Stuttgart

Stuttgart lies in a basin on three sides closed in by hills, where a stud farm, the Stuotgarten that gave the town its name, was founded in the tenth century, traditionally by Duke Liudolf of Swabia. The settlement came to the Counts of Württemberg in 1251 as the dowry of Mechthild of Baden. In 1286 King Rudolf I besieged the town and razed its walls, and in 1312 to 1315 the city of Esslingen administered it after the Württembergers fell out with Emperor Henry VII. Count Eberhard I then made it, from 1317, his strengthened residence, because it was safer from Esslingen than the old Württemberg castle; about 1320 the canons and the Württemberg tombs were moved from Beutelsbach to the collegiate church. He had begun a moated castle on the site of the later Old Castle about 1302.

In 1495 Stuttgart became the seat of the duchy of Württemberg. Duke Ulrich's quarrel with Reutlingen and the Swabian League put Württemberg under Habsburg rule from 1520 to 1534; peasants held the city for a few days in 1525, and Ulrich brought in the Reformation through Erhard Schnepf on his return. Duke Christoph had a new wall built about 1565 around the suburbs, and Aberlin Tretsch turned the castle into a Renaissance palace between 1553 and 1578. After the defeat at Nördlingen in 1634 the duke fled to Strasbourg, Habsburg rule lasted until 1638, plague struck in 1637, and the population fell from about 10,000 to fewer than 5,000.

In 1718 the court moved to Ludwigsburg, and Stuttgart regained the role of main residence only under Duke Carl Alexander, whose financial adviser Joseph Süss Oppenheimer was judicially murdered after his death. Carl Eugen laid the foundation stone of the New Palace in 1746. Stuttgart became capital of the Electorate of Württemberg in 1803 and of the new kingdom in 1806, and held its first Cannstatt fair in 1818.