Europe · The modern states
Duchy of Holstein
drawn on the map 1848–1852
Holstein (a German duchy inside the Empire, in the Lower Saxon Circle) and Schleswig (a Danish fief, outside the Empire) were long jointly ruled by the Danish crown and its cadet lines but bound by the medieval pledge that they be "forever undivided" (up ewig ungedeelt, Treaty of Ribe 1460). This underlay the 19th-century Schleswig-Holstein Question.
- Shown on the map
- 1848–1852
- Peak area
- 20k km²
- Region
- Europe
Overview
Holstein (a German duchy inside the Empire, in the Lower Saxon Circle) and Schleswig (a Danish fief, outside the Empire) were long jointly ruled by the Danish crown and its cadet lines but bound by the medieval pledge that they be "forever undivided" (up ewig ungedeelt, Treaty of Ribe 1460). This underlay the 19th-century Schleswig-Holstein Question. The First Schleswig War (1848–1851) ended with Danish victory and the London Protocol (8 May 1852), which kept the duchies joined to Denmark only by personal union and declared Denmark's integrity a "European necessity." When Frederick VII died heirless in 1863 and Christian IX signed the November Constitution incorporating Schleswig, Prussia and Austria invaded in the Second Schleswig War (1 February–30 October 1864); Denmark, defeated, ceded Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg by the Treaty of Vienna. The duchies passed to Prussia after 1866.
Common questions
- What was the Duchy of Holstein?
- Holstein (a German duchy inside the Empire, in the Lower Saxon Circle) and Schleswig (a Danish fief, outside the Empire) were long jointly ruled by the Danish crown and its cadet lines but bound by the medieval pledge that they be "forever undivided" (up ewig ungedeelt, Treaty of Ribe 1460). This underlay the 19th-century Schleswig-Holstein Question.
- When is the Duchy of Holstein shown on the map?
- The border data draws the Duchy of Holstein 1848–1852. The source samples borders at fixed dates, so a span can begin late or run on past the end.
- How large was the Duchy of Holstein?
- At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the Duchy of Holstein covered about 20,000 km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.
Sources
This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia articles for each territory as the primary basis, with Encyclopædia Britannica, the World History Encyclopedia, German History in Documents and Images, national institutions such as the Swiss Federal Council and the National Museum of Denmark, and the scholarship of Peter H. Wilson and Joachim Whaley on the Holy Roman Empire. The article this entry is anchored on:
- Wikipedia — Duchy of Holstein en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Holstein
This entry was last updated .
This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made
Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.
Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).
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