Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans.

Episode 191 the Mar graveyard of Baden.

Also episode 7 of season 10.

The empire in the 15th century.

What is it like to be a prince?

Well, not quite what it set out to be.

In particular, when you are a smaller prince, not in stature but in land.

The Markgrafs of Baden were such princes in the 15th century.

Their main territory, a slither of southwest Germany just 60km long, was too small to play on the European even on the German stage, but too big to escape the need of massive palaces and warfare.

What makes Baden so fascinating is that despite its handicap, it managed to become a medium sized state.

1/2 of Baden Wurtemberg.

The way there was a long one involving friendship and loyalty to the death, piratical princesses, alchemy, someone called the Turken Louis, a sun shaped city and some skilled diplomacy.

But before we start, the usual plea for support making this show has gone from being a hobby and a side hustle to being my obsession and even my main occupation.

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And with that, back to the show.

After last week's detour into the history of the German universities, we are now alternating back to our journey through the Holy Roman empire in the 15th century.

We are traveling back down to where Mannheim does not yet exist and resume our journey up the Rhine river towards Basel.

As we do this, we are entering one of the most fragmented parts of this ancient political structure that had once been the stem Duchy of Swabia, one of only five duchies that existed in Henry the Fowler's kingdom of East Francia.

In these 500 years since Henry's reign, the Duchy of Swabia had been divided into smaller and smaller principalities.

The first time in the 12th century when it broke up into three the Hohenstaufen Duchy of Swabia, the Duchy of Zeringen in the southwest and the lands of the Welf in the east.

Frederick Barbarossa and his successors consolidated the Welfish and the Hohenstaufen lands and penetrated the territory with castles and cities.

In 1218, the Zeringen dukes died out and their vast territory was distributed amongst the mighty cities like Zurich, Bern and Basel, the Habsburgs and various offshoots of their own family, as well as their vassals.

The next atomization happened in 1268, when the house of Hohenstaufen fell under the executioner's axe.

And as in the case of the Tieringer, it was the cities, the Habsburgs and a brace of more or less powerful counts who seized what had once been the power base of the emperors of the High middle ages.

In 1521, the Imperial Constitution recognized 101 different princes, cities and immediate lords in Swabia, more than in any other of the imperial circles.

And these 101 territories varied dramatically in size and economic power.

The Dukes of Wiltemberg were by far the biggest, accounting for about a quarter of the population for followed by the Margraves of Baden with 8% and the Bishopric of Augsburg with 4%.

And everybody else was even smaller than that with the Abbey of Hegbach with 600 inhabitants bringing up the back.

Which gets us to the how did this work?

What room to act did you have as one of these entities?

What were sensible policies to follow?

How do you come out on top now?

There are several approaches to this issue.

One would be to follow chronologically every move of every one of these players, shuffling villages and abbeys back and forth to trace the growth or contraction of each one of these territories.

This is what I actually did in my first draft of this episode.

But then I read the following sentence out.

It is highly likely that even before Rudolph I's marriage to Kunigunde von Eberstein, property belonging to this family, which had risen from a noble rank and was mainly based on fiefs from Speyer and the inheritance of the Counts of Laufen came to Baden.

Rudolf also acquired Liebenzell and Alt Eberstein, today's Ebersteinbroeck.

And that is when I realized that there are various ways of getting rid of listeners, even such loyal listeners as yourselves.

35 minutes of that kind of stuff and I will be all alone shouting into the podcast Ethereum.

So I came up with another idea.

We did know who came out tops the Dukes of Wurtemberg and the Margrafts of Baden, because the state is now called Baden Wurtemberg.

And whilst the Dukes of Wurtemberg are a fascinating subject, the rise of the Markgrafs of Baden was a lot steeper.

Meaning we may be able to learn more from them.

And we will not go through all the acquisitions and divestments that got them there.

That would sound like the reading of the land registry out loud.

If that is of interest, though, there is a great map available on a website called Leo BW that shows the territorial expansion of the Margraviad of baden up to 1796.

I've put a copy of it in the map section of historyofthegermans.com website.

The episode artwork and in the transcript of this episode for you to look at that should cover this, leaving us with a lot of room to discuss potential strategies for success.

The first thing a prince could do is also the most sensible thing to he could develop the economy of his territory.

And the Magravs of Baden could look to a very successful set of precedents in their own family.

They were one of the cadet branches of the Dukes of Tseringen.

