FAMILY HISTORY AND STORIES
The History Of Palatinate (Germany)
From "A History of Modern
Germany" by Hajo Holborn and the Encyclopedia Americana.
Palatinate (area) - Zweinbrucken (town) - Germany (Country).
Palatinate - a German principality (German Platz). Lands to the
west of the middle Rhine and to the east of the middle Rhine
along the Neckar River.
In 1410 the four sons of the Elector
Palantine, Rupert III divided among themselves the lands of the
Palantinate into the Electoral Palatinate, the Upper Palatinate,
Mosbach and Simmern-Zweinbrucken. (JP) Our families cam from
Zweinbrucken. This last of the four divisions was in turn split up
into smaller divisions in 1569.
The counts palantine built the
magnificent Heidelberg Castle on the Neckar River and made it
their main residence.
With Elector Otto Henry who made
Lutheranism the state religion in 1556, the original Palatinate
line died out in 1559. It was followed by the Palatinate Simmeron
branch, whose members embraced the Calvinist faith. In 1608
elector Frederick IV became the head of the Protestant Union of
German princes. The acceptance of the Bohemaian crown by his son,
the Elector Frederick V, in 1619 marked the beginning of the
Thirty Years War. Frederick V lost not only Bohemia in 1620 but
all his German territories together with the electoral dignity to
the Catholic Wittelsbach Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria in 1623.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) restored Frederick's son, Charles
Louis, as ruler of the Rhenish Palatinate. A new electoral
dignity was created for him, since the old one, together with the
Upper Palatinate, remained in Bavaria's possession.
The rebuilding of the Rhenish
Palatinate, which had suffered severe destruction during the war,
was cut short by the new War of the League of Augsburg, also know
as the War of the Palatinate. In 1685 the last elector of the
Palatinate - Simmern line had been succeeded by Philip William of
the Roman Catholic Palatinate - Zweibrucken - Neuberg line. King
Louis XIV of France,pretending to act on behalf of his
sister-in-law, a Palatinate princess, challenged the succession.
In the subsequent general European War of the League of Augsburg,
French designs on the Palatinate were frustrated but in 1689 the
country was systematically devastated by a retreating French army.
It was this destruction that led to the
first wave of German overseas migration. Most of the early German
settlers of Pennsylvania came from the Palatinate. In place of
Heidelberg, now in ruins, Mannheim in 1730 became the capital of
Palatinate.
Charles Theodore of the
Palatinate-Sulzbach branch inherited the Palatinate in 1742 and
Bavaria in 1777. In 1799 he was succeeded in all the Wittelsbach
lands by Maximilian IV Joseph of the Palatinate-Birkenfeld line.
In 1797-1801, however, all the
Palatinate lands on the left bank of the Rhone became French.
Those on the right bank, including Mannheim and Heidelberg were
joined to Baden in 1903. The treaty of Vienna (1815) gave most of
the left Rhenish Palatinate, augmented by some adjacent
territories, to Bavaria. After World War II this Rhenish or Lower
Palatinate became part of the state (land) of
Rhineland-Palatinate.
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