Dortmund

Dortmund lay on the Hellweg, the old road across the Westphalian plain, and probably began as a Carolingian royal court. After a great fire in 1232 destroyed the town and its archive, Frederick II renewed its privileges in 1236 and called it an imperial city for the first time. A grant of brewing rights followed in 1293. The patrician families of the council, among them the Klepping, Sudermann and Berswordt, traded as far as England, and Dortmund merchants had helped to found Memel on the Baltic around 1252.

The city's independence was tested when Archbishop Frederick of Cologne, the counts of Mark and some twenty allied towns turned on it in the Great Dortmund Feud of 1388 and 1389. The siege failed and Dortmund stayed free, but war damaged trade and the long economic decline began. In 1421 the citizens still began a new choir for the church of Saint Reinold, the city's patron saint. The Thirty Years' War deepened the slide; by 1793 Dortmund had shrunk to a small farming town of about 4,500 people. It lost its imperial status in 1803.