The province is not notably well suited to agriculture, but in forests
it is the richest in Prussia, and the timber trade is large. The chief
trees are beech, oak and conifers. Cattle-breeding is extensively
practised. The vine is cultivated chiefly on the slopes of the Taunus,
in the south-west, where the names of several towns are well known for
their wines--Schierstein, Erbach (Marcobrunner), Johannisberg,
Geisenheim, Rudesheim, Assmannshausen. Iron, coal, copper and manganese
are mined. The mineral springs are important, including those at
Wiesbaden, Homburg, Langenschwalbach, Nenndorf, Schlangenbad and Soden.
The chief manufacturing centres are Cassel, Diez, Eschwege, Frankfort,
Fulda, Gross Almerode, Hanau and Hersfeld. The province is divided for
administration into 42 circles (_Kreise_), 24 in the government of
Cassel and 18 in that of Wiesbaden. It returns 14 representatives to the
Reichstag. Marburg is the seat of a university.
HESSE-ROTENBURG, a German landgraviate which was broken up in 1834. In
1627 Ernest (1623-1693), a younger son of Maurice, landgrave of
Hesse-Cassel (d. 1632), received Rheinsfels and lower Katzenelnbogen as
his inheritance, and some years later, on the deaths of two of his
brothers, he added Eschwege, Rotenburg, Wanfried and other districts to
his possessions. Ernest, who was a convert to the Roman Catholic Church,
was a great traveller and a voluminous writer. About 1700 his two sons,
William (d. 1725) and Charles (d. 1711), divided their territories, and
founded the families of Hesse-Rotenburg and Hesse-Wanfried. The latter
family died out in 1755, when William's grandson, Constantine (d. 1778),
reunited the lands except Rheinfels, which had been acquired by
Hesse-Cassel in 1735, and ruled them as landgrave of Hesse-Rotenburg. At
the peace of Luneville in 1801 the part of the landgraviate on the left
bank of the Rhine was surrendered to France, and in 1815 other parts
were ceded to Prussia, the landgrave Victor Amadeus being compensated
by the abbey of Corvey and the Silesian duchy of Ratibor. Victor was the
last male member of his family, so, with the consent of Prussia, he
bequeathed his allodial estates to his nephews the princes Victor and
Chlodwig of Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfurst (see HOHENLOHE). When
the landgrave died on the 12th of November 1834 the remaining parts of
Hesse-Rotenburg were united with Hesse-Cassel according to the
arrangement of 1627. It may be noted that Hesse-Rotenburg was never
completely independent of Hesse-Cassel. Perhaps the most celebrated
member of this family was Charles Constantine (1752-1821), a younger son
of the landgrave Constantine, who was called "citoyen Hesse," and who
took part in the French Revolution.
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