Freiburg

Freiburg lies at the western edge of the Black Forest beneath the Schlossberg, where Duke Berthold II of Zähringen built a castle about 1091 and his son Conrad granted market and town rights in 1120. About 1200 the great minster was begun in place of a church grown too small, paid for largely by the silver mines of the Black Forest that made the burghers rich. After the Zähringer died out in 1218 the town passed to the Counts of Freiburg. In 1368 the citizens bought themselves free of their unloved count for 15,000 marks of silver and placed themselves under Habsburg protection. At Sempach in 1386 the Swiss beat Duke Leopold III and wiped out much of Freiburg's nobility, so the guilds ruled the council from then on. In 1457 Archduke Albert VI founded the university.

Maximilian I held an imperial diet here in 1498. In 1525, in the Peasants' War, peasants took the town and forced the council to join their Christian union. When iconoclasts won Basel for the Reformation in 1529, Erasmus of Rotterdam and the Basel cathedral chapter fled to Catholic Freiburg. The minster was finished in 1536.

The Jesuits took over the university in 1620, and the Swedes occupied the city in 1632; it changed hands again and again, and in 1644 an imperial-Bavarian army took it before the battle of Freiburg against the French and Weimar troops. In 1679 the Peace of Nijmegen gave Freiburg to France, and Vauban was told to make it a modern fortress, which Louis XIV came to inspect in 1681. Freiburg returned to the Habsburgs in 1697, was occupied again in 1713 and in 1744, and the French razed the fortifications as they left. In 1805 Napoleon gave the Breisgau to Baden.