Schaumburg-Lippe

Schaumburg-Lippe, also called Lippe-Schaumburg, was a small state in Germany, located in the present-day state of Lower Saxony, with its capital at Bückeburg, an area of 340 square kilometres and over 40,000 inhabitants — the polity shown on the map. It was created as a county in 1647 through the division of the County of Schaumburg by treaties between the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg and the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, which carved the Schaumburg lands between them and left the house of Lippe-Alverdissen a compact principality between the Weser and the Minden hills. Through the centuries of the old Reich the little county soldiered above its size — its contingent fought for the powers of the day, and in the 1780s its troops even served at Gibraltar for Britain. In 1807, amid Napoleon's reordering of Germany, Schaumburg-Lippe became a principality, and as the Confederation and then the Empire succeeded one another it stood among the smallest of the German sovereign states, its court at Bückeburg's residence and its fame resting on the scale of its miniature court life. With the German Revolution it became a free state in 1918, and it remained a constituent land of the republic until 1946.