Ulm

Ulm stands on the Danube where the Blau and the Iller join it, a royal town that stayed free of princely lords after the fall of the Staufer. In the fourteenth century it quadrupled its area to 66.5 hectares, a size it kept until the nineteenth, and after years of quarrels between guilds and patricians it adopted the Great Oath Letter of 1397, giving the guilds a clear majority on the council over the patricians; the Oath Monday on which the mayor swears before the citizens became the town's holiday. Ulm led the Swabian League of Towns of 1376, fourteen towns, and was named its head and ornament. The citizens began the great minster on 30 June 1377, because the old church lay outside the walls during a siege by Charles IV.

Around 1500 Ulm reached its height. It held the second largest territory of any imperial city, with three towns and fifty-five villages, traded in iron, salt, wine and above all fustian, a cloth of cotton and linen sealed with the Ulm stamp, and its sculptors and altar makers sent works as far as Vienna and the Netherlands. In 1480 a new wall was built in the middle of the river, in 1488 it became the seat of the Swabian League, and in 1499 the Jews were expelled. The new sea routes and competition from the Fuggers brought decline after 1500. The city voted to become Protestant in 1531, and the iconoclasm that followed closed over thirty churches and chapels and destroyed over a hundred altars, ending Ulm as an art centre. In 1546 Charles V broke its constitution, and in the Thirty Years' War and the War of the Spanish Succession plague, war and ransoms wore down the old wealth.

Ulm lost its imperial status in 1803 and passed to Bavaria; in October 1805 Napoleon forced an Austrian army to surrender there, and in 1810 the city on the left bank of the Danube went to Württemberg.