Henry I of Hesse

Henry I of Hesse "the Child" (German: Heinrich das Kind) (24 June 1244 – 21 December 1308) was the first Landgrave of Hesse. He was the son of Henry II, Duke of Brabant and Sophie of Thuringia.

In 1247, as Heinrich Raspe, Landgrave of Thuringia, died without issue, conflict arose about the future of Thuringia and Hesse. The succession was disputed between Heinrich Raspe's nephew and his niece: Sophie was the daughter of Heinrich Raspe's brother Ludwig IV and claimed the territories on behalf of her son Henry, while Henry the Illustrious, margrave of Meissen, was the son of Heinrich Raspe's sister Jutta. Another competitor were the Archbishops of Mainz, who could claim Hesse was a fiefdom of the Archbishop and now, after the extinction of the Ludowingians, demanded its return to them. Sophia, supported by the Hessian nobility, succeeded in retaining Hesse against her cousin, who in 1264 accepted the division of the Ludowingian inheritance: Henry of Meissen received Thuringia, while Sophia's son Heinrich would inherit Hesse. In the following year, the Archbishop Werner II von Eppenstein acceded to this outcome in the Treaty of Langsdorf, accepting Henry as his liege-man and Landgrave of Hesse.

At this time, the landgraviate of Hesse consisted of the region between Wolfhagen, Zierenberg, Eschwege, Alsfeld, Grünberg, Frankenberg and Biedenkopf. In the same year, Henry acquired a part of the county of Gleiberg with Gießen from the Counts palatine of Tübingen. The landgraviate was centred on the towns of Kassel, where Henry took up his residence since 1277, and Marburg, where his grandmother Saint Elisabeth was buried and where Henry built the Castle Marburg.