The Grand Duchy of Würzburg () was a German grand duchy centered on Würzburg existing in the Napoleonic era.
History As a consequence of the 1801 Treaty of Lunéville, the Bishopric of Würzburg was secularized in 1803 and granted to the Electorate of Bavaria.Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, Vol. II: The Peace of Westphalia to the Dissolution of the Reich 1648–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 640–648Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 704–710 In the same year Ferdinand III, former Grand Duke of Tuscany, was compensated with the Electorate of Salzburg.Derek Beales, Joseph II: Against the World, 1780–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 567–570Adam Zamoyski, Napoleon: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 356–360 In the Peace of Pressburg on 26 December 1805, Ferdinand lost Salzburg to the Austrian Empire but was compensated with the Würzburg territory, Bavaria having relinquished it in return for Tyrol.Mark Jarrett, The Congress of Vienna 1814–1815 (London: Routledge, 2013), 14–18Charles Esdaile, Napoleon’s Wars: An International History 1803–1815 (London: Penguin, 2007), 197–199.
Ferdinand’s new state was initially known as the Electorate of Würzburg (Kurfürstentum Würzburg).Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire, 711–715;Michael Broers, Europe Under Napoleon 1799–1815 (London: Hodder Arnold, 1996), 123–125. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire on 6 August 1806, the territory was elevated to the Grand Duchy of Würzburg.The new state joined the Confederation of the Rhine on 30 September 1806 as part of Napoleon’s reorganisation of the German political order.Alexander Grab, Napoleon and the Transformation of Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 158–162Stuart Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe (London: Routledge, 1991), 120–123. In 1810 the Grand Duchy acquired the territory of Schweinfurt, further consolidating its position within Franconia.James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 417–419.
After Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Leipzig, Ferdinand dissolved his alliance with the First French Empire on 26 October 1813.Adam Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 512–516Charles Esdaile, Napoleon’s Wars, 438–441. Through an Austrian-Bavarian treaty of 3 June 1814, Ferdinand lost his possessions to the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Grand Duchy was dissolved.Mark Jarrett, The Congress of Vienna, 112–115. Ferdinand was restored to a reconstituted Grand Duchy of Tuscany by the Congress of Vienna. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Würzburg remained as an ecclesiastical institution without temporal power, but was reformed in 1818 after the Concordat of 24 October 1817 with Bavaria.Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 289–292Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, 748–752.
References