The Tseringers ruled the territory in what is today Switzerland, well as the furthest southwest corner of Germany.

There they founded important cities, namely Bern, Freiburg in Germany and Fribourg in Switzerland.

And they promoted the growth of Zurich, Morten, Burgdorf, Offenburg, Fillingen, Schaffhausen and many others.

However, their descendants in Baden were not that interested in the foundation of cities.

The may be down to the fact that these cities had a habit of asserting their independence once their economy got going.

Mainz, Worms, Speyer and the mighty Strasbourg had all thrown out their bishops, whilst Freiburg, ungrateful as it was, had kicked out their local count and put themselves under the protection of the Habsburgs.

There was an established opinion that the Magravs of Baden had founded Stuttgart in 1219.

They did own the stud farm that gave the city its name for a while, but that does not mean they founded a city there.

No evidence of a foundation had been found, and the originator of this thesis has become the subject of some controversy.

It would have just been so deliciously ironic if it had been true, but probably is not.

As a consequence, the Margrave yard featured just one urban settlement, Pforzheim, which in the 15th century was one of the main residences of the Margrafs.

Pforzheim is today best known as a center for jewelry and watchmaking, but that only came about when in 1767, the Margraf established a jewelry and watch manufacture in an orphanage.

Most of the period between the 15th century and 1767.

Well, the city was left to fend for itself, and it didn't do that very well.

Then there is the wein Ordnung of 1495 that prohibited the Dilution of wine with all kinds of cheap ciders and fruit alcohol, and established fines for the use of sugar, sulphur and poisonous substances.

A Reinheitsgebort before the more famous beer purity law of 1516.

The Margrafs claim it was the first of its kind, but there was already an imperial order in 1487, and there is a much more meaningful imperial regulation that came in in 1498.

So if the House of Baden was not hugely successful in promoting economic activity, there was one thing they were excelling.

Loyalty.

Specifically loyalty to the House of Hohenstaufen.

The idea being that loyal vassals were rewarded with more fiefs and they could expect favourable imperial court decisions in their regular disputes with their neighbours and cousins.

They were there right from the word go.

Margraf Hermann III fought with Conrad of Hohenstaufen in his civil war against Emperor Lothar iii, and he followed him on the ill fated Second Crusade.

His son, Margrave Hermann IV, accompanied Barbarossa to Italy, fought with him before Milan and at the catastrophic Battle of Legnano.

He too came along on an ill fated crusade, the third one where he also died.

The next, Margrave Herman V, fought for Philip of Swabia in these civil wars, and then joined Frederick II when he showed up at Constance in 1212.

But the title of most loyal and most romantic of Paladins must go to Margraf Fridich I.

Barely 18, he followed his best friend and liege lord Conradin, Duke of Swabia and grandson of Frederick ii, to southern Italy.

Beaten at the Battle of Tagliacozzo in 1268, they were imprisoned together in the Castello di Ovo in Naples.

Legend has it that the two friends were playing chess when they were told that the King of Sicily had condemned them both to death.

They heard the message, looked at each other and resumed their game.

This whole story, including this scene, became a bit of a cornerstone of German national mythology, which also developed some rather unexpected homoerotic undertones.

Tischbein painted the scene in 1784.

Look at the picture and you'll get what I mean.

So was it worth it?

Well, that last bid at the end, with young Fridich decapitated on the market square of Naples?

Certainly not.

But on the other hand, it could have been the by far most rewarding bet in medieval history, because Friedrich was not only the heir to the Margraviard of Baden, he was also the grandson of the last Babenberger Duke of Austria, AKA the golden boy in Tischbein's picture was in play to become Duke of Austria.

He did not have the cards, though.

King Ottokar of Bohemia had already occupied the duchy.

But if Conradin had succeeded in Sicily and then returned to the empire like his grandfather had done, thrown out the ineffective King Richard of Cornwall and been crowned King of the Romans, well, then that new king would have supported his best mate's claim on Austria.

And if that had happened, then it would have been bye bye Habsburg and all hail the Berdinian Empress.

Okay, that did not work out.

And instead of world domination, we have a tragic tale of friendship and chivalry.

But that does not mean that a century of loyalty had gone unrewarded.

The core of the Baden lands that stretch on the eastern shore of the Rhine from Bruchsal to Baden Baden, was at least in large part given in compensation for services rendered.

