Osnabrück

Osnabrück's wealth in the later Middle Ages came from linen. From 1404 every bolt sold in the town had to pass the municipal Legge, where it was measured, checked and stamped with the Osnabrück wheel; the seal fetched such prices that dealers from other towns brought their cloth here to be stamped, and forgers copied it. As a leading town of the Westphalian quarter of the Hansa, Osnabrück sold its linen through Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck and London, and when the Dutch and English trade slipped away from the League its merchants turned to southern Germany and northern Italy.

The Reformation came in 1543, when the council called a superintendent from Lübeck to write a Protestant church order, but the prince-bishop and the cathedral chapter stayed Catholic, and town and bishop remained at odds. Plague from 1575, smallpox and the famine of 1580 killed some three quarters of the townspeople. In 1628 the town let Catholic League troops in without a fight, and the bishop restored the monasteries and raised the Petersburg citadel to watch the burghers; five years later a Swedish army laid siege, and he fled to Cologne. Because the war had spared it the worst, Osnabrück was chosen in 1641 to receive the Protestant envoys, and the settlement that followed made its prince-bishopric the first state in Germany ruled by Catholic and Lutheran bishops in turn.