Liechtenstein historical timeline

Liechtenstein's history is that of a family that needed a territory and a valley that acquired a prince. What a visitor sees -- the castle above Vaduz, Gutenberg above Balzers, the tidy industrial valley -- is the record of a state that was bought, ignored, and then made prosperous by its own people.

Chronology

1. 1712 The princely family of Liechtenstein, named for a castle south of Vienna, purchases the countship of Vaduz with its castle, whose keep dates from the 12th century; it had bought the lordship of Schellenberg a few years earlier.
2. 1719 On 23 January the Emperor Charles VI decrees that the counties of Vaduz and Schellenberg be promoted to a principality named Liechtenstein for his servant Anton Florian, making him and his successors Princes of the Holy Roman Empire.
3. 1799 France invades on 6 March 1799 during the War of the Second Coalition and plunders several towns, burning Nendeln, where four people are killed. It is the only time in the principality's history that its territory has been fought over, and it happened while the ruling family, who had not yet visited, were living near Vienna.
4. 1818 Prince Johann I grants a limited constitution, and Prince Alois pays the first visit by a member of the house to the country it had owned for a century.
5. 1866 The German Confederation, which Liechtenstein joined in 1815, dissolves on 24 August, and the principality becomes fully independent; on 12 February 1868 it disbands its army of eighty men and declares permanent neutrality.
6. 1890 The National Museum is established in rooms of Vaduz Castle, whose keep was built in the 12th century. The castle has been the primary residence of the princely family since 1938 and is not open to the public for that reason; the museum long since moved out into the town below.
7. 1920 Liechtenstein adopts the Swiss franc in 1920 and enters a customs union with Switzerland in 1924, having been tied to Austria-Hungary by customs union until the First World War -- during which France, Russia and the United Kingdom interned Liechtensteiners and partly confiscated their assets, and Britain and France pressed Switzerland to stop food exports to the country. The turn west is what made the 20th-century economy, and it is why prices, postage and money on the ground are Swiss.
8. 1938 In March 1938, just after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Franz names his 31-year-old grandnephew Franz Joseph as regent; Franz Joseph formally succeeds him on 25 July. In March 1939 a coup is attempted while Franz Joseph II is on a state visit to Berlin, by a party connected to the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle which intended to end the Swiss customs union and align with Germany towards annexation. It failed, and Liechtenstein stayed officially neutral through the war, looking to Switzerland for guidance.
9. 1945 Family treasures from the dynasty's lands in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia had been brought to Liechtenstein for safekeeping during the war, and just before it ended Franz Joseph granted political asylum to White Russian emigres of the First Russian National Army under General Boris Smyslovsky, who were cared for by the Liechtenstein Red Cross. The rescued collections are the reason a country of 40,000 people owns one of Europe's significant private art holdings, and they are what the Vaduz museums are built around.
10. 1984 Prince Franz Joseph hands power and the everyday duties of the monarch to Hans-Adam, who succeeds in 1989 after running the family's LGT Bank.
11. 1984 On 1 July 1984 Liechtenstein becomes the last country in Europe to grant women the right to vote, following three previous referendums that rejected it. Forty years is not long, and it is the single most useful corrective to the impression a visitor forms from the castle, the vineyards and the postage stamps.
12. 2003 A referendum expands the prince's constitutional powers after Hans-Adam II threatens to abdicate and leave the country if it fails; on 15 August 2004 he hands day-to-day government to Hereditary Prince Alois as regent.
13. 2011 Inside Schengen and the European Economic Area but outside the EU, in the United Nations, EFTA and the Council of Europe, Liechtenstein is a state of 41,389 people whose workforce crosses the Rhine each morning.

What survived, and how

The castles survived because the family kept them: Vaduz Castle is the prince's home. The dynasty survived because it never fought -- the army went in 1868 -- and because it turned a valley into a workshop and a bank. The dialect survived because the valley was too small for anyone to bother replacing it.

What did not survive is any sense of the place as a backwater: the prince won his referendum, the workforce commutes in, and the country is run like the business it is.