The south-western German stem duchy of the Hohenstaufen, which ceased to exist as a duchy in 1268 and afterwards supplied the empire and the military orders with knights — the Jungingen family among them.
Swabia in southwestern Germany was a central duchy of the Holy Roman Empire associated with the Hohenstaufen dynasty. Ulrich von Jungingen, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order who led the order to defeat at Grunwald in 1410, came from the Swabian knightly class.
At its widest the duchy ran from the Vosges in Alsace east to the right bank of the Lech, and south to the Alpine passes — considerably larger than the region called Swabia today.
The land was Alemannia, the country of the Alemanni, whom the Franks conquered in campaigns beginning in 496. The duchy was proclaimed in 915 by Count Erchanger, and became one of the five stem duchies on which the German kingdom was built: large territorial blocks under dukes who were, in practice, the king’s partners rather than his officials.
A stem duchy’s power was real but unstable, because a duke who could raise an army from a whole province was a rival as often as a subject. The history of Swabia in the tenth and eleventh centuries is mostly the history of German kings trying to solve that problem.
The solution, when it came, made the problem imperial. In 1079 Henry IV gave the duchy to Frederick of Büren, who married the king’s daughter Agnes, and the family took its name from the castle of Hohenstaufen. They held Swabia until 1268.
From that base they took the empire itself. Frederick I Barbarossa, duke of Swabia before he was king, drew the core of his strength from these lands, and Swabian ministeriales and knights served the Hohenstaufen across Italy and Germany for more than a century.
The last Hohenstaufen duke was Conradin, who went to Italy at sixteen to claim the Sicilian inheritance of his house, was defeated by Charles of Anjou and beheaded at Naples in 1268. With him the male line and the duchy ended together.
Rudolf of Habsburg tried to revive the title for his sons in 1289, and the attempt was dead by 1313. No duke of Swabia ruled after that, which makes Swabia the clearest case in the empire of a great province that simply dissolved into its parts.
What filled the vacuum was everything else the empire contained. Free imperial cities — Ulm, Augsburg, Esslingen and a dozen more — answered to the emperor alone; imperial abbeys held territory as princes; and a dense population of imperial knights held single castles and villages directly of the crown, too small to be swallowed and too numerous to be organised.
Holding their own without a duke required cooperation, and Swabia became the classic country of leagues: associations of cities and knights for keeping the peace and the roads, culminating in the Swabian League of 1488. It is the reason south-western Germany stayed a patchwork into the nineteenth century.
A knightly family with one castle and several sons had to place the younger ones, and the military orders were the obvious destination: the Teutonic Order offered a career, a livelihood and a war, none of which were available at home.
The Jungingen, lords of Hohenfels near Stockach, gave the order two grand masters in succession. Konrad von Jungingen ruled it from 1393 to 1407, at the height of its wealth; his younger brother Ulrich von Jungingen, born about 1360, followed him and was killed at the Battle of Grunwald on 15 July 1410, where the order lost its field army and never recovered. The Swabian connection of Ulrich von Jungingen places his career within the tradition of German knightly service to the military religious orders.