Prussian Guelders or Prussian G(u)elderland (; ) was the part of the Duchy of Guelders ruled by the

Kingdom of Prussia The Kingdom of Prussia (, ) was a German state that existed from 1701 to 1918.Marriott, J. A. R., and Charles Grant Robertson. ''The Evolution of Prussia, the Making of an Empire''. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. It played a signif ...

from 1713. Its capital was Geldern. The Upper Quarter of the Duchy of Guelders was part of the Spanish-ruled Southern Netherlands by the end of the 17th century. In the 1713

Treaty of Utrecht The Peace of Utrecht was a series of peace treaty, peace treaties signed by the belligerents in the War of the Spanish Succession, in the Dutch city of Utrecht between April 1713 and February 1715. The war involved three contenders for the vac ...

during the

War of the Spanish Succession The War of the Spanish Succession was a European great power conflict fought between 1701 and 1714. The immediate cause was the death of the childless Charles II of Spain in November 1700, which led to a struggle for control of the Spanish E ...

, the Upper Quarter was partitioned between the

Dutch Republic The United Provinces of the Netherlands, commonly referred to in historiography as the Dutch Republic, was a confederation that existed from 1579 until the Batavian Revolution in 1795. It was a predecessor state of the present-day Netherlands ...

Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...

, and Prussia. Besides Geldern, other towns in the Prussian duchy were Horst,

Venray Venray or Venraij (; ) is a Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality and a city in Limburg (Netherlands), Limburg, the Netherlands. The municipality of Venray consists of 14 towns over an area of , with 43,494 inhabitants as of July 2016 ...

, and Viersen, the latter of which was an

exclave An enclave is a territory that is entirely surrounded by the territory of only one other state or entity. An enclave can be an independent territory or part of a larger one. Enclaves may also exist within territorial waters. ''Enclave'' is s ...

surrounded by the Duchy of Jülich. Prussian Guelders was part of the Lower Rhenish-Westphalian Circle within the

Holy Roman Empire The Holy Roman Empire, also known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation after 1512, was a polity in Central and Western Europe, usually headed by the Holy Roman Emperor. It developed in the Early Middle Ages, and lasted for a millennium ...

. Prussian Guelders was occupied by Revolutionary France in 1794 and later annexed into the

First French Empire The First French Empire or French Empire (; ), also known as Napoleonic France, was the empire ruled by Napoleon Bonaparte, who established French hegemony over much of continental Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. It lasted from ...

as part of the Roer Department. After the

Napoleonic Wars {{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Napoleonic Wars , partof = the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars , image = Napoleonic Wars (revision).jpg , caption = Left to right, top to bottom:Battl ...

, the western regions became part of the

Kingdom of the Netherlands The Kingdom of the Netherlands (, ;, , ), commonly known simply as the Netherlands, is a sovereign state consisting of a collection of constituent territories united under the monarch of the Netherlands, who functions as head of state. The re ...

, while the eastern regions, such as Geldern and Viersen, were made part of the new Prussian province of Jülich-Cleves-Berg. These latter regions, until then linguistically and culturally Dutch, rapidly became Germanized.

External links

Treaty of Utrecht about Guelders between the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of Prussia (2 April 1713)
– German text (pages 91–96)

References

1713 establishments in Prussia 1794 disestablishments Duchy of Guelders Guelders War of the Spanish Succession {{Netherlands-hist-stub