Augsburg

That freedom let Augsburg's merchants build some of the greatest fortunes in Europe. After a craftsmen's rising in 1368 the guilds shared the council with the patricians, and on the roads to Italy the trading and banking houses of the Fuggers and Welsers made the city, by the 16th century, one of the largest and richest in the Empire and lender to its emperors. Wealth also made it a stage of the Reformation: in 1518 Cardinal Cajetan examined Luther in the Fugger houses, and in 1530 the Lutheran princes presented the Augsburg Confession to Charles V at the diet held here. The Peace of Augsburg, sealed in the city in 1555, left it governed by Catholics and Protestants together.

The Thirty Years' War broke that prosperity. In 1628 Bavarian troops garrisoned the city and enforced the Edict of Restitution against its Protestants, and in 1632 Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden marched in and restored them. After the Swedish defeat at Nördlingen in 1634, imperial and Bavarian armies sealed Augsburg off to starve it; famine killed some 5,000 people before the year was out, and when the city surrendered in March 1635 it had lost two thirds of its people since the war began. Augsburg never regained its old weight, though its goldsmiths and silversmiths stayed famous across Europe, and in 1806, after more than five centuries of imperial freedom, it was annexed by Bavaria.