The southern, Lutheran half of Hesse, created when Landgrave Philip I's lands were split among his four sons in 1567 and George I took the upper county of Katzenelnbogen and settled at Darmstadt. It sided with the emperor against its Calvinist rival Hesse-Kassel in the Thirty Years' War and stayed loyal to Austria for most of the eighteenth century.
Landgrave Louis X joined the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806 and took the title Louis I, Grand Duke of Hesse — the direct predecessor of the atlas's existing grand_duchy_of_hesse (Q20135) record, which must not be duplicated.
Polity-specific biography of the landgraviate's most famous consort and its Enlightenment court.
The Hessian partitions and the Darmstadt-Kassel rivalry in imperial context.