Just how many [*$%&@] Dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg were there? PLEASE help!

Factual Questions
1

I’m sorry for the crude title but I’m at my wit’s end trying to figure this out.

OK, it goes something like this:

Julius was Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg from 1568 until 1589.

His son Henry Julius was Duke from 1589 until 1613.

Now here’s where it starts to get confusing.

Henry Julius had two sons. Frederick Ulrich according to that page was Duke of B-L, officially, and also “Prince of Wolfenbuttel” from 1613 until his 1634. It says that between 1616 and 1622 he was deposed by his mother because of his alcoholism (!)

Now Henry Julius’s other son was the handsome Christian of Brunswick. According to his Wikipedia page, he lived from 1599 to 1626. (He died young, from wounds in battle.) It SAYS at the top of the page that he was Duke of Brunswick-Luneberg, but it doesn’t say from when to when. It doesn’t make sense; his lifetime was concurrent with his brother, Frederick Ulrich; were they both Dukes at the same time?

Now it gets even more confusing. Frederick Ulrich’s entry says that he was succeeded by TWO different men. Augustus the Younger and the burly George. According to his entry, Augustus the Younger “was duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. In the estate division of the House of Welf of 1635, he received the Principality of Wolfenbüttel.” Okay, so was he Duke of B-L, or was something else? It says at the bottom that he was “Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel” from 1635 to 1666. Could he be Duke of B-L and Duke of B-W at the same time?

The burly George, on HIS entry, says very plainly at the top of the page that HE “was duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg.” However he was also “Duke of Calenberg and Gottingen.” I don’t get it. So he and his brother Frederick Ulrich were both Dukes of Brunswick-Luneberg, at the same time, but they were ALSO the dukes of separate divisions of that duchy?

The Wiki entry on the House of Brunswick-Luneberg says:

Okay. So am I to take this to mean, that each of the rulers of these different subdivisions were ALSO Duke of Brunswick-Luneberg? In other words, there were multiple men claiming the title of Duke of Brunswick-Luneberg at the same time, who also governed separate subdivisions as well?

Maybe it’s just the very late (early) hour but I can’t wrap my mind around this. Where did these Germans get off on creating this baffling system of dukedoms?

Could someone clear this up for me?

2

Well, no you cant have 2 Dukes of the same location at the same time, but Brunswick-Lueneburg and Brunswick-Wolfenbuettel are 2 different locations [think of it as Brunswick is the county and Luenesburg and Wolfenbuettle are 2 different towns inside it, so you can have a duke of each one and they are separate.] Sorry for the spelling, but I dont have an umlauted e so I have to revert to the original spelling.

Also, dont confuse term in office … you can be duke for one week and be replaced, then go back to being duke later [happened to Dracula, he was in and out of office several times - swapping his princehood with IIRC 2 different brothers at different times] At that point in time, it was not impossible to have the king remove you from your dukedom [as had happened due to alcoholism] for anything, political, health, fallen out of favor.

Someone who has a better way of explaining will be along shortly =)

3

But ALL the men I linked to above are referred to as “Duke of Brunswick-Luneberg” despite some of them also being dukes of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel.

4

I would be willing to bet that if you actually schlepped over to Saxony[?] and looked at court records you would see something like nonoverlapping terms, where someone was replaced as Duke for a month or so, then put back into place.

Not all titles were ‘permanent’ hereditary, as I said - frequently the king would pop people in and out of ‘office’ for a number of reasons [and as you pointed out one was deposed by his mom for alcoholism]

Though it is not unknown for historians to get titles mixed up. It would be so easy to be going along and accidently make a Duke of B-W into a duke of B-L when at that specific time it was 2 different guys with each one having a different duchy.

Um, why do you want to know the dukes, anyway? Curiosity or frustration at doing a family tree?

5

Just curiosity. I’m in the middle of writing an elaborate article about the Thirty Years’ War and this entails some understanding of the different Electorates of the German territories, so I was doing some research, and got confused. At this point it’s just curiosity.

Some of these guys, or at least their descendants, may very well be in my family tree somewhere, but if so, it would be the result of rape. I mean, the Thirty Years’ War entailed massive amounts of military conquest and plunder of the whole of Europe, and it’s pretty inevitable that some of my female (Jewish) ancestors were raped along the way.

