Torgau

The bears belonged to a court. When the Wettin lands were divided at Leipzig in 1485, Torgau fell to the Ernestine electors, who rebuilt Hartenfels Castle above the Elbe and from 1525 made the town their only residence. Under Frederick the Wise and his two successors it became the political centre of the Reformation, so that people called Wittenberg its mother and Torgau its nurse. Luther and his colleagues drew up the Torgau Articles here in 1530, and in 1544 Luther consecrated the new castle chapel, one of the first churches anywhere built for Protestant worship.

Defeat in the Schmalkaldic War ended that standing. After the battle of Mühlberg in 1547 the electoral title passed to the Albertine line in Dresden, and Hartenfels became a secondary residence, but the town's bond with the Reformation held. In 1552 Luther's widow Katharina von Bora, fleeing plague in Wittenberg, died here after a coach accident, and in 1576 Lutheran theologians met in Torgau to draft the Torgau Book, the basis of the Formula of Concord. Two centuries later war came to its gates: on 3 November 1760 Frederick the Great's Prussians beat a larger Austrian army under Daun on the Süptitz heights outside the town.