Rhine league

The League of the Rhine is the name given to the association of more than fifty cities in Germany established in 1658 by King Louis XIV of France after failing to be elected head of the Holy Roman Empire, despite the victory of France in 1658 at the Battle of the Dunes.

Cardinal Mazarin, then Prime Minister of France, led the operation in order to keep the House of Austria out.

The League sent a force of 6,000 to fight on the side of France and the Empire against the Ottomans, seeing action in 1664 at the Battle of Gotthard.

The League was promulgated with a duration of three years, and was later extended twice. Officially finished in August 1667, its end should in fact be dated to 1668, as French diplomacy succeeded in negotiating a further extension of the alliance as the Rheinbundrat, made up solely of the leading members of the League, which lasted until 1688.

After its disintegration, the league was recreated in 1806, although this time with a larger size and under the Confederation of the Rhine, created in the framework of the Napoleonic Wars and which gave the coup de grace to the Holy Empire.

League Members

Map of the Holy Roman German Empire in 1648.

• Electorate of Maguncia (1658)
• Electorate of Cologne (1658)
• Duchy of the Palatinate-Neoburg (1658)
• Bremen-Verden (1658) (Sweden)
• Brunswick-Lunebourg (1658)
• Hesse-Kassel (1658)
• France (1658)
• Hesse-Darmstadt (1659)
• Wurtemberg (1660)
• Principado obispal de Münster (1660)
• Swedish Pomerania (1660) (Sweden)
• Electorate of Tréveris (1662)
• Palatinado-Zweibrücken (1663)
• Basel diocese (1664)
• Brandenburg (1665)
• Archdiocese of Strasbourg (1665)
• Brandenburg-Prussian (1666)