Münster

Münster grew around the monastery that the Frisian missionary Liudger founded in 793 at a ford over the Münstersche Aa, and from which the city takes its name. Liudger became the first bishop in 805, and the town, granted its rights around 1170, grew into the capital of the prince-bishops who ruled the Münsterland. Its roughly four-kilometre wall made it the largest town in Westphalia by the mid-14th century, while a patriciate of old families, the Erbmänner, sat on the council and spoke for Münster in the bishop's diet and at the Hanseatic assemblies.

Between 1358 and 1454 Münster belonged to the Hanseatic League, and from 1494 it served as the leading town of the league in Westphalia; the gabled merchants' houses of the Prinzipalmarkt date from this prosperous age. Then came the most dramatic episode in its history. In 1534 Anabaptists seized the city, Jan van Leiden proclaimed the Kingdom of Zion in September, and the town was declared a New Jerusalem. Troops of Bishop Franz von Waldeck stormed the starving city on 24 June 1535. The leaders were tortured and executed, and their bodies were hung in three iron baskets from the tower of Saint Lambert's Church as a warning.

In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia was concluded at Münster and Osnabrück, ending the Thirty Years' War and the Eighty Years' War; Spanish and Dutch envoys swore their treaty in the town hall. The city's long struggle to become a free imperial city ended in 1661, when Prince-Bishop Christoph Bernhard von Galen took it after an eight-month siege and stripped it of its rights. The last prince-bishop died in 1801, and Prussian troops entered the city the following year.