Duchy of Limburg
Duchy of Limburg
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Duchy of Limburg

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Duchy of Limburg

The Duchy of Limburg or Limbourg was an imperial estate of the Holy Roman Empire. Much of the area of the duchy is today located within Liège Province of Belgium, with a small portion in the municipality of Voeren, an exclave of the neighbouring Limburg Province. Its chief town was Limbourg-sur-Vesdre, in today's Liège Province.

The duchy evolved from a county which was first assembled under the lordship of a junior member of the House of Ardenne–Luxembourg, Frederick. He and his successors built and apparently named the fortified town which the county, and later the duchy, were named after. Despite being a younger son, Frederick had a successful career and also became duke of Lower Lotharingia in 1046. Lordship of this county was not originally automatically linked with possession of a ducal title (Herzog in German, Hertog in Dutch), and the same title was also eventually contested by the counts of Brabant, leading to the invention of two new ducal titles: Brabant and Limbourg.

The extinction of the line of Frederick's grandson Henry in 1283 sparked the War of the Limburg Succession, whereafter Limburg was ruled by the dukes of Brabant in personal union, eventually being grouped together with the Brabantian "Overmaas" territories bordering it (including Dalhem, Valkenburg, and 's-Hertogenrade), to be one of the Seventeen Provinces of the Burgundian Netherlands. Unlike other parts of this province, the lands of the duchy stayed intact within the Southern Netherlands, under Habsburg control, after the divisions caused by the Eighty Years' War and the War of the Spanish Succession. However finally, after the failed Brabant Revolution in 1789, the duchy's history was terminated with the occupation by French Revolutionary troops in 1793. The easternmost lands were reunited within modern Belgium only after World War I.

The duchy was multilingual, being the place where Dutch, French, and German dialects border upon each other and coexist at their geographical extremes, both now and in medieval times. Its northern and eastern borders are the approximate boundaries of the modern state of Belgium with the Netherlands and Germany, at their "tripoint". The eastern part, which includes Eupen, is the administrative capital and northernmost part of the modern German-speaking Community of Belgium. The duchy also included the main part of the Pays de Herve, famous for its pungent-smelling soft cheese known as Limburger or Herve.

The state's territory was situated in the Low Countries between the river Meuse (Maas) in the west and the Imperial city of Aachen in the east. These lands had formed a very large lordship under Baelen on the route between the important imperial centres of Liège and Aachen. They had chiefly been used for hunting, and not yet developed very much for agriculture. Frederick selected a natural prominence at an important intersection of roads which had probably been called "Heimersberch" or Hèvremont, and built his new comital caput there in about 1030. Kupper has proposed that the new name for this place, Limburg, was taken from the name of the fort of the ruling Salian dynasty who had in about the same period given their possession to become Limburg Abbey.

The most important towns in the eventual duchy were Limbourg, the capital, and Eupen. The Limburg estates were commonly divided into five legal districts (Hochbänke):

The territory of Limburg formed a complex patchwork with those of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, based to the west, the Principality of Stavelot-Malmedy to the south, and the County of Luxembourg, to the south. In the east the main neighbour was the Rhenish Duchy of Jülich. To the north were the smaller lordships such as Slenaken, and Wittem and the lordships of Dalhem and Rolduc ('s-Hertogenrade), today in the Dutch province of Limburg, which came under Brabant control and were referred to in that context as the "Overmaas" territory, or even Limburg. In the northeast was the imperial city of Aachen.

Linguistically Limburg was situated on the border of Germanic with Romance Europe. While in the northern and eastern districts Limburgish and Ripuarian dialects were spoken, the southwestern part around Herve was dominated by Walloon.

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