Recklinghausen

Recklinghausen was a town of the archbishops of Cologne between the Emscher and the Lippe. Archbishop Henry of Müllenark granted it privileges in 1236; walls followed in the late thirteenth century and were enlarged in the fourteenth. It became the centre of the Vest Recklinghausen, a jurisdiction separated from Cologne's lands west of the Rhine.

Financial troubles led the archbishops to pledge the town and Vest to other rulers from 1446 until 1576. Recklinghausen joined the Hanseatic League as a lesser member in the sixteenth century, though it lay away from the great long-distance roads of the Hellweg. The Cologne War brought devastation in the 1580s. The Reformation gained little ground here, and in the seventeenth century Franciscan friars played an important part in Catholic worship and education.