Rather than act as guardian to the Duchess and duchy, he decided, he would marry the duchess to his heir and bring Aquitaine under the French Crown, thereby greatly increasing the power and prominence of France and the Capets.

Elisabeth was childless, and in 1440 made a treaty with her powerful neighbour Philip III, Duke of Burgundy that Philip would administer the duchy and inherit it after the Duchess Elisabeth's death.

This was on the understanding that Bismarck would immediately restore the duchy to Prussia ; all that he wanted was the privilege of a mediatized family for himself and his descendants.

After being forced by the sovereign to resign, he received the purely honorific title of " Duke of Lauenburg ", without the duchy itself and the sovereignty that would have transformed his family into a mediatized house.

In the Treaty of London ( 1718 ) it was promulgated that the heir to the duchy would be Elisabeth Farnese's elder son with Philip V of Spain, Don Carlos.

Rennes would later become the capital of the duchy of Brittany.

By the Treaty of Vienna ( November 1738 ), Stanisław was compensated for the loss of his Polish throne with the duchy of Lorraine, which would eventually pass to King Louis as his son-in-law, while Duke Francis III of Lorraine was made heir to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany as compensation for the loss of Lorraine.

Upon the death of the Black Prince the duchy of Cornwall passed to his nine-year-old son, who would eventually succeed his grandfather as Richard II.

By January 1851 the parties were able to agree that the action of the opera would be moved from the royal court of France to a duchy of France or Italy, and some of the characters would to be renamed.

The duchy would then revert to the Kingdom of Portugal at her death.

Lombards were present in southern Italy well before the complete conquest of the Po Valley: the duchy would have been founded in 576 by some soldiers led by a Zotto, autonomously from the Lombard king.

Opole would became a duchy in 1172 and would share much in common with the Duchy of Racibórz, with which it was often combined.

However, the duchy was taken by King John II, who was son of Joan of Burgundy, second daughter of Duke Robert II, who claimed it in proximity of blood, and made provision that after his death it would pass to his favourite son Philip the Bold.

Even after she had been crowned queen, she would spend most of her time in Normandy, governing the duchy, supporting her brother's interests in Flanders, and sponsoring ecclesiastic houses there.

Ladislaus and Lampert were left behind because the dukes worried that the king's partisans would try to conquer their duchy during their absence.

He decided to take holy orders, in the expectation that he would become cardinal, and then pope, when he would wrest from the Venetians his duchy of Verona, of which the republic had despoiled his ancestors.

In breach of the traditional line of succession of Luxembourg, the great powers of Europe agreed that the grand duchy would be inherited in the male line of the House of Nassau.

The submission of the whole grand duchy would be the natural consequence of such a success, and, Finland once secured, Sprengtporten proposed at the head of his Finns to embark for Sweden, meet the king and his friends near Stockholm, and surprise the capital by a night attack.

Władysław was fed up with the weak position of the king in the Commonwealth ; some of his politics revolved around a failed attempt to secure a small, preferably hereditary territory – like a duchy – in which his position would be much stronger.

The crown of Denmark could be inherited by female heirs ( see Louise of Hesse ); in the duchy of Holstein the Salic law had never been repealed and, in the event of a failure of male heirs to Christian VIII, the succession would pass to the Dukes of Augustenburg — although this was debatable as the dynasty itself had received Holstein by Christian I of Denmark being the son of the sister of the last Schauenburg, Adolphus VIII.

Frederick VII, who had succeeded his father at the end of January, declared ( March 4 ) that he had no right to deal in this way with Schleswig, and, yielding to the importunity of the Eider-Danish party, withdrew the rescript of January ( April 4 ) and announced to the people of Schleswig ( March 27 ) the promulgation of a liberal constitution under which the duchy, while preserving its local autonomy, would become an integral part of Denmark.

The duchy would legally revert back to Poland if the Hohenzollern dynastic line became extinct.

In turn, the predominantly French speaking part of the duchy was ceded to Belgium as the province de Luxembourg.

The historical Duchy of Normandy was a formerly independent duchy occupying the lower Seine area, the Pays de Caux and the region to the west through the Pays d ' Auge as far as the Cotentin Peninsula.

Walter de Coutances issued an interdict against the duchy of Normandy which prohibited church services from being performed in the region.

Events in England meant that Stephen was unable to travel to Normandy himself, so Waleran de Beaumont, appointed by Stephen as the lieutenant of Normandy, and Theobald led the efforts to defend the duchy.

The grand duchy witnessed degrees of economic growth under the earlier grand dukes, but by the time of Cosimo III de ' Medici, Tuscany was fiscally bankrupt.