They were also able to expand their traditional homeland way upriver between Freiburg and Basel, the area still called the Mark Greffler land.

And they acquired the county of Spohnheim quite a way further north along the Nile River.

When the Hohenstaufen fell, the Markgrafts of Baden took over much of what they had held on behalf of the Imperial family as their own and added a few bits and pieces, though they were nowhere near as successful in this grab and run as the Habsburgs or the Wurtembergers had been.

So loyalty sort of tick, but not a huge one.

They did alright, but not massively so.

Hence, if you cannot get it by charm, can you get it by force of arms?

Well, they tried once, in 1462, in a conflict that involved almost everyone we've met so far.

What I'm talking about is, of course, the Mainzer Stiftsfeede.

I have mentioned it several times before, but there was no point in trying to describe it unless we have all the protagonists round the table.

And that we do now.

So here it.

On May 6, 1459, the Archbishop of Mainz, Dietrich Schenk von Erbach, passed away.

He had led the archdiocese for 25 years.

25 years, during which he lost again lands and rights to the Landgarths of Hesse, who had now pushed through Mainz territory almost all the way to the gates of Frankfurt.

When the cathedral chapter proceeded to elect a new archbishop, two candidates were put Dieter von Isenburg and Adolf von Nassau.

Dieter von Isenburg gained the upper hand, four against three votes.

He then asked the Pope, who was Drumroll Pius ii, formerly Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, author of Fruity Prose, friend of the Podcast, but also now a conservative hardliner Piccolomini demanded that Isenburg submit to him not only as it concerned his activities as shepherd of his sizable flock, but also in his role as Prince Elector.

Isenburg remained non committal, but Pius II thought he had won and gave him the pallium, together with a bill for 10,000 gulden, twice the usual papal tax on newly appointed bishops.

That payment became the crunch point after his predecessors had lost so much of Mainz territory and income.

The new archbishop did not have the money for the standard fee, let alone a double fee.

It also did not help that another papal condition was that he should wage war against the Count Palatine that Isenburg did not, realizing that his opponent was none other than Friedrich der Siegrache Frederick the Victorious, who was well victorious.

That lost battle further reduced the resources of the archbishopric, which is why Isenburg now outright refused to pay the Pope, at which point Pius II deposed him and promoted his erstwhile rival, Adolf von Nassau, to the arch episcopal throne.

Great result.

We now have two contenders for the most senior prince electorship in the empire, a principality that was already in trouble.

So the sharks start circling.

Isenburg secured the support of the city of Mainz and, In an interesting 180 degree shift, the help of his erstwhile enemy, Friedrich, the Sieg Reiche of the Palatinate.

Friedrich's change of allegiance had not come out of a deep conviction on points of canon law, as you can imagine, but was brought about by the promise of valuable arch episcopal territory, namely Lorsch and Heppenheim.

Meanwhile, Adolf von Nasser too was busy offering generous rewards for nobles willing to support his cause.

He was particularly successful amongst the neighbours of Friedrich, who feared the continued strengthening of the Palatinate.

Duke Ulrich V of Wurtemberg signed up.

The Bishop of Speier Nix von Hoeneg signed up.

And then there was the question of whether the Margraf of Baden would sign up too.

This Margraf, Karl I, was a sensible, a calculating man.

He knew the Palatinate was militarily and economically much stronger than his territory.

But the Margravial family had just hit a temporary pinnacle of power.

One of his brothers was Archbishop of Trier and another was the Bishop of Metz.

And then the news came that Friedrich of the Palatinate was also involved in another equally sizable feud in Bavaria, had left his lands with an army to go to Landshut.

That was it, now or never.

Karl von Baden had an alliance of Wurtemberg, Trier, Speyer, Metz and half of Mainz to go after his overbearing neighbour in the north, who was also out of the country.

So let's do it.

They gathered their army of allegedly 8,000 and invaded the Palatinate.

As per standard procedure, they got busy burning downtowns and villages, believing the Count Palatine was away.

You can imagine their surprise when they came to the village of Zeckenheim, now part of mannheim, and encountered 300 Palatine riders and 2,000 infantry and the man himself.

It was time to fight.

The Bedinians called up their 7 to 800 knights, while Friedrich received reinforcements of 300 armored riders from Mainz.

The battle was fierced and lasted all day.

As it was becoming more common, the deciding factor was was the infantry, specifically the militia of Heidelberg, who targeted the horses and fought the knights on foot.

