Juelich-Berg 1742-1815 Prussia 1815-1848










Grand Duchy of Berg, 1806-1813



In 1806 BAVARIA ceded her sideland, the Duchy of Berg, to France in exchange for the counties of Ansbach and Bayreuth. Napoleon made his general JOACHIM MURAT Duke of Berg, which he elevated a GRAND DUCHY. Prussian Kleve (what was on the right bank of the Rhine) was annexed to it, as were the County of BENTHEIM and RHEINE-WOLBECK (formery to Muenster), the abbeys of ESSEN, WERDEN, ELTEN, the territories of STEINFURT and HORSTMAR, and NASSAU-SIEGEN. . After the PEACE OF TILSIT (1807), Berg annexed the County of MARK and the VEST RECKLINGHAUSEN, RHEDA, TECKLENBURG, LINGEN, MÜNSTER, In 1808, Joachim Murat was made KING OF NAPLES. In 1809 LOUIS NAPOLEON, 4 year old son of the King of Holland, was made Grand Duke. In 1810 Berg ceded her territories to the north of the Lippe. In 1813 most of the Grand Duchy formed a GENERAL GOUVERNEMENT under the Russian governor J. Gruner; the formerly Prussian territories reverted to Prussia. In 1815 the entire territory was allocated to Prussia.
In 1810 the Grand Duchy had a population of 931,000. In 1811, Napoleon Bonaparte created a UNIVERSITY at Düsseldorf, named Napoleona Augustea; the enterprise was not realized.
The capital was Düsseldorf.



Grand Dukes of Berg
Joachim Murat (1806-1809)
Louis Napoleon (1809-1813)






EXTERNAL
FILES 		Biography of Joachim Murat, from NRW 2000, in German; from Napoleonic Guide; from Histofig
Le Musee Murat, in French
Heinrich Heine-Universität D&uum;'sseldorf - ein Portrait, from HHU, in German
Rheinbund Statistics of 1810, from Napoleon Online
Westfalen und Kleve-Berg im Peninsular War, by Andreas Kopp
DOCUMENTS Flag of the Grand Duchy of Berg, from FOTW
Uniforms : Berg, from Histofig
The Grand Duchy of Kleve-Berg, from warflags.com
REFERENCE Territorien-Ploetz : Geschichte der Deutschen Länder, Vol.1, Würzburg 1964, pp.177-178



This page is part of World History at KMLA
First posted in 2000, last revised on November 12th 2004

Click here to go Home
Click here to go to Information about KMLA, WHKMLA, the author and webmaster
Click here to go to Statistics









Impressum · Datenschutz