How two lordships bought for a title became a country

What Vaduz and Schellenberg were before the sale

The stretch of the Rhine valley that became Liechtenstein was part of the Roman province of Raetia. A Roman road ran through it from south to north, crossing the Alps by the Splügen Pass and keeping to the right bank of the Rhine at the edge of a floodplain that periodic flooding left empty for long stretches. Roman villas have been excavated at Schaanwald and Nendeln. Romansh was the predominant language until about 1100, after which German gained ground. Around 1300 Walsers from the Valais were settled at Triesenberg, and the village still keeps features of their dialect.

In 806 the bishops of Chur, who had held secular power over the area since the 6th century, had to hand it to Hunfrid, the first count of Raetia. The land then passed through a sequence of comital families by inheritance and division. On 3 May 1342 the brothers Hartmann III and Rudolf IV of Werdenberg-Sargans divided their property, and Hartmann took the castle of Vaduz, first recorded in 1322, with rights reaching from the Landquart to the Rhine. In 1396 King Wenceslas enfeoffed Count Heinrich V with Vaduz, and from then on it counted as an imperial immediate county: its lord held it directly from the emperor, with no duke in between. That legal standing is what a buyer paid for three centuries later.

To the north, the lords of Schellenberg held a lordship running along the Eschnerberg through Ruggell and Gamprin to Bendern, with the Rhine ferries at Ruggell and Gamprin. By the 1430s both territories had passed to the barons of Brandis, who served the Habsburgs as bailiffs of Feldkirch and held citizenship of Bern, and their lands became a buffer between the two. The Swiss burned Balzers in 1445 and took Vaduz castle in the Swabian War of 1499. The Peace of Basel on 22 September 1499 settled the zones of interest for the long term, and the Rhine became a border, if a permeable one.

Why the lordships went up for sale

Johannes von Brandis, provost of Chur cathedral, sold Vaduz and Schellenberg in 1510 to his nephew, Count Rudolf V of Sulz, whose family held them until 1613 and set the local customary law down in writing. In 1613 they went to Count Kaspar of Hohenems, when the two lordships together had about 3,000 inhabitants. Under Kaspar's descendants the administration fell into mismanagement and arbitrary rule. Witch trials in the 17th century persecuted and executed more than 100 people. In 1684 Count Ferdinand Karl was deposed and taken out of the country, and the prince-abbot of Kempten ran both lordships as imperial commissioner.

The financial crisis continued after the Hohenems family regained control, and the rights were offered for sale piece by piece. The southern communes of Vaduz were offered to the Three Leagues; the prince-abbot of St Gallen, the counts Waldstein and the princes Schwarzenberg were all interested, and a sale of the lordship rights to the subjects themselves was considered.

Why the Liechtensteins paid for two poor lordships

The family took its name from Liechtenstein Castle in Lower Austria, near Vienna, built around 1122 to 1136 by Hugo von Liechtenstein on a fief from the Babenberg margraves. Over the following centuries it gathered land in Moravia, Lower Austria, Silesia and Styria, all of it inside countries ruled by other dynasties, chiefly the Habsburgs, whom several Liechtensteins served as close advisers. Karl of Liechtenstein was Obersthofmeister at the court of Rudolf II until 1607, sided with Rudolf's brother Matthias in their dispute, and was raised to hereditary prince on 20 December 1608.

The Bohemian Revolt made the family rich. After the Battle of White Mountain in November 1620, Karl, as the emperor's representative in Bohemia, oversaw the arrest and execution of 27 Protestant leaders of the rising. The family then acquired land confiscated from expelled Protestant nobles in Bohemia and Moravia cheaply, since Karl himself carried out the confiscations. In 1633 Ferdinand II gave the Moravian estates of Mährisch Kromau and Ungarisch Ostra the name Principality of Liechtenstein, a name that had fallen out of use by 1647.

What the estates could not give was a seat in the Imperial Diet. Every Liechtenstein holding was a fief from the Habsburg ruler as king of Bohemia or archduke of Austria, and a princely title without land held directly from the imperial crown was an honour with no vote. Vaduz and Schellenberg were such land, because the Duchy of Swabia had lost its duke in 1268 and its former vassals had become immediate vassals of the emperor.

Prince Johann Adam Andreas bought the lordship of Schellenberg on 18 January 1699 and the county of Vaduz on 22 February 1712. The Historisches Lexikon states that only the imperial immediacy justified the high price for two lordships that produced modest revenues. For the thirteen years between the two purchases the northern half belonged to the Liechtensteins and the southern half still to the Hohenems. On 23 January 1719 Emperor Charles VI united the county and the lordship as the imperial principality of Liechtenstein, in honour of "his true servant" Anton Florian of Liechtenstein, and the family took its hereditary seat in the Diet. The land took the name of the family that had bought it.