But there was still some good old chivalry going on.

The commander of the invading force, Duke Ulrich of Wurtemberg, refused to accept the defeat and kept on fighting ferociously.

After most of his army had fled, he was then called up for single combat by a knight called Hans von Gemingen.

Ulrich was defeated and taken prisoner, as were Markgraf Karl von Baden and his brother, the Bishop of Metz.

They all had to pay huge ransoms and Carl von Baden had to hand over parts of the county of Spoenheim and take his city of Pforzheim as a palatine fief.

There was a rematch in 1504 at which Baden was more successful, but that was the end of their ambition to conquer lands.

The true loser in all of this was the city of Mainz, because a few months later, Adolf von Nasser managed to convince some citizens to open the gates to his army.

His soldiers poured in, killed a lot of people, including the brother of Johann Fuss, the printer.

The next morning, Adolf calls up 800 citizens, including Johannes Gutenberg, and tells them to leave.

The city was stripped of its autonomy and rights and was from then on no longer a free imperial city.

But this is not the end of the martial history of the Margraves of Baden.

They never had the resources to fight a major war.

But once they divided their already small lands even further into Baden Baden and Baden Dolach, that was now completely out of reach.

Though they could not fight on their own behalf, they could do so on behalf of others.

One who went down this route was Ludwig Wilhelm Margraf of Baden Baden.

Though he was a reigning prince, he spent his entire life in the service of the Austrian Habsburgs.

He fought at the siege of Vienna in 1683 and rose through the ranks during the Ottoman wars, becoming Imperial Field Marshal and Supreme Commander in the Great Turkish War in 1689.

In 1691 he won the Battle of Stan Kamen that secured Hungary for the Habsburgs.

All this happened against the simultaneously occurring War of the Palatine Succession, where French troops deliberately devastated southwest Germany and amongst others, destroyed Ludwig's home in Baden Baden.

To save his lands, he transferred to the Palatine Front and handed over command in Hungary to his cousin, Prince Eugene of Savoy, who promptly won the Battle of Zenta that ended the Great Turkish War, making Eugene, not Ludwig, into a great Austrian hero.

Ludwig, affectionately called Turkenlouis, remained in Imperial service and was given huge amounts of money, the booty from his walls and a rich heiress.

All that was enough for him to build the enormous palace at Rastad, the first of the great baroque palaces modelled on Versailles.

If there is one trait that defines these principalities in the Empire, then it's one upmanship.

Sure, if you are a successful general, by all means go and build yourself an enormous castle, you literally earned it.

And yes, if your cousin, successor and rival builds himself an even larger and even more splendid palace in Vienna, AKA the Belvedere, then take it as a blessing that you are dead before it's finished.

But not all Imperial princes were great war heroes.

In fact, very few were.

That did not stop them spending vigorously.

The House of Baden has its fair share of tales of profligacy, two of which are quite extraordinary.

The first involves Margraf Eduard Fortunate of Baden.

Despite his name Fortunatus, he was not a very fortunate man.

Let's start with his father, Christoph Markgraf of Baden.

Rodemchen had been the second son of the Markgraf of Baden Baden.

To avoid another division of this already minuscule territory, Christoph agreed to get an annual pension and a few villages around Rodemmachan.

If you won't find Rudemachen on the atlas, it's because it's now called Rodemak and is one of les plus beau villages en France, but still not exactly a Metropolis.

In 1564, said Christoph of Badenrodemachen married Cecilia of Sweden, daughter of king Eric the 14th.

How come a man with a glorious title but not more income than an English squire married a Swedish princess?

The only case I can think of went the opposite way when the King of Sweden married a German Olympic hostess.

Well, as it happens, Cecilia was a bit of a wild child, having trysts with her brother in law and racking up astounding debts.

A Margrave with no cash and no questions was a suitable marriage candidate for a promiscuous princess.

In fact, he was the only marriage candidate.

Unsurprisingly, Cecilia preferred the royal courts of Europe to Rhodemagen, which explains why Edouard Fortunat was born in London and why Elizabeth I was his godmother.

To fund her lifestyle at court, his mother employed pirates challenging the Hanseatic trade in the Channel.

But this side hustle wasn't enough to pay for it all.

And so she piled up debt on a staggering scale.

It went so far that her husband had to flee to avoid getting put into debtors prison.

Well, he still ended up there.

When he tried to sneak back into the country.

