The rich merchant city

Everywhere you look in Mühlhausen you find church spires appearing over the red-tiled roofs, and if you look down you see water channels running between the houses. Mühle is the word for mill, and Mühlhausen is rightly so named. Watermills were the basis of its wealth from the moment of the city’s first appearance in written records in AD 967. Textiles and tanning were its chief industries in the Middle Ages. The more we learnt about its history the more we forgot the initial shabby impression from 1994. We discovered that Mühlhausen had been the site of one of the royal residences (Pfalze) from the 10th century until the middle of the 13th century, when the citizens of Mühlhausen fought off royal interference and thenceforth ran their own affairs as a free and independent city of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as it was called until its dissolution in 1806. Cloth from Mühlhausen was being traded in Hamburg and beyond and its citizens were rich and self-confident. In 1430 Mühlhausen became a member of the Hansa, that league of merchant cities whose staples or trading posts stretched across Europe from Russia to the Atlantic. (For more about the Hansa see the websites http://hanza.gdansk.gda.pl/nhanza_n.html and http://www.hanse.org/hanse.php?lg=en). Beyond the walls, which had been built between 1180 and 1250, the city owned extensive rich farmlands and forests. By around 1250 it had its own codified book of laws, the right to take tolls and duties on goods and its own mint. As an Imperial City it had its own seat in the Reichstag, the Imperial Diet, chief legislature of the Empire. On subsequent visits to Mühlhausen we explored its grand Rathaus, its town hall, and were astonished to find that it contained one of the oldest and most complete city archives in the whole of Germany.