A report on Stuttgart, Duchy of Württemberg and Ludwigsburg

Ludwigsburg is a city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, about 12 km north of Stuttgart city centre, near the river Neckar.

Much of the territory of the Duchy of Württemberg lies in the valley of the Neckar river, from Tübingen to Heilbronn, with its capital and largest city, Stuttgart, in the center.

The fortunes of Stuttgart turned with those of the House of Württemberg, and they made it the capital of their county, duchy, and kingdom from the 15th century to 1918.

Duke Eberhard Louis, Duke of Württemberg awarded Ludwigsburg its coat of arms on 3 September 1718 as a Reichssturmfahne, which had been part of the Duchy of Württemberg's own coat of arms since 1495.

For the first time in centuries, Duke Eberhard Ludwig moved the seat of the Duchy out of the declining city of Stuttgart in 1718 to Ludwigsburg, founded in 1704, while the namesake Baroque palace, known as the "Versailles of Swabia", was still under construction.

The rules of the Baroque dukes, Eberhard Louis, Charles Alexander, and Charles Eugene, were an unstable period in the musical scene in the Duchy based at the palaces of Ludwigsburg and Stuttgart (much like the Dukes that patronized those arts) that illuminates three central themes in the history of music in the West: the emergence of the orchestra, importance of chamber music and the growing number of Italian composers and musicians employed at the courts of German princes in the 18th century.