History of Bavaria

The region north of the Alps was inhabited by Celts and was part of the Roman Empire until (probably Slavonic) tribes from the East, the so-called 'Bayuvaren' started to settle in the region in the 6th century AD. A later mention was made by the Franks ca. 520. Saint Boniface completed the people's conversion to Christianity in the early 8th century. Bavaria resisted the Protestant Reformation, and remains strongly Roman Catholic.
From about 550 to 788, the house of Agilolfing ruled the duchy of Bavaria, ending with Tassilo III who was deposed by Charlemagne. For the next 400 years numerous families held the duchy, rarely for more than three generations.
The last, and one of the most important, of these dukes was Henry the Lion of the house of Welf, founder of Munich.When Henry the Lion was deposed as duke of Saxony and Bavaria by his cousin, Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor, in 1180, Bavaria was awarded as fief to the Wittelsbach family, which ruled from 1180 to 1918. The first of several divisions of the duchy occurred in 1255 but in 1506 Bavaria was reunited and Munich became the sole capital. In 1623 the dukes replaced their relative, the Count Palatine of the Rhine in the early days of the Thirty Years War and acquired the powerful prince-electoral dignity in the Holy Roman Empire, determining its Emperor thence forward, as well as special legal status under the empire's laws. When Napoleon abolished the Empire, Bavaria became a kingdom in 1806, and in 1815 the Rhenish Palatinate was annexed to it. In between 1799 and 1817 the leading minister count Montgelas followed a strict policy of modernisation and lay the foundations of administrative structures that survived even the monarchy and are (in their core) valid until today. In 1818 a modern constitution (with the standards of the time) was passed, that established a bicameral Parliament with a House of Lords ("Kammer der Reichsräte") and a House of Commons ("Kammer der Abgeordneten"). The constitution was valid until the collapse of the monarchy at the end of the First World War.