Memmingen

Memmingen lay at the crossing of the salt road from Bohemia, Austria and Munich to Lindau with the road from northern Germany to Switzerland and Italy. Duke Welf VI made it a town in 1158, the Staufer inherited it in 1191, and in 1286 King Rudolf I of Habsburg declared it a free imperial city. The 14th to 16th centuries were its golden age: the walls were extended for the last time in 1445, and in 1480 Albrecht Kunne opened a printing press that issued about two hundred works by 1520, one of them, in 1519, among the earliest to use the name America.

Maximilian I came thirteen times and called Memmingen his place of rest and sleep, and the choir stalls of Saint Martin's are among the finest in Germany. The preacher Christoph Schappeler brought the Reformation here in 1524 and 1525. In February and March 1525 the Upper Swabian peasant bands met in Memmingen, founded their Christian Union and drew up the Twelve Articles, a charter of grievances usually credited to Schappeler and a furrier's journeyman. In 1529 the city joined the protest at the Diet of Speyer.

In the Thirty Years' War imperial troops took Memmingen after a siege in 1635. In 1647, under the armistice of Ulm, it was handed to the Swedes, and Bavarian and imperial troops besieged and retook it that November; their garrison stayed until 1649. Memmingen fell to Bavaria in 1803.