HESSE (Ger. Hewn), a territory of Germany, occupied, in ancient times, by the Gatti or Chatti, who first became known to the Romans in the year 15 A.D., when Ger manieus destroyed their principal settlement of Mattium, the site of the present villages of Gross and Klein Maden, near Gudensberg. In the course of time, the Catti, who were settled in the districts now known as Upper and Lower Hesse, gradually merged in the Frankish tribes, with whom they took part in the great emigration into Belgium and Gaul, after which the territories which they had evacuated were occupied by Sax ons, who thenceforward kept possession of the land known in after-ages as Saxon 'Hesse: The power of the chiefs had, in the meanwhile, become so firmly established under the Frankish empire, that on the fall of the Carlovingians, in 911, Conrad I. duke of Fran conia and Hesse, was elected to the vacant throne of Germany, as being the most pow erful of the princes of the empire. The various branches of the Hessian family 81111 extant are descended from Heinrich I., surnamed the Child (died 1306), son of Sophie, duchess of Brabant. Although he himself exercised little real power, owing to the
dismemberment of Hesse into numerous send-independent principalities, his descend ants gradually reunited these disjointed domains, and added many valuable territories OD the Rhine to their old patrimony. Philip I., the magnanimous, who succeeded his father, Wilhelm II., as a minor, in 1509, introduced the reformation into Hesse, and founded the university of Marburg, with the revenues of the secularized convents and monasteries. This prince took an active part in the peasant and religious civil wars of his day; and by a will made in 1562, divided his territories among his four SODS, W110 suc ceeded to their allotted possessions on his death in 1567. The eldest, Wilhelm IV., obtained the half of tire Hessian domains, with Cassel for Iris residence; Ludwig. a fourth part, with Marburg; Philip, au eighth part, with Rheinfels; and George, an eighth part, with Darmstadt. The death of Philip and Ludwig left all the Hessian dominions in the two main lines of Hesse-Cassel and Hesse-Darmstadt