In 1488, Stuttgart finally
officially became the de facto residence of the Count himself as opposed to the location of his home, the Old Castle.
[27] Eberhard I, then Count Eberhard V, became the first
Duke of Württemberg[d] in
1495,
[29] and made Stuttgart the seat of the
Duchy of Württemberg in addition to the County thereof. All this would be lost to the Württembergs during the reign of his son,
Ulrich. Though Ulrich initially made territorial gains as a result of his decision to fight alongside the Emperor
Maximilian I,
[42] he was no friend of the powerful
Swabian League nor of his own subjects,
[42] who launched the
Poor Conrad rebellion of 1514.
[43][44] Despite this and his rivalry with the Swabian League, his undoing would actually come in the form of his unhappy marriage to
Sabina of Bavaria. In 1515, Ulrich killed an imperial knight and lover of Sabina's by the name of Hans von Hutten,
[46] obliging her to flee to the court of her brother,
William IV,
Duke of Bavaria, who successfully had Ulrich placed under
Imperial ban twice. When the Emperor died in 1519, Ulrich struck, seizing the Free Imperial City of
Reutlingen, prompting the League to intervene. That same year, Ulrich was soundly defeated and he was and driven into exile in
France and
Switzerland following the League's conquest of Württemberg.
[42] Württemberg was then sold by the League to Emperor
Charles V,
[47] who then granted it to his brother,
Ferdinand I, thus beginning the 12 year ownership of the county by the
Habsburgs.
[37] When the peasants Ulrich had crushed before rose once again in the
German Peasants' War,
[43][44] Stuttgart was occupied by the peasant armies for a few days in the Spring of 1525. Ulrich, with the help of
Philip I,
Landgrave of Hesse, seized the chance to restore himself to power (albeit as an Austrian vassal)
[42] in the turmoil of the
Reformation and
War with the Turks and invited
Erhard Schnepf to bring the Reformation to Stuttgart. He accepted, was named Court Preacher in Stuttgart, and worked in concert with
Ambrosius Blarer until his dismissal following his resistance to the
Augsburg Interim by the Duke in 1548.
[48] Duke Ulrich himself died two years later, and was succeeded by his son,
Christoph.
He had grown up in a Württemberg in turmoil, and wished to rebuild its
image. To this end, he once again began a construction boom all over the
Duchy under the direction of Court Architect
Aberlin Tretsch; knowing full well that the time of the
Reisekönigtum was over, Christoph and Tretsch rebuilt and remodeled the Old Castle into a
Renaissance palace,
[41] and from 1542–
44, what is today the
Schillerplatz was built as a town square.
[29] Duke Christoph also responded to the increasing made for drinking water by embarking upon a massive
hydraulic engineering project in the form of a 2,810 feet (860 m) tunnel to
Pffaf Lake, the
Glems, and the
Nesenbach from 1566–
75. In 1575,
Georg Beer was also appointed Court Architect, and he built the
Lusthaus. But it was architect
Heinrich Schickhardt who would carry Tretsch's torch further; Schickhardt constructed the
Stammheim Castle in the suburb of
Stammheim, rebuilt the
Fruchtkasten in the today's Schillerplatz,
[50] and expanded the Prinzebau.
[51] It seems the fortunes of Stuttgart died in the
Thirty Years' War[27] alongside Schickhardt, killed by invading Habsburg soldiers.
The Thirty Years' War devastated the city,
[52] and it would slowly decline for a period of time from then on.
[28] After the catastrophic defeat of the Protestant
Heilbronn League by the Habsburgs at
Nörlingen in 1634,
Duke Eberhard III and his court fled in exile to
Strasbourg,
abandoning the Duchy to looting by pro-Habsburg forces. The Habsburgs
once again had full reign of the city for another four years, and in
that time Stuttgart had to carry the burden of billeting the
pro-Habsburg armies in Swabia.
Ferdinand III,
King of the Romans, entered the city in 1634 and, two years later in 1636, once again attempted to re-Catholicize Württemberg. The next year, the
Bubonic plague struck and devastated the population.
The Duke returned in 1638 to a realm somewhat partitioned to Catholic
factions in the region, and entirely ravaged by the war. In the Duchy
itself, battle,
famine,
plague and war reduced the Duchy's population of 350,000 in 1618 to 120,000 in 1648 – about 57% of the population of Württemberg.
Recovery would be slow for the next several decades, but began
nonetheless with the city's first bookstore in 1650 and high school in
1686. This progress was almost entirely undone when
French soldiers under
Ezéchiel du Mas appeared outside the city's walls in 1688 during the
Nine Years' War, but the city was saved from another sack due to the diplomatic ability of
Magdalena Sibylla, reigning over Württemberg as regent for her son,
[57] Eberhard Ludwig.
[58]
For the first time in centuries, Duke Eberhard Ludwig moved the seat of the Duchy out of the declining city of Stuttgart to
Ludwigsburg, founded in 1704, in 1718 while the namesake
Baroque palace, known as the "Versailles of Swabia," was still under construction. When Eberhard Ludwig died, his nephew
Charles Alexander, ascended to the throne.
[52] Charles Alexander himself died in 1737, meaning his son
Charles Eugene
became the premature Duke (and later King) at the age of nine. When he
came of age and returned from his tutoring at the court of
Frederick the Great,
King of Prussia, Charles desired to move the capital back to Stuttgart. He commissioned the construction of the
New Castle in 1746,
[60] Castle Solitude in 1763,
[61] Castle Hohenheim in 1785,
[62] and the
Karlsschule in 1770.
[63] The rule of Charles Eugene also saw the tutoring and origins of
Friedrich Schiller in Stuttgart, who studied medicine and completed
The Robbers here.
[52] Stuttgart, at the end of the
18th Century,
remained a very provincial town of 20,000 residents, narrow alleys, and
agriculture and livestock. Despite being the capital and seat of the
Duchy, the general staff of the
Army of Württemberg was not present in the city. In 1794, Duke Charles dissolved the Karlsschule to prevent the spreading of revolutionary ideas.
Stuttgart was proclaimed capital once more when Württemberg became an electorate in 1803,
[29] and was yet again named as capital when the
Kingdom of Württemberg was formed in 1805 by the
Peace of Pressburg.
[65][66]
