one of the smallest of the former German states, forming, since 1946–47, the northeastern corner of the Land (state) of North Rhine-Westphalia; the rather smaller Schaumburg-Lippe, now in the southern part of the Land of Lower Saxony, was founded in the 1640s under a separate branch of the House of Lippe. Both were until 1990 in West Germany. The Lippe lands lie north and south of the east–west bend of the middle Weser River and extend southwestward to the Teutoburg Forest.

The medieval lords of Lippe had their original possessions around Lippstadt on the Lippe River, west of Paderborn. Simon V of Lippe (died 1536) assumed the title of count in 1528. In the Reformation, Lippe became Lutheran (1538) and later, Calvinist (1605). Dynastic divisions occurred in the early 17th century; but the Lippe-Detmold line, princes from 1720, reunited most of the Lippe lands except for those held by Schaumburg-Lippe.

Schaumburg, or Schauenburg, northeast of Rinteln, was the seat of a dynasty of counts from c. 1100 to 1640. Hesse-Kassel and Brunswick acquired some of those lands; but Philip of Lippe-Alverdissen, brother of the last countess of Schaumburg, retained others to form a principality with its capital at Bückeburg. Both states joined the Confederation of the Rhine, under the aegis of Napoleon I, in 1807, and the German Confederation in 1815. Schaumburg-Lippe adhered to the fiscal union of the northeastern German states in 1837, the Zollverein (German Customs Union) in 1854, the North German Confederation in 1866 (Lippe joining in 1867), and the German Empire in 1871. Under the constitution of the Weimar Republic (1919–33) the princely regimes in both states gave place to republican governments, which were suppressed during the Nazi era.