Duchy of Luxembourg

The Duchy of Luxembourg was a state of the Holy Roman Empire and the ancestral homeland of the House of Luxembourg. Its ducal lands were assembled in 1353 from the old County of Luxembourg and neighbouring lordships, and Emperor Charles IV raised them to a duchy in 1354 for his brother Wenceslaus. The House of Luxembourg became one of the leading political forces of fourteenth-century Europe, supplying four Holy Roman Emperors and acquiring the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Kingdom of Hungary. John of Luxembourg, Wenceslaus's son, became king of Bohemia in 1310, and his son Charles IV was elected emperor in 1346. In 1443 the duchy passed to Philip the Good of Burgundy, and in 1477, through the marriage of Mary of Burgundy to Maximilian of Habsburg, it entered the Habsburg inheritance. Luxembourg was later part of the Spanish and Austrian Netherlands, and its fortress became one of the strongest in Europe. French revolutionary armies annexed the duchy in 1795, ending its separate existence. Its capital was Luxembourg City.