Principality of Neuchâtel

The Principality of Neuchâtel — known as the County of Neuchâtel until the seventeenth century — was a state in present-day Switzerland that existed from the eleventh century until 1848, the predecessor of the modern Republic and Canton of Neuchâtel, with its capital at the city of Neuchâtel on the lake of the same name. An associate state of the Old Swiss Confederation, Neuchâtel was allied from the late thirteenth century to several Swiss cantons and cities, most notably Fribourg (1290), Bern (1308), Solothurn (1369) and Lucerne (1501). Following the extinction of the native House of Neuchâtel in 1395, the county passed into the hands of families from Southern Germany, then to the French House of Orléans-Longueville in the early sixteenth century — the rulers shown on the map's first record of the state. On the death of Marie de Nemours in 1707 the principality was awarded to the royal dynasty of Prussia, the House of Hohenzollern, entering into a personal union with the Kingdom of Prussia that lasted, through a Napoleonic interlude from 1806 to 1814 when the territory passed out of Prussian hands and back again, until the Prussian king restored it. In 1848 the princely era ended: Neuchâtel became a republic and was admitted as a full member of the Swiss federation.