He was only released when Elizabeth I covered his debts.

To avoid a diplomatic clash with Sweden, Cecilia, her husband and son had to leave and move to Stockholm.

There she expanded her pirate fleet and converted to Catholicism.

It was all very chaotic, which is why her husband and son left and returned to tiny Rhodemager.

When little Edouard is 10, his father died.

His mother showed up four years later with the Spanish ambassador in tow, giving birth to a girl.

Shortly afterwards, everyone in the little castle of Rodemarchan is broken.

Cecilia's income from Sweden has been cut because she tried to have her brother King John killed, which is just not the done thing.

The scandal about the little girl also does not help.

The ambassador buggered off.

Still, Edouard Fortunat adds a nice palace on his village hill.

Things suddenly brighten up when young Edward inherits the much bigger Margrave yard of Baden Baden.

Okay, Baden Baden is also deep in debt and profoundly mismanaged, but at least bigger than Rodemagan.

So it is party, party, party all the way.

Until Edouard Fortunat's habits collide with financial realities.

His debts are such that most of the income of the Margrave yard goes straight out to the big bankers, the Fuggers and Welsers.

At that point he asks the Fuggers whether they want to buy the Mar graveyard when they turn him down.

So he goes to Brussels to live with his mum, who seemingly had found someone willing to lend her some more cash.

In Brussels, our not very fortunate.

Edouard Fortunat meets Maria von Eycken, a lady of some wealth and beauty, but not of equivalent status to a Margraf.

He initially tried to fool her into a fake marriage to get hold of her money, but not grant her the status of a Margravine.

But she figures it out and pressures him into an official marriage on Schlosshoenbaden, where he appears very reluctantly and wearing slippers.

And he had a point.

This mesalliance and his profound mismanagement was taken as the reason for Edouard's cousins, the Markgrafs of Baden Dorlach, to occupy his territory.

Right now he comes up with a great new plan.

He had met two Italian alchemists who had promised him to turn base metal into gold.

He takes his last bit of money and puts them up in one of his few remaining castles at Ebro, near Baden Baden.

Turns out making gold is hard, but they were able to make poison, so they changed the plan.

Now they want to poison the Baden Dorlach cousins and and take over their margraveyard in return.

That, I'm afraid, that did not work out either.

The whole sorry tale comes to an end in 1600 when Edouard the Unfortunate has an unfortunate fall.

A very sad story, which now needs to be followed by a more positive, if equally profligate one.

In 1709, the Margraviard of Baden was still divided between two lines.

The house of Baden Baden, living in the massively oversized palace in Rastadt that the Turkenloui had built, and the Baden Dolachs, who resided, or were supposed to reside, in the small township of Dolach.

Today it takes about 10 minutes to cross either of these states on the motorway.

These lands were tiny, and after the 30 years war, followed by the War of the Palatine Succession and then the War of the Spanish Succession, all of which involved troops marauding across Bedinian lands, their economies were well and truly short.

In the case of the Magravs of Baden Dorlach, all their homes and castles had also been burned down by the French.

That is why the new Magrav, Karl III Wilhelm, decided that he needed a new palace and he called it Karls Rest.

Karlsruhe in German.

I guess the name rings a bell.

It is home to the highest courts in the land.

But if you've never been there, let me explain to you what it looks like.

Karlsruhe is the most absolutist city design you can imagine.

It was built entirely from scratch.

At its center stands the Schlossturm, the castle tower.

From the tower, 32 roads emerge in a straight line like rays from a sun, reflecting the 32 sections on a mariner's compass.

Three quarters of the alleys go out into the vast hunting forest, whilst in the southern quarter, eight avenues adorned with buildings stretch out like a fan.

Wherever one is in the design city, one can see the castle tower, the seat of the ruler, a true Sun King.

Only that this king was a mere Markgraf.

The original design did not designate space for a town hall, nor did the concept recognize any form of representation of the estates.

Baden Daulach was so tiny its cities had shrunk to be mere towns and Its nobility had been subjugated, so that absolutist rule found little resistance.

But again there is that disconnect between the baroque ideal and economic reality.

Carl III really wanted to be an absolutist ruler.

Benevolent one who moves his little statelet forward, but an absolutist ruler all the same.

But when it came to filling up his grand design with actual people, he realized he needed to give them incentives.

Money he did not have, nor was there any industry or university yet.

All he could offer was freedom.

