empire collapsed it became a free state within the Weimar Republic in 1918.

  The Greater Hamburg Act of 1937 reshaped Oldenburg's borders again: the exclave districts of Eutin, near the Baltic coast, and Birkenfeld in south-western Germany were transferred to Prussia, while Oldenburg gained the City of Wilhelmshaven in exchange. By the start of World War II in 1939, those changes left the state with an area of 5,375 square kilometres and a population of 580,000 inhabitants.

  After the war, in 1946, Oldenburg was folded into the newly founded state of Lower Saxony, becoming the administrative region of Oldenburg with its territory unchanged. That region and the surrounding state joined West Germany in 1949. The administrative region itself was abolished in 1978, when it merged with neighbouring governorates into the new region of Weser-Ems, which was in turn dissolved in 2004.