Duchy of Swabia

Swabia was the great south-western duchy of medieval Germany, one of the five so-called stem duchies, built on the lands where the Alemanni had settled in late antiquity. Proclaimed in 915, it reached from the Vosges in Alsace to the river Lech and south into the Alps, taking in much of today's south-western Germany, Alsace and parts of Switzerland. Its most famous dukes were the Hohenstaufen, who held it from 1079 until the line died out in 1268.

The Alemanni were defeated by the Frankish king Clovis I in 496 and brought into the Frankish realm under dukes of their own. In the seventh century they became Christian, with bishops' seats founded at Augsburg and Constance; great abbeys followed in the eighth century at Reichenau and Saint Gall. Frankish control tightened after 709, and the Blood Court of Cannstatt in 746 ended the old tribal duchy; the region was afterwards run by royal officials. Under the Treaty of Verdun in 843 Alamannia passed to East Francia. For centuries the names Alamannia and Swabia were used side by side, until the second prevailed around the eleventh century.

As Carolingian power faded, local counts became nearly independent, and by about 900 two families led the struggle for supremacy: the Hunfridings in Raetia and the Ahalolfings around the upper Neckar and Danube. In 915 the Ahalolfing Erchanger, allied with his Hunfriding rival Burchard II, defeated King Conrad I at Wahlwies and proclaimed himself duke. Conrad had him executed two years later, and Burchard took the title instead. Burchard defended the Thurgau against King Rudolph II of Burgundy near Winterthur in 919, and the new German king Henry the Fowler accepted his rule.

The kings soon brought the duchy closer under royal control. After Burchard's death in 926 it passed to Hermann, a nobleman from Franconia who had wed the duke's widow, and Otto the Great later gave it to his own son Liudolf, while cutting ducal rights and installing royal officials to watch over them. Liudolf rebelled and was deposed, and the title then changed hands frequently, often passing through marriage. In 1077 Duke Rudolf of Rheinfelden was chosen as a rival king against Henry IV, but his own duchy largely failed to back him, and Henry gave the duchy to his ally Frederick, count of Hohenstaufen.

Frederick had to defend his claim against Rudolf's son and the Zähringen family, and in 1096 he gave up the Breisgau to the Zähringer. His grandson, another Frederick, became Duke of Swabia and later emperor as Frederick Barbarossa, and the Hohenstaufen used Swabia as a base for their imperial power. The duchy's lands were steadily reduced: Philip of Swabia, chosen king in 1198, sold off large parts of it to win support during his struggle for the throne. The last duke, the young Conradin, pledged his Swabian inheritance to the count of Württemberg before setting out to claim Sicily in 1266. His execution in 1268 left the duchy without a ruler, and it fell into abeyance.

After his election as German king in 1273, Rudolf of Habsburg tried to revive the ducal title for his youngest son, who passed it to his own son John, known as the Parricide. John died without heirs in 1312 or 1313, and the title lapsed for good.

Swabia lived on as a region rather than a state. In 1500 Emperor Maximilian I created the Swabian Circle within the Holy Roman Empire, roughly matching the old duchy. After the empire's end most of its lands went to Württemberg and Baden, which since shortly after the Second World War have formed the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany. The name survives officially in Bavarian Swabia, whose capital is Augsburg.

Our 1000 map shows the Duchy of Swabia within the Holy Roman Empire, between the Kingdom of Burgundy to the south-west and the other German duchies; part of its old territory now lies in Switzerland.