So he gave them religious freedom, freedom of opinion, press freedom.

Within limits, of course, but still freedom.

So despite its uber authoritarian design, it is not an oppressive structure.

The palace surrounding the Schlossturm is of course vast.

It had to be.

The cousins down in Rastadt had just added the Fasanerie to their already immense Schloss.

And the Bishop of Speyer had hired the greatest of German Baroque architects, Balthasar Neumann, to build his residence at Bruchsal, a mere 25km north from here, where, whilst the gigantic block that is the Manheimer schloss loomed another 30km further on.

OK, now you say thanks.

This is all very amusing, but how did these little margraves, with their tin pot, statelet and oversized palaces, acquire a territory that stretched 260km from Mannheim to the gates of Basel, including most of the Black Forest and the cities of Heidelberg, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Offenburg, Freiburg and Constance?

Now there are two ways to tell this story.

One is about diplomatic genius and the other is about being in the right place at the right time.

Let's do the hero story first.

When Karl III of Baden Daulacht, the founder of Karlsruhe, died in 1738, the title went to his grandson, Karl Friedrich, who was just 10 years old.

He did take over officially in 1746, but most of what he did was having a great time fathering children and losing money playing cards.

In 1751, however, he got married and it seems his wife straightened him out.

From now on, he took an interest in the well being of his lands that held roughly 90,000 people.

And she got him interested in the latest developments in philosophy, sciences and economics.

She herself corresponded with Voltaire, received Herder, Goethe, Klopstock Gluck and Wieland at her court.

He in turn struck up friendships with the physiocrats and went to Paris to meet Mirabeau.

Pierre Dupont de Nemours briefly acted as chief minister for Baden.

Karlsruhe became another of the centers of enlightened absolutism in the German lands.

He banned torture in 1767.

And served them in 1783, 30 years after Frederick the Great.

But at least he did it.

After all, some of his colleagues were selling troops to the Brits to suppress the American colonies at the same time.

And then Karl Friedrich inherited in 1771, the last of the Markgrafts of Baden.

Baden shuffled off his mortal coil and according to a century old arrangement, his lands are reunited with those of his cousin in Dolach.

That now more than doubles the size of the little state to roughly 200,000 people.

Twenty years later, the French Revolution, and with it the revolutionary wars begin.

And Baden on the Rhine, just across from Alsace, was straight in the firing line.

At which point we have to introduce another hero, Sigismund von Reitzenstein.

He was a lawyer who had studied at the University of Gottingen and joined the Baden administration in 1788, where he quickly rose up the food chain.

Just as an aside, he would later reform the University of Heidelberg along the lines of Gottingen and Berlin that we discussed last week.

In 1796, things came to a head.

This is the war of the first coalition and things are moving back and forth.

The French have made gains, but they've also experienced reversals of fortune.

Napoleon is an unknown general, having been given command of the ragtag army of Italy.

Jourdan and Moreau are attacking along the Rhine.

Baden has to make a stand with the Austrians or submit to the French.

Baden signs a ceasefire with France.

Reitzenstein negotiated a separate peace with the French, not a great one.

Baden was to give up its territories on the left bank of the Rhine, about 10% of their total, and pay 2 million in compensation that they didn't have.

So his prince refused to sign.

But a few months later, after the Austrians had caved under Napoleon's onslaught, he did sign on the dotted line.

Meanwhile, Reitzenstein had moved to Paris as the envoy of the Margrave yard of Baden, and whilst there he made many friends, convinced them of Karl Fridi's enlightened convictions and general amenity towards the French.

And at home, Reizenstein kept pushing for ever closer alignment with the French, preventing Baden from joining the war of the Second Coalition, as for instance Wurtemberg had done.

And in 1803, in the Reichsdeputationshupschloss, the rewards poured in.

Baden received much of the territory of the dissolved prince bishoprics of Speyer and Strasbourg, as well as several abbeys and drumroll the whole of the Palatinate on the right bank of the Rhine, including Mannheim and Heidelberg.

And to top it off, Karl Friedrich received the electorate of the Palatinate as well.

But that wasn't all.

Reitzenstein, who had been ill for a while, returned to Paris in 1806 and negotiated the real coup a marriage between the heir of Baden and Stephanie de Boany, Napoleon's adopted stepdaughter.

