Electorate of Hanover

The Electorate of Hanover, formally the Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg, was an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire in north-west Germany that grew out of the Principality of Calenberg. The duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg had been divided among branches of the house of Welf in 1269, and in 1692 the emperor Leopold I raised the prince of Calenberg to the college of electors, creating the new electorate, whose territory was enlarged by the inheritances of Grubenhagen earlier and Celle in 1705, together with the counties of Diepholz and Hoya. It made Hanover its capital. Its fortunes were tied to Britain by the Act of Settlement of 1701 and the Act of Union of 1707, which settled the succession on Electress Sophia of Hanover and her descendants, and in 1714 the prince-elector became George I of Great Britain. For most of its existence the electorate was therefore ruled in personal union with Great Britain, yet it kept its own government and had to conclude a treaty with London whenever Hanoverian troops fought beside British ones, and during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars it raised the King's German Legion. It was annexed by Napoleonic France, merged into the Kingdom of Westphalia in 1807 and reconquered in 1813, before being re-established as the Kingdom of Hanover in 1814.