The Counts of Berg first appeared in records in 1101, a junior line of a Lotharingian dynasty whose roots ran back to the ninth-century kingdom that once stretched between France and Germany. By the eleventh century they were the most powerful family on the lower Rhine. Their original seat sat on the Wupper river at Schloss Burg, but in 1280 the counts moved their court west to a small town at the mouth of the Dussel. That town was Dusseldorf, and it grew with the dynasty. Eight years later, Count Adolf VIII fought on the winning side at the Battle of Worringen against Guelders, a victory that broke the Archbishop of Cologne's grip on the region. The name lives on today in Bergisches Land, the hilly country east of Dusseldorf - often misunderstood by modern Germans as bergiges Land, meaning simply hilly country, but actually preserving the dynasty's name.

Power passed through unexpected channels. The most powerful of the early rulers, Engelbert II, was also Archbishop of Cologne until his assassination on November 7, 1225. In 1380, Emperor Wenceslaus elevated the counts to dukes, and through the strategic 1509 marriage of John III of Cleves to Maria von Geldern, Berg merged with Julich, Cleves, and the County of the Mark to form a vast territory covering most of today's North Rhine-Westphalia. The new dynasty's reign ended badly: in 1609 the last duke died after years of mental incapacity, triggering the War of the Julich Succession. The eventual partition handed Berg to the Catholic Count Palatine of Neuburg. Tensions with Protestant Brandenburg escalated into the absurdly named Dusseldorf Cow War - one of those small, almost forgotten European conflicts that nonetheless shaped who ruled what.

Long before steam engines reshaped England, the Duchy of Berg was quietly inventing continental industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the hilly country east of Dusseldorf became one of Europe's earliest industrial hubs. Elberfeld and Barmen developed into proto-industrial centers of textile production. Solingen and Remscheid specialized in ironmongery - particularly blades. The Solingen reputation for cutlery still sells today as a mark of quality. While elsewhere artisans worked alone, the Bergisch valleys organized themselves into dispersed manufacturing networks, with water-powered hammers ringing in narrow valleys and weavers turning out cloth for export across Europe. It was an industrial revolution before the term existed.

Then came the French. The Revolutionary armies occupied Julich in 1794 and annexed it in 1801, separating it from Berg forever. In 1806, as the Holy Roman Empire dissolved, Napoleon reorganized the German lands and elevated Berg to a Grand Duchy. He installed his brother-in-law Joachim Murat as Grand Duke. Murat's coat of arms combined the red Berg lion with the arms of Cleves, plus an anchor and batons from his roles as Grand Admiral and Marshal of the Empire, plus the imperial eagle he claimed through marriage to Napoleon's sister Caroline. When Murat moved up to become King of Naples in 1809, Napoleon handed the Grand Duchy to his four-year-old nephew. Four years later, Napoleon fell at Leipzig, and the Grand Duchy fell with him. The 1815 Congress of Vienna folded Berg into Prussia. The dynasty was gone, but the lion remained on the Bergisches Land coat of arms - and on the bottles of mineral water and packets of cheese still sold under the Bergisch name today.