Content and Evaluation The Supreme (Land) Government was founded in 1806 as a collegial authority in the execution of the manifesto of King Frederick I's organization. It seems that the contemporary chancellory lists were uncertain about their correct spelling, at any rate the variants "Oberregierung" and - according to the predecessor authority in Ellwangen - "Oberlandesregierung" were represented almost equally frequently in the written material. The name is also misleading, because the authority was not a government in the current sense, but only a department of the Ministry of the Interior with responsibility for the so-called Regiminal Subject. According to the opinion of the time, this included in particular the safeguarding of the royal sovereignty rights, police matters throughout the country with the exception of the residential cities of Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg, the supervision of all state officials with the exception of the administration of justice, and the confirmation of elections to magistrate and other offices, Issues of subjects' and citizens' rights including emigration (deduction and after-tax), participation in military conscription, matters of prisons, breeding, labour and orphanages, poor institutions, trade, commerce and crafts as well as fire insurance. In 1807 the government college was divided into three subdepartments. In addition to the Department of Criminal Investigation, the Department of Police was established for security and police matters and the Department of Lending for feudal matters. On July 1, 1811, the responsibilities of the Department of Criminal Investigation and the Department of Police were reassigned to the Section of Internal Administration. In 1817 the newly founded district governments finally took over the tasks of this section. The present collection contains the special files of the category 'Princes' from the registry of the Supreme Government or the Section of Internal Administration, which is arranged alphabetically according to categories, although this title is rather misleading. In fact, the written records hardly concern relations with princely houses, and also the possessions of the often feared domestic and foreign class rulers located in Württemberg play at best a subordinate role in the holdings at hand. On the contrary, the contemporary registrars used the term 'princes' as a synonym for 'sovereigns', but they were not completely consistent, as the few files relating to cities or the monastery of St. Wolfgang in Engen show. In the main, the files deal with the interaction with the directly or indirectly neighbouring sovereign states, more than three quarters of the material concern relations with the Empire of France, the Grand Duchy of Baden and the Kingdom of Bavaria. In accordance with the turbulent times, war events, military, police (searches) and security matters play a prominent role, as do disputes over competing claims to sovereignty in the newly acquired former imperial territories and cities, trade blockades and customs harassment, as well as a colourful conglomeration of reciprocal attacks by authorities, officials and ordinary citizens on actual or alleged possessions of the respective neighbours and the retaliatory measures taken by them, but also efforts to achieve a contractual balance (borders, rights, disparities).) are represented. The files prove - particularly impressive in the case of the Landgraviate of Nellenburg, which was first allocated to Württemberg in 1806, the provisional Württemberg offices of Weiltingen and Nördlingen or the areas around Wiesensteig and Geislingen, Tettnang, Ravensburg and Ulm, which were also only briefly owned by Bavaria - the restlessness and often misunderstandings in the Paris treaties of 1810 until the settlement, The situation in the border regions was marked by provocations and acts of violence, the break-up of grown structures (such as parish priests), the abrupt interruption of road connections, the capping of rights, customs and habits by the new borders, and the liquidation of the structures created by the previous owners and the conditions left behind in the towns and regions that had finally become Württemberg after the State Treaty of 1810. D 44 is an almost flawless provenance collection, only in isolated cases do the files originate from predecessor or successor authorities (Bü 112: 'Retardatenkommission'; Bü 441 and 562: Oberlandesregierung Ellwangen; Bü 528: Fürststift Ellwangen). The local or regional assignment of each file follows the use of the registry of the upper government, which has assigned each operation to a particular ruling dynasty, but has not always done so correctly. Therefore, individual title recordings can reflect facts or events that cannot actually be expected from their territorial-dynastic classification, as for example in Bü 159, which contemporary registrars have assigned to the Grand Duchy of Hesse, but which contains mainly correspondence with the government in Karlsruhe due to the former Hanaulichberg places of reference in Baden since 1803. The - also already contemporary - assignment of the Büschel 379 to the Grand Duchy of Baden is not at all comprehensible from a factual point of view, since it is a matter of the request of the court chamber of Hesse and Darmstadt in Arnsberg for extradition of the documents relating to the Teutonic Order commander Mülheim from the archives of the Grand Master government in Mergentheim. Originally, the collection was divided into 59 bundles or federations, the contents of which were reproduced in the Marquart repertory (1912) only in keywords. In the course of the reworking these bundles were dissolved into a total of 673 individually recorded files with a total volume of 4.4 linear metres. The main running time ranges from 1806 to 1817, pre-files (mostly copies) go back to 1460, individual post-files have been added until 1834. Ludwigsburg, November 2010 Dr. Peter Steuer
