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Fritzlar, a small German town (pop. 10,000) in northern Hesse, 160 km north of Frankfurt, with a storied history. It can reasonably be argued that the town was the birthplace both of Christianity in Germany (north of the Roman Limes) and of the German nation as a political entity.
The town has a medieaval center ringed by a wall with numerous watch towers. 37 meters high, the Graue Turm ("Grey Tower") is the highest remaining urban defense tower in Germany. The city hall of 1109, with a stone relief of St. Martin, the town's patron saint, is the oldest in Germany still in use for its original purpose. The Gothic church of the old Franciscan monestary is today the Protestant parish church, while its other buildings have been converted into a modern hospital. Many houses in the town center, notably around the market square, date from the 14th to 16th centuries and have been lovingly maintained or restored.
The Romanesque-Gothic cathedral (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Fritzlar_dom_st_peter.jpg) from the 12th-14th centuries in the center of town was built on the site where St. Boniface, apostle of the Germans, in 723 A.D. erected a chapel from the wood of an oak dedicated to Thor and sacred to the local German tribe, the Chatten/Catti (ancestors of the Hessians). Boniface, then still known under his original name Winfrid, had the oak felled to prove the superiority of the Christian god over Thor and the Germanic gods. This event marked the beginning of the Christianization of the Germans. Boniface established the first bishopric in Germany on a hill (Büraburg) across the Eder river, but after the death of Witta in 747, the first and only bishop of Büraburg, the bishopric was subsumed into the bishopric (later archbishopric) of Mainz. An important Benedictine monastery established in Fritzlar at the same time gained prominence as a center of religious and worldly learning under its most famous abbot, St. Wigbert.
Fritzlar was the site of multiple assemblies and synods of the German princes and church leaders during the early middle ages. The most important of these was the Reichstag of 919 A.D. when Henry I ("Henry the Fowler"), duke of Saxony, was elected King of the Germans to succeed Charlemagne's Frankish descendants on the throne of what had become known as the East Frankish Empire. This event marked the end of bitter rivalry between the two large German tribes of the Franks and the Saxons and the beginning of the German Empire that lasted until the Napoleonic wars. King Conrad I had died in 918 without heir and named Henry as his successor, although they had been at odds with each other from 912 to 915 over the title to lands in Thuringia. Conrad's choice was respected by the Reichstag of 919, where Henry was elected king with the support of dukes Eberhard III of Franconia, Conrad's brother, and Burkhard I of Swabia. Duke Arnulf of Bavaria, however, did not submit to Henry and claimed the German crown himself until Henry invaded Bavaria in 921.
At the Synod of 1118, prince-bishop Otto of Bamberg was was suspended by a papal party for having remained loyal to Emperor Henry IV during his quarrels with the papacy.
Located in the border area between Frankish and Saxon territories, and later a Roman-Catholic enclave owned by the Archbishop of Mainz in the midst of protestant Hesse, the town was frequently embattled, by Saxons and Franks, by Protestant and Catholic princes, and repeatedly sacked and rebuilt.
In 1821 the town became the administrative center of the district (Kreis) Fritzlar in the Electorate of Hesse-Kassel (Kurhessen), which in turn was annexed by Prussia in 1866. In 1932 the district was merged with the neighboring district of Homberg to form the district of Fritzlar-Homberg. In 1974, the three districts of Fritzlar-Homberg, Melsungen and Ziegenhain were combined into the new district Schwalm-Eder, with its administrative seat in Homberg. Today, the town is a service and market center for the surrounding area, with schools, hospital, and a sizeable military garrison with airfield.
Official web site: [1] (http://www.fritzlar.de)
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