The region including what would become the Principality of Reuss was inhabited in early medieval times by Slavic people who were converted to Christianity by the German Emperor Otto I (936–973).

As early as the year 1000, however, Emperor Otto III permitted the entire part lying on the eastern boundary of Thuringia, a wooded area, sparsely populated by the West Slavic people of the Sorbs, to be cleared for farmland and settled by German settlers.

He was a son of Erkenbert I of Weida, the oldest known ancestor of the family, who is mentioned in 1122 in the entourage of Count Adalbert of Everstein at the consecration of St John's church in Plauen.

This designation has remained to this day a geographical summary for a region of 3,467 km2 (comparable roughly to the county of Essex) which is located in Saxony, Thuringia and, to a lesser extent, in northern Bavaria.

While the dominions of Heinrich von Gleissberg included the towns Gera and Weida, his grandson Henry II the Rich (d. before 1209) also acquired Plauen.

When his three sons divided their inheritance, three independent areas emerged, ruled by the branches of the bailiffs of Weida-Ronneburg, Plauen-Gera and Greiz-Reichenbach.

In 1329 Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian confirmed the bailiffs a rank equal to Princes of the Holy Roman Empire, albeit without the title itself, they continued to use the designation Vogt.

The elder Plauen line of the vogts was extinct in 1380, the founder of the younger Plauen line was Henry (d. about 1300), who on account of his stay in Eastern European regions and his marriage with a granddaughter of King Daniel of Galicia received the surname of "der Reusse" (Ruthenus, a term for the Kievan Rus'), whence the name later passed to his country.

The House of Reuss is thus descended from the vogts of Plauen from whom they inherited the cities and lordships of Gera, Greiz, Schleiz and Lobenstein.

However, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the vogts had lost the greater part of their possessions, most of which fell to the Electorate of Saxony, including Weida in 1427 and Plauen in 1482.

It was seen as a way of honoring the Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich/Henry VI, who raised Heinrich der Reiche/Henry the Rich (+1209) to the office of provost of the Quedlinburg Abbey, thus taking on the title of vogt.

Henry XXII of Reuss Elder line is notable among the modern princes of this house for his enmity to Prussia, which he opposed in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, when the Prussian troops occupied his domain.

A (non-governing) side branch of the younger line had emerged in 1692 when Heinrich XXIV, Count Reuss of Köstritz, a younger son of the ruling count Heinrich I. Reuss of Schleiz, received a number of landed estates as a paréage within his eldest brother's county, with his main seat at Köstritz Castle.

This branch connected through marriages with important ruling houses, did however not govern their own territory, but lived as landowners in the county of the Schleiz Line.

When the elder line died out with Heinrich XXIV in 1927 and the younger one when Heinrich XLV, son of the last ruler, died childless in 1945 as a prisoner of the communists, thus both main branches having become extinct, the dynastic succession (and the theoretical claims to their thrones) passed to the princely House Reuss of Köstritz.

[18] He believes Reuss' anti-government views derive from his resentment at the German judicial system for its failure to recognize his claims to family properties expropriated at the end of World War II.