Nassau

The House of Nassau took its name from Nassau Castle on the Lahn, after the lordship of Laurenburg, held by founder Count Dudo around 1100, was moved there in 1159. As Franconia fragmented after the Hohenstaufen fell, Nassau's lords emerged as imperial counts answerable only to the emperor. Count Henry the Rich, who died in 1251, left two sons whose 1255 partition created the elder Walramian and younger Ottonian branches.

The Walramian line produced Adolf of Nassau, elected King of the Romans in 1292 and killed in battle at Göllheim in 1298. The Ottonian line grew greater in the west: William the Silent inherited Orange in 1544 and led the Dutch revolt against Spain, his descendants serving as hereditary Dutch stadtholders; William III of Orange took the English and Scottish thrones in 1689.

In 1815 the Orange-Nassau line gained the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, while the Walramian branch united the ancestral lands into the Duchy of Nassau, capital Wiesbaden.