The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia was briefly a client state of the German Empire. It was proclaimed on 8 March 1918, in the German-occupied Courland Governorate by a Landesrat composed of Baltic Germans, who offered the crown of the once-autonomous Duchy to Kaiser Wilhelm II, despite the existence of a formerly sovereign reigning family in that duchy, the Biron descendents of Ernst Johann von Biron.