Prince-Bishopric of Lübeck

Origins

Henry the Lion moved the bishopric of Oldenburg in Holstein to the new town of Lübeck in 1160, and the bishops gathered estates in eastern Holstein. After Henry's fall in 1180 they held these lands as imperial princes. Conflicts with the citizens of the Free and Hanseatic City of Lübeck led them to govern from Eutin.

Rule and society

The territory was a small rural principality of lakes and estates around Eutin. After the Reformation the cathedral chapter turned Lutheran and from 1586 elected princes of the house of Holstein-Gottorp, an arrangement the Peace of Westphalia protected. One of them, Adolf Frederick, became King of Sweden in 1751. Eutin grew into a small court town of the Enlightenment, later called the Weimar of the North.

Decline and legacy

In 1803 the see was secularised as the Principality of Lübeck and joined to the Duchy of Oldenburg, whose ruler had been its last prince-bishop. It stayed Oldenburg's exclave until the Greater Hamburg Act of 1937 merged it into Prussian Schleswig-Holstein.