Colmar

Colmar, a royal estate first recorded in 823, was walled by 1220 and raised to a free imperial city by Frederick II in 1226. Its first river port, the Ladhof, opened in 1337 where the Thur and the Lauch meet, sending goods by water to Strasbourg and the Rhineland. On 28 August 1354 the city joined the Décapole, the league of ten imperial towns of Alsace. In 1360 the guilds took the government from the old patricians under a lasting constitution, and in 1376 the town gained the right to coin money. The plague struck in 1418, and in 1474 the Colmar executioner beheaded Peter von Hagenbach, the harsh Burgundian governor whom the Alsatian towns had turned against. The Koïfhus, finished in 1480, served as warehouse, customs house and meeting hall for the Décapole.

The Jewish community, destroyed in the plague pogroms of 1348 and 1349, was later expelled in 1512. A master-singers' school had been founded by 1564, and the first Lutheran service was held in the Franciscan church on 15 May 1575. In 1632 Swedish troops besieged and took Colmar during the Thirty Years' War. French forces occupied it in 1673, and in 1680 Louis XIV annexed it together with its neighbours Türkheim, Kaysersberg and Munster, and in 1698 Colmar became the seat of the Sovereign Council of Alsace.