The county appears in documents around 1050, and in 1115 it passed by inheritance to Count Otto of the House of Salm. His daughter Sophia married Dirk VI, Count of Holland - which is how a small Westphalian-fenland state ended up tied by blood to the great trading dynasty of the Low Countries. From that point on, Bentheim's center of gravity sat awkwardly between worlds: imperially loyal to the Holy Roman Empire, culturally and linguistically half-Dutch, geographically composed of fenland and floodplain and the famous sandstone outcrop at Bentheim itself. For almost seven hundred years the Counts of Bentheim ran their own affairs.

The single county did not stay single for long. In 1263 it absorbed Tecklenburg; in 1277 it split into Bentheim-Bentheim and Bentheim-Tecklenburg; later partitions produced Bentheim-Steinfurt, Bentheim-Lingen, Bentheim-Alpen, Bentheim-Limburg, Bentheim-Tecklenburg-Rheda. The family tree reads like a medieval law-firm letterhead. When Count Arnold II inherited Bentheim from the extinct Bentheim-Bentheim line in 1530, he was already Count of Steinfurt - and his 1544 conversion to Lutheranism began a slow Reformation that, by 1591, had given all three of his counties Reformed Church constitutions and made the Bentheims one of the most resolutely Protestant noble houses of northwestern Germany.

In 1753 the count needed money. He took out a mortgage from the Elector of Hanover - who was also the King of England - and pledged the county as collateral. Hanover called it in. The Counts of Bentheim lost the county that had borne their name for seven centuries, and one observer noted dryly: trouble within made them take out a mortgage to the King of Hanover and England. The Bentheim-Steinfurt branch managed in 1804 to buy the county back from France, but only briefly. In July 1806, the Act of the Confederation of the Rhine handed Bentheim and Steinfurt to the Grand Duchy of Berg, and in 1810 Napoleon's empire annexed the whole region into the French Department of Lippe.

What survived the political shipwreck was a particular Grafschaft way of doing things. Arranged marriages, often between distant relatives, were normal here into living memory; the wedding lasted three days, and every guest contributed roughly the equivalent of 50 dollars to the new household. Babies were born at home with a midwife until the 1950s, then wrapped tightly to prevent bowleggedness, capped to make the ears lie close. When someone died, the next-door neighbor took charge for four days - contacting the pastor, the bell ringer, the gravedigger - and the town bell tolled once for each year of the dead person's life. The mourning period was rigorously codified: three years for a spouse, two for a child, one for a sibling, six weeks for the neighbor next door.

Today the modern Landkreis Grafschaft Bentheim - a district of Lower Saxony - covers more or less the same patch of ground and uses the same coat of arms. The princely line of Bentheim-Steinfurt still lives in Steinfurt Castle and still owns Burg Bentheim. The Bentheim-Tecklenburg-Rheda branch still sits at Rheda Castle and Hohenlimburg Castle. The plattdeutsch dialect, salted with Dutch loanwords, still echoes in markets and parish halls. And the answer to the question of identity is still, if you press it, the same it has been since Hanover came calling: we are from the County.