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Swa·bi·a (swā'bē-ə)  |
A historical region of southwest Germany that originally included parts of present-day France and Switzerland. It was divided into small principalities and fiefdoms after 1268, but its prosperous towns often banded together in defensive leagues, most notably the Swabian League of 1488 to 1534.
Swabian Swa'bi·an adj. & n.
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History
Swabia is rich in history and is a treasury of German architecture. Settled in the 3d cent. by the Germanic Suebi and Alemanni during the great migrations, the region was also known as Alamannia until the 11th cent. (The Alemannic, or Swabian, dialects of the various regions of Swabia [in its largest sense] remain linguistically closely related.) It became one of the five basic or stem duchies of medieval Germany in the 9th cent., when it far exceeded its present boundaries, including also Alsace and Switzerland E of the Reuss River. In 1079 the duchy was bestowed on the house of Hohenstaufen, which in 1138 also obtained the imperial title.
On the extinction (1268) of the dynasty, Swabia broke up into small temporal and ecclesiastic lordships and lost its political identity. The Swiss part became independent in 1291 and the Hapsburg territories in Alsace passed to France in 1648, but Breisgau and the other Hapsburg domains in S Baden remained Austrian until 1803-6, except from 1469 to 1477, when they were ruled by Charles the Bold of Burgundy. The rest of Swabia was held in large part by the counts (later dukes) of Württemberg, by the margraves of Baden-Durlach, by the landgraves of Fürstenberg, by the princes of Hohenzollern, by the bishops of Strasbourg, Konstanz (Constance), and Augsburg, by several powerful abbeys, and by a multitude of petty princes, counts, and knights.
Most of the Swabian municipalities had obtained the status of free imperial cities (i.e., virtually independent republics) by 1300. Among them were Augsburg, Ulm, Schwäbisch Gmünd, Reutlingen, and Ravensburg. Their wealth, due mainly to commerce and industry, made them the most powerful element of the country, and they made their superior power felt by forming a series of leagues, starting in 1331. The Swabian League of 1376-89 successfully opposed Emperor Charles IV but was eventually defeated by the count of Württemberg. The most important Swabian League was that of 1488-1534.
The chief Swabian cities accepted the Reformation in the 16th cent., but the countryside has remained divided between Catholics and Protestants to the present day. With the commercial revolution of the 15th and 16th cent. the Swabian cities temporarily lost most of their importance. (In the 19th cent. some, especially Stuttgart, revived as industrial centers.) When the Holy Roman Empire was organized in circles in the 16th cent., the Swabian Circle, similar in extent to the present region, was created. At the diet of Regensburg of 1801-3, which acted largely under the influence of Napoleon I, many of the small ecclesiastic and feudal holdings were taken over by Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria.
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Swabia, Suabia, or Svebia (German: Schwaben, Schwabenland or Ländle) is both a historic and linguistic (see Swabian German) region in Germany. Swabia consists of much of the present-day state of Baden-Württemberg (specifically, historical Württemberg and the Hohenzollerische Lande, but not the western region of Baden), as well as the Bavarian administrative region of Swabia. In the Middle Ages, Baden, Vorarlberg, the modern principality of Liechtenstein, modern German-speaking Switzerland, and Alsace (now in France) were also considered to be a part of Swabia.
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2000 years ago, the Suebi or Suevi were an Elbe Germanic people whose origin was near the Baltic Sea, which was thus known to the Romans as the Mare Suebicum (today, the term "Swabian Sea" is applied to Lake Constance). They migrated to the southwest, becoming part of the Alamannic confederacy. The Alamanni were ruled by independent kings throughout the 4th and 5th centuries. Also, a number of Suevi (20,000-50,000[1]) reached the Iberian Peninsula under king Hermeric and established an independent kingdom in 410 in what is now northern Portugal, Galicia, and western regions of Asturias and most of León (in northwest Spain). Their kingdom was known as Galliciense Regnum and endured until 585. Its political center was Braccara Augusta (present-day Braga, Portugal).
Swabia became a duchy under the Frankish Empire in 496, following the Battle of Tolbiac. Swabia was one of the original stem duchies of East Francia, the later Holy Roman Empire, as it developed in the 9th and 10th centuries. The Hohenstaufen dynasty (the dynasty of Frederick Barbarossa), which ruled the Holy Roman Empire in the 12th and 13th centuries, arose out of Swabia, but following the execution of Conradin, the last Hohenstaufen, on October 29, 1268, the original duchy gradually broke up into many smaller units.
