Rhenish Palatinate
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The Rhenish Palatinate (Rheinpfalz, sometimes "Lower Palatinate" or Niederpfalz) occupies rather more than a quarter of the German Bundesland (federal state) of Rhineland-Palatinate (Rheinland-Pfalz) and contains the towns of Ludwigshafen, Kaiserslautern, Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, Pirmasens, Landau and Speyer.
Ruled by counts of the Wittelsbach dynasty from 1214 on (apart from almost 20 years of annexation by France after 1795), the area was devastated during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) and by French invasion in 1689. In 1815, the Rhenish Palatine passed to the Wittelsbach family's Bavarian line; although it was geographically separate from Bavaria, the two were ruled as a single state for the next 140 years. The union persisted after Bavaria became part of the German Empire in 1870, and after the Wittelsbach dynasty was deposed and Bavaria became a republican state in 1918. The union with Bavaria was finally broken in the reorganization of German states after World War II: the Rhenish Palatine became part of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in 1946.
The historical rulers of the palatinate included: