Duchy of Nassau

The Duchy of Nassau was an independent state of the German Confederation between 1806 and 1866, in the country that later became Rhineland-palatinate and Hesse, and it gave its name to a region and a nature park that survive today. It was named after Nassau Castle and the town, though Wiesbaden rather than Nassau was its capital; the ruling house was the Nassaus, whose many branches had mostly died out by the eighteenth century, leaving the small duchy of Nassau-Usingen, Nassau-Weilburg and the Dutch lands of Nassau-Dietz, ancestor of Orange-Nassau. After the war of the first coalition the Nassau princes lost their lands west of the Rhine and, like other secular rulers deprived of church land, were compensated at the expense of Mainz and Cologne, joining Napoleon's side and supplying more troops than was asked. The duchy was created in 1806 and entered the Confederation of the Rhine, later the German Confederation. Its territory was essentially the Taunus and the Westerwald, bounded by the Main and the Rhine in the south and west, with the Lahn dividing the two ranges in the north, and it had 465,636 inhabitants in 1865. After the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 Prussia occupied and annexed it, folding it into the province of Hesse-Nassau.