History
The Schleswig lands north of the Eider river and the Bay of Kiel had been a fief of the Danish Crown since the Early Middle Ages. The southern Holstein region belonged to Francia and later to the Holy Roman Empire, it was however held as an Imperial fief by the Danish kings since the 1460 Treaty of Ribe. Both Schleswig and Holstein were therefore administered from Copenhagen, even after the Empire's dissolution, when the Danish kings as dukes of Holstein became monarchs of the German Confederation in 1815.
The Schleswig-Holstein Question at first culminated in the course of the Revolutions of 1848, when from 1848 to 1851 revolting German-speaking National liberals backed by Prussia fought for the separation of Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark in the First Schleswig War. Though the status quo was restored, the conflict lingered on and on 1 February 1864 the German Confederation, i.e. Prussian and Austrian troops crossed the Eider sparking off the Second Schleswig War, after which Denmark had to cede Schleswig and Holstein according to the Treaty of Vienna. After the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, victorious Prussia took control over all Schleswig and Holstein but was obliged by the Peace of Prague to hold a referendum in predominantly Danish-speaking Northern Schleswig, which it never did.
Not until the German defeat in World War I the Schleswig Plebiscites were decreed by the Treaty of Versailles, after which the present-day German-Danish border was drawn taking effect on 15 June 1920, dividing Schleswig in a southern and northern part and leaving a considerable Danish and German minority on both sides.
Read more about this topic: Southern Schleswig
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)