Home ▸ Catalog ▸ |Medieval & Modern Coins| ▸ |Germany||View Options: ![]() ![]() Germany is today a federal republic consisting of sixteen states. Federalism has a long tradition in German history. The Holy Roman Empire comprised many petty states, numbering more than 300 around 1796. The number of territories was greatly reduced during the Napoleonic Wars (1796-1814). After the Congress of Vienna (1815), 39 states formed the German Confederation. The Confederation was dissolved after the Austro-Prussian War. Prussia and the other states in Northern and Central Germany united as a federal state, the North German Federation, on July 1, 1867. The Southern states Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt entered military alliances with Prussia. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870?71, those states joined the North German Federation. It was consequently renamed to German Empire, and the parliament and Federal Council decided to give the Prussian king the title of German Emperor. The new German Empire included 25 states and the imperial territory of Alsace-Lorraine. After the territorial losses of the Treaty of Versailles, the remaining states continued as republics of a new German federation. These states were gradually de facto abolished and reduced to provinces under the Nazi regime. The creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 was through the unification of the western states (which were previously under American, British, and French administration) created in the aftermath of World War II. |
Lorraine was Duchy of the Holy Roman Empire. Charles IV was Duke of Lorraine from 1624 until his death in 1675, with a brief interruption in 1634, when he abdicated under French pressure in favor of his younger brother, Nicholas Francis. He came to lose his duchy because of his anti-French policy; in 1633. Charles was a casualty of the fierce factional infighting in the French court between the King's brother Gaston d'Orléans, and Cardinal Richelieu, even though technically, Lorraine was subject to the Holy Roman Empire and the Emperor Ferdinand II of Austria. French troops invaded Lorraine in 1634 in retaliation for Charles's support of Gaston d'Orléans and he abdicated and entered the imperial service in the Thirty Years' War and was victorious at the Battle of Nördlingen. Shortly thereafter, Nicholas Francis too fled into exile and abdicated his claims, which were now taken up once again by Charles, who remained Duke of Lorraine in exile for the next quarter century. | ![]() |