WITTELSBACH, the name of an important German family, taken from the castle of Wittelsbach, which formerly stood near Aichach on the Paar in Bavaria. In 1124, Otto V., count of Scheyern (d. 1155), removed the residence of his family to Wittelsbach, and called himself by this name. His descendants bore simply the title of counts of Scheyern until about 1116, when the emperor Henry V. recognized Count Otto V. as count palatine in Bavaria. His son, Count Otto VI., who succeeded his father in 1155, accompanied the German king, Frederick I., to Italy in 1154, where he distinguished himself by his courage, and later rendered valuable assistance to Frederick in Germany. When Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, was placed under the imperial ban in 1180, Otto's services were rewarded by the investiture of the dukedom of Bavaria at Altenburg. Bavaria was ruled by the Wittelsbachs from that time onwards until the revolu tion of 1918, and the history of the house is closely connected with the history of Bavaria (q.v.). The ancestral castle of Wittelsbach was destroyed in 1208.
In 1329 the most important of various divisions of the Wittels bach lands took place. By the treaty of Pavia in this year, Louis IV., German king, formerly duke of Bavaria, granted the Palatinate of the Rhine and the upper Palatinate of Bavaria to his brother's sons, Rudolph II. (d. 1353) and Rupert I. Rupert, who from 1353 to 1390 was sole ruler, gained the electoral dignity for the Palatinate of the Rhine in 1356 by a grant of some lands in upper Bavaria to the emperor Charles IV. It had been exercised from the division of 1329 by both branches in turn. The descendants of Louis IV. retained the rest of Bavaria, but made several divisions of their territory, the most important of which was in 1392, when the branches of Ingoldstadt, Munich and Landshut were founded. These were reunited under Albert IV.,
duke of Bavaria-Munich (1447-1508) and the upper Palatinate was added to them in 1628. Albert's descendants ruled over a united Bavaria, until the death of Duke Maximilian III. in 1777, when it passed to the Elector Palatine, Charles Theodore. The Palatinate of the Rhine, after the death of Rupert I. in 1390, passed to his nephew, Rupert II., and in 1398 to his son, Rupert III., who was German king from 1400 to 1410. On his death it was divided into four branches. Three of these had died out by 1559, and their possessions were inherited by the fourth or Sim mern line, among whom the Palatinate was again divided. (See PALATINATE.) In 1742, after the extinction of the two senior lines of this family, the Sulzbach branch became the senior line, and its head, the elector Charles Theodore, inherited Bavaria in 1777. He died in 1799, and Maximilian Joseph, the head of the Zweibriicken branch, inherited Bavaria and the Palatinate. He took the title of king as Maximilian I.
The Wittelsbachs gave three kings to Germany, Louis IV., Rupert and Charles VII. Members of the family were also margraves of Brandenburg from 1323 to 1373, and kings of Sweden from 1654 to 1718.
See J. Dellinger, Das Haus Wittelsbach and seine Bedeutung in der deutschen Geschichte (Munich, 1880) ; J. F. Bohmer, Wittelsbachische Regesten bis 1340 (Stuttgart, 1854) ; F. M. Wittmann, Monumenta Wittelsbacensia (Urkundenbuch, Munich, 1857-1861) ; K. T. Heigel, Die Wittelsbacher (Munich, 1880) ; F. Leitschuh, Die Wittelsbacher in Bayern (Bamberg, 1894).