That marriage only came about in 1807, but in advance of it, Baden received the Breiskau, former Austrian lands in the southwest, including the city of Freiburg, then the counties of Leiningen and the principality of Furstenberg, and all the prince bishops and abbeys, places like Constance, St.

Blasian and St.

Peter that lay in between.

They were all incorporated into Baden.

When Carl Friedrich died in 1811, his state had over 900,000 inhabitants, up from 90,000 when he set out 73 years earlier.

Reitzenstein did one more thing to protect the state he helped create.

In 1813, after the battle of Leipzig, he convinced the new Margraf to withdraw his troops and join the anti French coalition.

That was late, but not too late.

And definitely not too late for a prince who was also Napoleon's son in law and one of his greatest beneficiaries.

Within this story there is an epilogue.

The allied forces demanded that the new Markgraft divorced his wife, Stephanie de Beauharnais.

He refused, not out of love, but out of common decency, which could have resulted in the restitution of land to the deposed counts and princes.

Baden was saved by his sister, the wife of Tsar Alexander of Russia, who intervened on his behalf and the general reluctance to return to the tiny states.

Pre Napoleon.

Stephanie de Boarny had no surviving son.

One boy was born, but was declared dead soon after.

Then, in 1828, a young man appeared in Nuremberg who said he had been raised in total isolation in a darkened cell.

Some claimed that this man, who was given the name Kaspar Hauser, was in fact the son of Stephanie de Boani, who had not in fact died and was hence the true heir to the Grand Duchy.

Something worth a whole episode, I think.

All these stories about diplomatic genius and daring marriages are, however, only half the story.

The underlying reason Napoleon reorganized the states of the Holy Roman Empire was to create entities that were large enough to provide him with viable auxiliary forces, but too small and too divided to stand up against him.

And for the Southwest, Baden was not just the natural but the only option to create such a state.

Let's go through the other principalities in the area.

First up, the bishops and abbots.

Well, they are no go, for obvious reasons.

Then there is the Palatinate.

But the Elector's Palatinate had Inherited Bavaria in 1777, Bavaria had already gained significantly, so that adding the southwest would have made Bavaria just simply far too big.

A major expansion of Wurtemberg would in principle have been possible.

However, the current Duke Friedrich had joined the second coalition, was a son in law of King George III of England, and Napoleon did not like him.

Friedrich was an extraordinarily tall and even a more extraordinarily obese man, prompting Napoleon to say that he was put on earth to test how far human skin can stretch.

Friedrich in return wondered how so much poison could be contained in so small a head as Napoleon's.

No, that was not an option.

The next contender would be the House of Hohenzollern Sigmaringen.

Apart from being a tiny state, this was the Hohenzollern family linked to the kings of Prussia, which also did not work.

And finally, the largest landowner in the south of what is now Baden were the Habsburgs.

The area was called Further Austria.

After all, giving them more land was explicitly not the plan.

So by a process of elimination, the Markgraf of Baden was the only viable option if Napoleon wanted a medium sized state in the southwest ruled by a client king, or more precisely, a client Grand Duke.

Sure, Reincenstein's diplomacy, Karl Friedrich's affinity to the French Enlightenment, his granddaughter being the wife of Tsar Alexander and the marriage of Stephanie de Beauharnais were helpful.

But I'm wondering how crucial.

So here we are.

How do you rise from having a tiny statelet squeezed between powerful neighbors and the need to keep up with the palace building Joneses, be in the right place at the right time and then do not muck it up.

Next week we will take a look at another one of Baden's powerful neighbors, Wurtemberg, and follow up on a theory I recently read about how this region, the ancient stem duchy of Swabia, became one of Europe's centers of innovation.

Prepare to be amazed.

And in the meantime, why not?

Catching up on some of the topics we touched upon today, namely how the Hohenstaufen rose to become Dukes of Swabia in episode 43, all change.

All change.

And then how Barbarossa settles the conflict between his family and the tsehringer in episode 50, Barbarossa begins.

I often guide listeners to episode 91, the Hohenstaufen epilogue, to relive the end of Conradin and the House of Hohenstaufen.

But there's another story that involved the Markgrafs of Baden.

The sad story of Frederick II's eldest son Henry, the king in brackets.

Episode 81 Then there is the fall of the Tsringer, the struggle over Austria and the rise of the Habsburgs we discussed in episode 140 Rudolf von Habsburg and the Golden King.

I hope you are going to enjoy those and if it makes you want to support the show on historyofthegermans.com support well, you know where to find it.