6

Considering all of that took place in the middle of the 30 years war, you should consider that dukes of occupied areas were frequently replaced with someone more friendly with the occupier, and they were then themselves replaced as fortune and battle lines shifted. I’m sure a real history book could tell you more about what happened in those duchies than Wikipedia, but one thing I do know is that Brunswick was invaded by Imperial troops in 1641 and relieved by their at the time Swedish allies following that, so it’s not all that surprising there’d be some confusion regarding who was actually in charge during that time.

7

[Moderator Note]

I edited the thread title to remove an obscenity. While we do not have formal language restrictions in GQ, we do ask that thread titles outside the Pit be reasonably safe for work. In this case, the word used in the title was both inappropriate and completely unnecessary.

No warning, but don’t do this again.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

8

Does this article help clarify things?

9

Raped by a male in the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg? I’d say that’s a long distance from inevitable. The common soldiery would be the guys doing most of the raping and if one of your female ancestors was raped it’s far more likely to have been a hairy-assed German peasant doing the ravishing.

10

As I understand the German Wikipedia article after the division in 1269 the rulers of the partial territories concurrently used the style of Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, as an empty title, in addition to their actual unique title e.g. Prince of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. So there actually were several concurrent Dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg who did not dispute each others’ right to that title.

Regarding Christian von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, he was a younger son who seemed to be Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg only because everyone in the family was; his actual possessions only were the administration of the diocese of Halberstadt and (for a short time, after forcing his brother out until his death) the principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. So his brother Frederick Ulrich was Prince of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel from 1613 to 1626 and then from 1626 to 1634.

Confusingly, part of the duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (the principality of Calenberg) from 1692 on was the electorate of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.

BTW the most prominent person using the style of Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel today is Ernst August, Prince of Hanover, notable for assaulting and insulting people, pissing against the Turkish pavilion on the 2000 world fair (the Bild tabloid published a photograph at the time, with a very small black bar which unusually was not across the eyes), and being married to the heiress presumptive of Monaco.

11

I’m pretty sure that this continued until the reign of Georg Ludwig. His father was Duke Ernst August (not the public pisser), who managed to become the first elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg . As part of that, Ernst August’s brothers, who held the other parts of Brunswick-Lüneburg agreed that, on their death, the titles would pass to Ernst August’s line. Georg Ludwig would go on to inherit the throne of Great Britain and rule as George I.

12

Fair enough, but really…look at this picture and tell me that’s not the face of a rapist right there. I have to say, I’ve never seen a portrait of a historical figure that made him look like a mug shot from America’s Most Wanted.

13

We need to distinguish between:

(a) people who rule Brunswick-Luneburg; and

(b) people who have the title “Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg” (a much larger class).

In the German system of titles, all of the male-line descendants of the Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg have the title “Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg”. This is opposed to the British system, in which only the senior male descendant of the Duke of Westminister will hold the title “Duke of Westminster”, and only one person can hold that title at any time.

Typically only one Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg would actually govern the place at any time, and he would also hold the office of Elector of Brunswick-Luneburg, or similar. But all of this brothers, and all of his sons, would also be “Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg”.

Likewise, all of the male Habsburgs were simultaneously “Archdukes of Austria”. But only one of them (at any time) held the office of Holy Roman Emperor (or, later, Emperor of Austria), and he was the one that counted.

14

**UDS, **thank you so much for clearing that up. That was exactly the explanation I was looking for. I was thinking about this in terms of the English system.

Also, I really am sorry about the vulgar thread title. I mean it - I was genuinely frustrated trying to figure this out, it was confusing me so.

15

For a parallel example Eugene of Savoy was referred to as Prince of Savoy-Carignan ( hence “Prince Eugene”, also immortalized in the Austrian battleship Prinz Eugen, the British warship Prince Eugene, the German heavy cruiser Prinze Eugen and the Italian light cruiser Eugenio di Savoia - why the French didn’t name one after him I’ll never know - they can claim him as a native son as well :stuck_out_tongue: ). But as you can see he was never in the actual line of succession for Carignan. He was in fact a younger son of a cadet line, through his grandfather.