John de la Pole was Duke of Suffolk and John Howard was Duke of Norfolk ( 2nd creation ), while the duchy of Cornwall was reserved as a title and source of income for the eldest son of the sovereign, and the duchy of Lancaster was now held by the monarch.

In January 1364 Charles met Edward, the Black Prince at Agen in order to negotiate the passage of his troops through the English-held duchy of Aquitaine, to which the Prince agreed perhaps because of his friendship with Charles's new military adviser Jean III de Grailly, captal de Buch, who had been betrothed to Charles sister and was to lead his army to Normandy.

Events in England meant that Stephen was unable to travel to Normandy himself, so Waleran de Beaumont, appointed by Stephen as the lieutenant of Normandy, and Theobald led the efforts to defend the duchy.

A leader of the Catholic League, he invoked the hereditary rights of his wife, Marie de Luxembourg, who was a descendant of the dukes of Brittany and heiress of the Blois-Brosse claim to the duchy as well as Duchess of Penthièvre in Brittany, and organized a government at Nantes.

When King John abandoned Normandy in late 1203, effectively relinquishing control of the duchy to Philip, de Gray was one of his companions on the journey to the port of Barfleur, and went on to England with the king.

Enghien gave its name to a French duchy and to the commune of Enghien-les-Bains, a suburb of Paris, due to a complex series of family successions: in 1487, Mary of Luxembourg ( d. 1547 ), the only heir of Peter II of Luxembourg ( d. 1482 ), Count of Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise and member of one of the branches of the House of Luxembourg, married François de Bourbon-Vendôme ( d. 1495 ), the great-grandfather of King Henry IV of France.

In 1633, Henry II, Prince of Condé, grandson of Louis I de Bourbon, inherited the duchy of Montmorency, near Paris, after the execution of Henri II de Montmorency, brother of his wife Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency.

In 1689, King Louis XIV allowed Henry III, Prince of Condé, grandson of Henry II, Prince of Condé, to rename the duchy of Montmorency as " duchy of Enghien ", in memory of the duchy of Enghien which the Princes of Condé had lost in 1569 at the death of Louis I de Bourbon.

The county of Vendôme was raised to the rank of a duchy and a peerage of France for Charles of Bourbon ( 1515 ); his son Antoine de Bourbon, king of Navarre, was the father of Henry IV, who gave the duchy of Vendôme in 1598 to his illegitimate son César de Bourbon ( 1594 – 1665 ).

" He also edited the Rotuli de oblatis etfinibus ( 1835 ), which deal also with the time of King John ; the Rotuli Normanniae, 1200 – 1205, and 1417-1418 ( 1835 ), containing letters and grants of the English kings concerning the duchy of Normandy ; the Charter Rolls, Rotuli chartarum, 1295-1216 ( 1837 ), giving with this work an account of the structure of charters ; the Liberate Rolls, Rotuli de liberate ac de misis et praestitis regnante Johanne ( 1844 ); and the Modus tenendi parliamentum, with a translation ( 1846 ).

The first monarchy ever officially titled a " grand duchy " was the Medici sovereignty of Tuscany under overlordship of the Holy Roman Emperors.

Anna Maria Luisa arranged a marriage for her younger brother at the instigation of their father: On 2 July 1697 Gian Gastone de ' Medici married Anna Maria Franziska of Saxe-Lauenburg, heiress of the eponymous duchy, in Düsseldorf.

The Medici ruled the grand duchy until their extinction in 1737.

The grand duchy, initially, was ruled by the House of Medici until its extinction in 1737.

The grand duchy succeeded the Duchy of Florence, which had been established by Cosimo's predecessor, Alessandro de ' Medici ( proclaimed Duke by his alleged father, Pope Clement VII ).

Europe heard of the perils of Tuscany, and Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor asserted his remote claim to the grand duchy ( through some Medici descent ).

Gian Gastone, the last Medici, resigned the grand duchy to Francis Stephen of Lorraine.

Sienese rule ended in 1559, when Charles V handed over the whole duchy to Cosimo I de Medici, first Grand Duke of Tuscany.

The duchy then returned to the royal domain, and was detached from it successively for Giuliano de Medici and his wife Philiberta of Savoy in 1515, for Louise of Savoy in 1524, and for Philip of Savoy, Count of Genevois, in 1528.

Also, the rights of the duchy of Urbino were transferred to Christina after the death of Queen Catherine and thus assumed by future Medici rulers.

Likewise, the line of the principi di Ottajano, an extant branch of the House of Medici who were eligible to inherit the grand duchy of Tuscany when the last male of the senior branch died in 1737, but for intervention of Europe's major powers which allocated the sovereignty of Florence elsewhere.