Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach

Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach was a German state of the Ernestine branch of the House of Wettin in Thuringia. The duchies of Saxe-Weimar and Saxe-Eisenach had been in personal union since 1741, and in 1809 they were merged into a single duchy, which the Congress of Vienna raised to a grand duchy in 1815. From 1871 it belonged to the German Empire, and the monarchy fell in the revolution of 1918-19, after which the free state of the same name became part of the new State of Thuringia two years later. Its formal style, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Landgrave in Thuringia, Margrave of Meissen and Princely Count of Henneberg, shows how patchy the territory was: three larger districts, each an administrative Kreis, plus a scatter of exclaves, squeezed between Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria and the other Thuringian states. Weimar itself was its cultural monument: under Karl August, in the regency of Anna Amalia, the court drew Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland to the town, and it was called the home of the German spirit. Under Maria Pavlovna the grand duchy had a silver age, with Liszt as its Kapellmeister, and Karl Alexander later founded the Bauhaus and restored the Wartburg, while corresponding with Andersen. In 1905 it had some 388,000 inhabitants.