Lingen

Lingen stands on the Ems in the southern part of the Emsland. Mentioned in 975, it became the centre of a county established in 1388. Its position between the German lands and the Netherlands exposed it to the successive religious and dynastic conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Charles V's forces took Lingen after a period of Lutheran rule, and in 1550 he granted it to his sister Mary, governor of the Habsburg Netherlands. During the Eighty Years' War the county passed repeatedly between Spanish and Dutch control as armies crossed the frontier. The Dutch held it from 1597 to 1605 and again for much of the period after 1632. Prussia inherited Lingen in 1713; after the Napoleonic wars it became part of the kingdom of Hanover in 1815.