The Hohenzollerns bought Brandenburg for 400,000 guilders and ended up ruling Germany
From a castle on a Swabian mountain, a family of minor counts first recorded in 1061 climbed through marriage, loyalty and shrewd purchases to become kings of Prussia and, from 1871, German emperors. One branch even ruled Romania. Defeat in 1918 swept their thrones away, though the family still owns the castle.
Their name comes from Hohenzollern Castle, perched on an 855-metre peak in the Swabian Alps near Hechingen. The first documented member is Burkhard I, Count of Zollern, who died in 1061. A 16th-century historian later invented a grander ancestor, a supposed grandson of Charlemagne called Tassilo, but that figure was exposed as fiction in the 19th century. The counts rose as dependable vassals of the Hohenstaufen emperors; Frederick III married into the Nuremberg nobility and was granted the Burgraviate of Nuremberg in 1192.
The family then split. The Catholic Swabian line kept small principalities at home and later supplied Romania's rulers from 1866 to 1947. The Protestant Franconian line was the ambitious one. Frederick VI of Nuremberg was sent to govern unruly Brandenburg in 1411, made Elector in 1415, and bought the territory outright from Emperor Sigismund two years later for 400,000 Hungarian guilders. In 1525 Albert, last Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, turned their lands into the Duchy of Prussia under Polish overlordship, and from 1618 Brandenburg and Prussia shared a ruler.
Titles were negotiated carefully. In 1701 Frederick I became King in Prussia, not of Prussia, because part of Prussian land still lay under the Polish crown. Frederick the Great won Silesia, made Prussia a great power, and after the First Partition of Poland in 1772 could at last style himself King of Prussia. When the German Empire was proclaimed in 1871, Otto von Bismarck persuaded William I to take the title German Emperor rather than Emperor of Germany.
The dynasty's final chapter came with William II, who built a navy to rival Britain's and led Germany into the First World War. The 1918 revolution forced him and the Crown Prince to abdicate, and the Weimar Republic replaced the monarchy. Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, now heads the former royal line, and Karl Friedrich heads the Swabian branch.
Source: House of Hohenzollern
