Three of the noble families of the southwest attained a special importance: the Staufers, the Welfens and the Zähringers. The most successful appear from the view of that time to be the Staufers, who, as dukes of Swabia from 1079 and as German kings and emperors from 1138 to 1268, attained the greatest influence in Swabia. Their decline in the 13th century was a deep incision into German history, but also into the history of the Duchy of Swabia.
The Welfens had to yield to the Staufers in Upper Swabia in 1191, as their stronghold was more in Bavaria and permanently in North Germany. In the struggle for the king's crown they were only successful for a short time (Emperor Otto IV, 1208 - 1218). The Welfens are among the ancestors of today's English royal family.
The Zähringers were also powerful competitors of the Staufers in the struggle for the Duchy of Swabia. Their claim was based on large landholdings and on kinship with the early dukes. Beyond that, Berthold I (died 1078) had received the substitute title of "Duke of Kärnten" from King Heinrich III, as, not he, but rather Rudolf of Rheinfelden, had become Duke of Swabia. After their deaths in 1218 their property around Offenburg fell to the Staufers; the largest part, however, was inherited through the daughter of the last Zähringer. The counts of Kyburg held the lands on the left bank of the Rhine, the right bank of the Rhine the counts of Freiburg and the counts of Fürstenberg, who now live in Donaueschingen as the princes of Fürstenberg. The margraves of Baden had branched off from the Zähringers. Just as with the Zähringers, their title did not come from the ancestral land itself. The ancestor of the margravian line, Hermann I, who died as a monk in Cluny in 1074, called himself the Margrave of Verona; his descendants, then, the margraves of Baden.
A further collateral line of the Zähringers were the dukes of Teck, who sold their lands in 1381 to the counts of Württemberg. The title of Duke of Teck was then in 1495 the basis for the elevation of the earldom (or county) of Württemberg to a duchy. The title of Duke of Teck was handed down to the English royal family through a Württemberg collateral line.
There were thus besides the Staufers several in the Duchy of Swabia who carried the ducal title. In contrast to the Zähringers and the Tecks, only the Welfen were authentic dukes, namely dukes of Bavaria and Saxony.
The strongholds of the three families may be seen on the map. They reached well beyond the Baden-Württemberg of today. It is more difficult to identify an ancestral castle or central point of the rule of the families.
With the Staufers, localizing is not possible at all. They did not come from the Hohenstaufen castle. They came into this area just in 1070 as counts from the Riesgau, perhaps even from Austria. Otherwise they had old family properties in Alsace. Despite that, the upper Rems Valley was a central point for them, as they founded the Lorch Monastery as a family burial ground. Their properties ran down the Neckar (Wimpfen) up to the Rhine. Schlettstadt and Hagenau in Alsace, Kaiserslautern in the Palatinate, Frankfurt and Nürnberg showed that the German southwest was only a part of the sphere of influence of the Staufens.
The Welfens originally came from the area around Metz. They had their burial ground in the Weingarten monastery by Ravensburg. The movement of the Benedictine monastery from Altomünster to Weingarten shows that the Welfens were settled in multiple places.
This is still clearer with the Zähringers. Duke Berthold I of Kärnten died in 1078 at the Limburg by Weilheim on the Teck. There he had founded the private monastery of St. Peter. His son, Berthold II, constructed the Zähringen castle near Freiburg in the Breisgau well after 1078. Around 1100 he named himself the Duke of Zähringen after it. In earlier times the family of the Bertholds indeed had a seat in the Breisgau and in the Baar. In 1093 Berthold II moved the private monastery of St. Peter from Weilheim into the Black Forest. The cloister is completely preserved in its baroque form and harbors today the seminary of the Archdiocese of Freiburg. The Black Forest and its surroundings became the special field of activity of the Zähringers. There is a legend about that from the Black Forest. There it is said that the Zähringers were originally charcoal burners and had found silver in the forest and assembled a great treasure. There then came a "king banished from the empire" who proclaimed that to whomsoever would help him, he would give his daughter and make him a duke. The charcoal-burner gave him some of his treasure, and was elevated to be the Duke of Zähringen. To the Zähringer sphere of influence originally belonged Freiburg and Offenburg, Rottweil and Villingen; in modern Switzerland, Zürich and Bern. The three prominent noble families were in vigorous competition with one another, even though they were linked by kinship. The mother of the Staufer King Friedrich Barbarossa (Redbeard) was Judith Welfen. The Staufers, as well as the Zähringers, based their claims of rule on ties with the family of the German kings from the House of Salier.
