Leipzig

The decisive privileges came in 1497, when King Maximilian made Leipzig a city of imperial fairs, and ten years later he extended its staple right over a radius of 115 kilometres. The fairs made it the chief German market for goods moving between eastern and western Europe, and its Brühl street became, with London, the centre of the international fur trade. The university, founded in 1409, gave the town a second fame: in 1519 it hosted the Leipzig Disputation, in which Luther and Karlstadt debated the Catholic theologian Johannes Eck in the Pleissenburg castle, although the town itself did not adopt the Reformation until 1539.

The Thirty Years' War cut deep into this prosperity. Leipzig was besieged five times between 1631 and 1642 and held by the Swedes from 1642 to 1650, and its population fell from 18,000 to 12,000; at Breitenfeld, just outside the town, the Swedes twice beat imperial armies, in 1631 and 1642. Yet the presses kept running, and in 1650 a Leipzig newspaper began to appear six days a week, counted as the oldest daily in the world.