Duchy of Brunswick

The Duchy of Brunswick was the Welf state of northwest Germany, remade at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 from the old Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, whose dukes had carried the Brunswick-Luneburg title since 1235. Neither compact nor indivisible, the Welf lands had split and merged with every marriage and extinction, and Vienna tidied them into a tidy duchy with Brunswick city as its head. The duchy marched through the German Confederation, stayed sovereign and independent, unrecognized by Prussia over Ernest Augustus, when Prussia swallowed Hanover in 1866, joined the North German Confederation first, and entered the Empire from 1871, a loyal soldier-state of middling size. Napoleon had folded it into Westphalia from 1807 to 1813; the boy Charles fled unabdicated in the 1830 revolution, and liberal reforms with an October constitution followed. The World War ended it: like its fellows it was disestablished and folded into the Weimar Republic as the Free State of Brunswick.