County of Kyburg Bailiwick of Kyburg |
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Grafschaft Kyburg Landvogtei Kyburg |
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Feudal territories in Switzerland c. 1200. The territory of the house of Kyburg, including their terrories inherited from Lenzburg in 1173, is shown in yellow.
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Capital | Kyburg | |||||||||
Government | Feudalism | |||||||||
Graf | ||||||||||
• | d. 1121 | Hartmann I. von Dillingen | ||||||||
Landvogt | ||||||||||
• | 1795–1798 | Hans Caspar Ulrich | ||||||||
History | ||||||||||
• | death of Adalbert II. von Winterthur | 1053 | ||||||||
• | inheritance from Lenzburg | 1173 | ||||||||
• | comital line extinct | 1264 | ||||||||
• | Burgdorferkrieg | 1383 | ||||||||
• | Neu-Kyburg line extinct | 1417 | ||||||||
• | Landvogtei of Zürich | 1452 | ||||||||
• | Disestablished | 1798 | ||||||||
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The County of Kyburg existed from 1053 as a possession of the counts of Dillingen. It was greatly expanded with the extinction of the House of Lenzburg in 1173.
It continued to exist as a Habsburg possession under the counts of Neu-Kyburg (also Kyburg-Burgdorf) after the extinction of the agnatic line of the House of Kyburg, until the extinction of Neu-Kyburg in 1417. It then passed under direct Habsburg suzerainty, then briefly to Zürich (1424–1442), to emperor Frederick III (1442–1452) and back to Zürich in 1452, from which time it was administered as a bailiwick (Landvogtei) of Zürich until the establishment of the Helvetic Republic in 1798.
Despite not being in possession anymore, the Habsburg monarchs continued carrying the historic title of "Princely Count of Kyburg" in the grand title of the Emperor of Austria.
The first mention of Kyburg Castle, presumably with associated lands, was in 1027 when Emperor Conrad II destroyed the Chuigeburch. By 1096 the Counts of Dillingen also included Count of Kyburg as one of their titles. By 1180 the family split into two lines, the Kyburgs and the Dillingens. The county expanded when the male line of the Counts of Lenzburg went extinct in 1173, followed by the Counts of Zähringen in 1218. From the Zähringen lands they inherited the cities of Thun, Burgdorf and Fribourg. Over the following decades they founded a number of towns including; Diessenhofen, Winterthur, Zug, Baden, Frauenfeld, Aarau, Mellingen, Lenzburg, Sursee, Weesen, Laupen, Richensee, Wangen an der Aare and Huttwil. However, in 1250, quarreling between Hartmann IV and his nephew Hartmann V led to dividing the county in half. Hartmann IV (the Elder) received the original County of Kyburg and all the Kyburg lands east of the Reuss river while Hartmann V (the Younger) received everything west of the Reuss as well as Zug and Arth.