Wernigerode

The counts of Wernigerode were a comital house in the Harzgau at the foot of the Harz, seated at Wernigerode Castle, recorded in 1213. Their first documented member, Count Albert I, came from Haimar and appears under the Wernigerode title in a charter of 1121. The family rivalled the counts of Regenstein.

Pressed by the Welf dukes of Brunswick, they lost imperial immediacy in 1268 and became vassals of the margraves of Brandenburg, then the archbishops of Magdeburg from 1381. In 1343 they added former Regenstein lands as fiefs of Halberstadt. The male line ended with Henry IV in 1429, and a settlement of 1417 passed the county to Stolberg.

Stolberg ruled it in personal union for two centuries. The Stolberg-Wernigerode line, formed in 1710, restored the castle, accepted Prussian overlordship in 1714 and was mediatized; the county entered Prussian Saxony in 1815.