Würzburg

In 1168 Frederick Barbarossa granted Bishop Herold the ducal dignity at a diet held here, and from then on the bishops ruled as princes and called themselves dukes in Franconia. The townsmen never fully accepted their lord. They rose against him again and again until, in 1400, the bishop's army crushed them at Bergtheim, and Würzburg remained a bishop's city to the end of the old Empire. When the Peasants' War reached the Main in 1525, the rebels stormed the fortress of Marienberg above the river and failed, and the sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, a councillor who had refused to march against them, was held prisoner in the fortress.

Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn, prince-bishop from 1573 to 1617, made the city a bastion of the Counter-Reformation. He refounded the university in 1582, built the great hospital that bears his name and rebuilt Marienberg as a Renaissance palace, while he banished the Lutherans, most of whom settled in nearby Schweinfurt, and hunted witches; more than 260 people in the bishopric were executed for witchcraft early in the 17th century. Swedish occupation from 1631 to 1634 briefly reversed his work. From 1699 the prince-bishops, above all the Schönborns, rebuilt the city in Baroque splendour, crowned by the Residenz that Balthasar Neumann raised for them between 1720 and 1744. Their state ended in 1802, when Würzburg passed to Bavaria, and after a few years as capital of a grand duchy under Ferdinand of Tuscany it returned to Bavaria in 1814.