Karl the Great's (or Charlemagne) family is known to hail from Swabia. The major dynasties that arose out of the region were the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns, who rose to prominence in Northern Germany. Also stemming from Swabia are the local dynasties of the Dukes of Württemberg and the Margraves of Baden. The Welf family went on to rule in Bavaria and Hanover, and are ancestral to the British royal family that has ruled since 1714. Smaller feudal dynasties eventually disappeared; however, for example, branches of the Montforts and Hohenems lived until modern times, and the Fürstenberg survive still. The region proved to be one of the most divided in the Empire, containing, in addition to these principalities, numerous free cities, ecclesiastical territories, and fiefdoms of lesser counts and knights.
The Old Swiss Confederacy was de facto independent from Swabia from 1499 as a result of the Swabian War.
Fearing the power of the greater princes, the cities and smaller secular rulers of Swabia joined to form the Swabian League in the 15th century. The League was quite successful, notably expelling the Duke of Württemberg in 1519 and putting in his place a Habsburg governor, but the league broke up a few years later over religious differences inspired by the Reformation, and the Duke of Württemberg was soon restored. The region was quite divided by the Reformation. While secular princes like the Duke of Württemberg and the Margrave of Baden-Durlach, as well as most of the Free Cities, became Protestant, the ecclesiastical territories (including the bishoprics of Augsburg, Konstanz and others) remained Catholic, as did the territories belonging to the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and the Margrave of Baden-Baden.
In the wake of the territorial reorganization of the Empire of 1803 by the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, the shape of Swabia was entirely changed. All the ecclesiastical estates were secularized, and most of the smaller secular states, and almost all of the free cities, were mediatized, leaving only Württemberg, Baden and Hohenzollern as sovereign states. Much of Eastern Swabia became part of Bavaria, forming what is now the Bavarian administrative region of Swabia.
From 1939 to 1945, Nazi Germany claimed sovereignty over an area of Antarctica, which was named Neu-Schwabenland in honour of Swabia.
Outside of Germany, many Swabians settled in Hungary, including part of what is now Serbia; and Romania (the Danube Swabians and Swabian Turkey) in the 18th century, where they were invited as pioneers to repopulate some areas. They also settled in Russia, Bessarabia, and Kazakhstan. They were well-respected as farmers. Outside of Europe, Swabian settlements can also be found in Brazil, Canada, and the United States. The town of Swaffham, Norfolk means "homestead of the Swabians", some of whom must presumably have settled[citation needed] in England alongside the Angles and Saxons.
In several languages of eastern and south-eastern Europe, the local name for "Swabian" has come to be used as a colloquial name for "Germans" in general.
Swabians have in former times been the target of many jokes and stories where they are depicted as excessively stingy, overly serious, prudish, or as simpletons, for instance in "The Seven Swabians" (Die sieben Schwaben) published in Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the Brothers Grimm. However, this has ceased to a large extent, while Swabians are nowadays said to be frugal, clever, entrepreneurial and hard-working. In a widely respected publicity campaign on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Baden-Württemberg, the economically most successful state in modern Germany, the Swabians famously replied to the former jokes with: ""We can do everything - except speak Standard German" (Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch), alluding to the region's distinct local dialect.
Many Swabian surnames end with the suffixes -le, -el, -ehl, and -lin. Examples would be: Schäuble, Egeler, Rommel, and Gmelin. The popular surname Schwab is derived from this area, meaning literally "Swabian".
In Switzerland, "Sauschwab" is a derogatory term for Germans, derived from the Swabian War of 1499. In Serbian, Polish, and Bulgarian, "Shvab" or "Szwab" may be a semi-abusive term for any German, not just one from Swabia. In parts of the former Yugoslavia (i.e. Slovenia, Slavonija in Croatia, and Vojvodina in Serbia), the term Swab (locally Švab, from Шваб) is somewhat applied to all German peoples who lived in those regions until shortly after World War II, and many of their descendants; it is even occasionally used as a slang term to refer to all Germans as well as Austrians and Swiss German speaking people.
Swabian (Schwäbisch) is one of the Alemannic German dialects of High German, spoken in the region of Swabia, present in the North-Eastern area of the Alemannic Sprachraum. A separate version of Wikipedia is maintained in Alemannic German.[2]
The following is an abbreviated list of individuals who hailed from the region. Inclusion in this list is not indicative of descent from the original Swabians.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Swabia". Read more |
