The Bavarian dynasty that ruled Bavaria and the Rhenish Palatinate for centuries and produced Emperor Louis IV and Christopher of Bavaria, king of the Kalmar Union.
The Wittelsbachs took their name from a castle in Bavaria and rose as ministerials and counts palatine before Frederick Barbarossa granted the Duchy of Bavaria to Otto I of Wittelsbach in 1180, following the fall of the Welf duke Henry the Lion. From that grant the family held Bavaria without interruption until 1918.
In the thirteenth century the house divided into two great branches: the dukes of Bavaria and the counts palatine of the Rhine. The Palatine branch gained a vote in the imperial elections, giving the Wittelsbachs a permanent place among the electors of the Holy Roman Empire.
The dynasty reached its medieval height with Louis IV, Duke of Bavaria, elected King of the Romans in 1314 against a Habsburg rival and defeating him decisively at Mühldorf in 1322. Crowned emperor in 1328, Louis spent his reign in bitter conflict with the Avignon papacy, which excommunicated him, and with the rising Luxembourg dynasty that would eventually supplant him.
His acquisition of Brandenburg, Holland, and other territories for his sons overreached the family’s strength and provoked the electors, and after his death the imperial crown passed to the Luxembourg Charles IV.
In 1440 a Wittelsbach of the Palatine line, Christopher of Bavaria, was elected king of Denmark, and soon of Sweden and Norway, briefly wearing all three crowns of the Kalmar Union until his sudden death in 1448 without an heir — an event that opened the Danish throne to the House of Oldenburg.
The Wittelsbachs never regained the imperial title in the Middle Ages, but they held Bavaria and the Palatinate through every later upheaval, ruling Bavaria as dukes, electors, and finally kings until the German revolutions of 1918.