How absent princes governed Liechtenstein from Vienna

The new owners broke with local custom at once. Service instructions of 10 April 1719 abolished the old court constitution under which each of the two territories elected its own Landammann, dissolved the two territories as corporate bodies and divided the principality into six districts. Taxes rose, the administration fell into a dispute with the church over tithes, and the subjects' complaints to the emperor were almost always decided for the authorities. In 1733 Prince Josef Wenzel sent a commission that restored the old court order in form, while first-instance justice and administration stayed with the princely Oberamt in Vaduz.

The Oberamt, a bailiff, a revenue officer and a clerk, spoke for princes who always resided outside the country. None of them set foot in Liechtenstein before 1842. The account of the princely house records that Vaduz castle stood unused and was let as a restaurant for hikers until the late 19th century.

How Napoleon made Liechtenstein sovereign

In 1806 Maximilian I of Bavaria asked for Liechtenstein among the territories he wanted as his price for joining the Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon refused, because he had come to value Prince Johann I as Austria's negotiator before the Treaty of Pressburg, and Liechtenstein entered the Confederation as a member. Membership made it sovereign in 1806 and ended its place in the Holy Roman Empire.

Johann I used that sovereignty to reform from Vienna: land reform from 1806, a new tax order in 1807, the end of serfdom in 1808, a land register in 1809 and the Austrian civil code in 1812. His instructions of 1808 abolished the Landammann for good, with effect from 1 January 1809, and turned the villages into political municipalities under the Oberamt. Most of the population rejected the reforms, and it rose against them in 1809. The Congress of Vienna admitted Liechtenstein to the German Confederation in 1815, and on 9 November 1818 Johann I issued the constitution the Confederation required. It gave the estates, the clergy and the peasantry, one task: to approve each year the sum of tax the prince asked for, without debate.

How the subjects won a share of the state

The revolution of 1848 was bloodless in Liechtenstein. Peter Kaiser and later Karl Schädler sat for Liechtenstein in the German National Assembly in Frankfurt, and the draft of an elected constitutional council, dated 1 October 1848, placed the highest power "united in the prince and the people". Prince Alois II conceded a Landrat, the first legislature, elected on 20 May 1849. His reaction decree of 20 July 1852 put the 1818 constitution back in force, though the labour services stayed abolished and feudal dues now went to the state treasury.

The constitution of 26 September 1862 was negotiated between Prince Johann II's representatives and a committee of the estates, and its preamble speaks of the Landtag's contractual consent. It created a Landtag of 15, three members named by the prince and twelve elected indirectly through electors. The prince kept all rights of state power, an absolute veto and the appointment of the government, the judges and the officials. The government was a foreign governor and two Liechtenstein councillors. Appeals went to the princely court chancellery in Vienna, and the supreme court sat in Innsbruck, so the country's highest courts sat outside it.

In the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 a contingent of about 80 men held the Stilfser Joch against the Italians. A popular legend says that 80 went and 81 came back, and who the extra man was is disputed. The German Confederation dissolved that year, and on 12 February 1868, under pressure from the Landtag, the army was abolished. In 1878 a dispute over currency ended with two electoral districts, which revived the old division: the former county of Vaduz became the Oberland and the former lordship of Schellenberg the Unterland, with a guaranteed number of seats for the smaller Unterland.

The resident population rose from about 4,400 at the end of the 18th century to 8,693 in 1911, held down by a marriage restriction of 1804, famines in 1817 and 1846 and emigration to America. A customs and tax treaty with Austria in 1852 made Liechtenstein part of a large economic area, and the Austrian gulden was legal tender from 1859. Swiss textile manufacturers opened factories from 1861, and the number of textile workers rose from 21 in 1861 to 677 in 1912, 470 of them women. The first bank opened in 1861, and the railway between Feldkirch and Buchs has run through the country since 1872.

Why the principality turned from Vienna to Bern

The First World War exposed how closely the principality was tied to Austria-Hungary. Liechtenstein declared itself neutral, but France, Russia and the United Kingdom interned Liechtensteiners and partly confiscated their assets. Food deliveries from Austria-Hungary fell from September 1914 and had ceased by 1916, the Entente imposed an embargo in 1916, and the Spanish flu took lives in the autumn of 1918. Smuggling spread and the state approached bankruptcy.

Politics formed around the crisis. Wilhelm Beck's circle founded the Christian-Social People's Party before the elections of March 1918, and its opponents answered with the Progressive Citizens' Party in December. In the November putsch of 1918 the opposition forced the resignation of Leopold von Imhof, governor since 1914, and a provisional committee under Martin Ritter ran the government for about a month. Liechtenstein gave notice on the customs treaty with Austria on 2 August 1919, and in the same year Switzerland took over its diplomatic representation wherever Liechtenstein had none of its own. An application to join the League of Nations failed in 1920: at the vote of 17 December 1920 Switzerland was the only state in favour and 28 voted against.

Constitutional talks came to a head when Johann II visited the country in September 1920. The Landtag adopted a new constitution unanimously on 24 August 1921; Prince Karl signed it for the prince on 5 October and it came into force on 24 October. It defined the principality as a constitutional hereditary monarchy on a democratic and parliamentary basis, with state power "anchored in the prince and in the people". All 15 members of the Landtag were now elected, the government had to be Liechtenstein citizens, initiative and referendum were introduced on the Swiss model and every court moved into the country. The prince kept an absolute veto, emergency decrees and the power to dissolve the Landtag.

On 29 March 1923 Liechtenstein signed the customs treaty with Switzerland, in force from 1 January 1924. Swiss customs law and other federal law apply in Liechtenstein as far as the union requires, and Swiss trade treaties with third states cover it too. The sources disagree on when the Swiss franc arrived: the history article on Wikipedia gives 1920, Britannica gives 1921, and the Historisches Lexikon says Liechtenstein introduced it unilaterally in 1924, after the Austrian crown had lost its entire value by 1922. The company law of 1926 then let the state attract holding companies with flat-rate tax deals.

How the princes came to live in Vaduz

The estates that had made the family were already shrinking. The Historisches Lexikon records that the Czechoslovak land reform between 1919 and 1938 cost the House of Liechtenstein about 50% of its landholdings.

Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, and Prince Franz I made his grandnephew Franz Josef his deputy the same month. Franz died in July 1938, and Franz Josef II, according to the Historisches Lexikon, became that year the first reigning prince to take up residence in the country. The history of the princely house dates the move from Valtice to Vaduz to 1939 and ties it to the confiscation of the family's properties after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. On the Lexikon's dating, 219 years passed between the creation of the principality and a prince living in it.

A National Socialist party, the Volksdeutsche Bewegung in Liechtenstein, was founded in March 1938 to seek annexation to Germany and found support only in a small minority. Hitler rejected plans for interference on 18 March 1938, and the two established parties formed a coalition that filled the Landtag in the spring of 1939 through a silent election on a joint list. Franz Josef paid Hitler an official visit in Berlin on 2 and 3 March 1939. The party's putsch of 24 March 1939 failed and its leaders were jailed. Within days the Heimattreue Vereinigung collected signatures for the country's independence; the Historisches Lexikon puts them at 95.4% of all voters, and the Wikipedia history gives a count of 2,492.

Through the Second World War the unarmed principality depended on Switzerland, which controlled its German border and brought it into the Swiss war economy, so supplies held. Two new metal firms, Presta and Hilti, produced for German armaments.

What the family lost after the war

At the end of the war Czechoslovakia expropriated all of the family's lands and possessions in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, including the Lednice and Valtice estates. The two Wikipedia accounts give different areas: over 1,600 square kilometres of farmland and forest in the history of the country, and about 1,200 square kilometres, 7.5 times the principality's own area, in the history of the princely house. Liechtenstein's own area in the record is 160 square kilometres. Nearly all the princes had been buried in the family crypt at Vranov until a new crypt was built in Vaduz in 1960.

The principality itself grew. In 1949 it ceded the Ellhorn mountain to Switzerland, which in exchange forgave much of the debt Liechtenstein had run up with it during the war. The population rose from 12,141 in 1945 to 34,905 in 2005, and the foreign share of residents from 20% in 1950 to 34% in 2003.

What the purchase still decides in the constitution

Women received the vote in 1984, after a referendum among men. Liechtenstein joined the Council of Europe in 1978 and the United Nations in 1990, and a revision of the Swiss customs treaty in 1990 let it join EFTA in its own right in 1991. The European Economic Area strained the arrangement with Switzerland. On 28 October 1992 Prince Hans-Adam II, in a dispute over the date of the EEA vote, threatened to dismiss the Landtag and the government, and about 2,000 people demonstrated in front of the government building in Vaduz. Voters approved the EEA with 55.8% on 11 and 13 December 1992, although Switzerland, the customs partner, had voted no. The treaties with Switzerland were revised in 1994, a second referendum passed with 55.9% in April 1995, and Liechtenstein joined the EEA on 1 May 1995.

The dispute over the prince's powers ran for a decade. In the referendum of 14 and 16 March 2003 the princely house's own constitutional initiative took 64%, with Wikipedia giving 64.3%, after Hans-Adam II had threatened to leave the country if he lost; the counter-initiative took 17%. The prince kept the absolute veto, gained the power to dismiss the government and took the chair and casting vote on the panel that selects judges. The same revision gave each municipality the right to leave the state by a majority of its voters, and it created two procedures initiated by the people: a motion of no confidence in the prince, on which the princely house decides under its own house law, and a procedure to abolish the monarchy. The house law defines the dynasty's membership and rights and cannot be altered by the government or the Landtag, and the Historisches Lexikon counts parts of it as part of the constitution. In 2004 Hans-Adam II made his son Alois his deputy, and in a referendum on 1 July 2012, 76% of voters upheld the prince's power to veto the results of referendums.

The constitution still names the state's two constituent parts as the Landschaft Vaduz, the Oberland, and the Landschaft Schellenberg, the Unterland. The Historisches Lexikon gives the Oberland 78.2% of the country's area and the Unterland 21.8%, and each has been a separate electoral district since 1878. The line between them follows the Scheidgraben, a ditch that barely shows in the countryside today, and it is the line between the purchase of 1699 and the purchase of 1712.