Dresden is first documented in 1206 in a charter of Dietrich, Margrave of Meissen, and was a walled town by the middle of the 13th century, guarding a crossing of the Elbe where a stone bridge — the ancestor of today’s Augustusbrücke — is recorded from 1275. In 1485 the Leipzig partition of the Wettin lands made Dresden the residence of the Albertine dukes, later electors and kings of Saxony, and the castle at the western end of the old town grew from a 13th-century stronghold into the Residenzschloss that now houses the Green Vault and the Saxon armoury.
The Stallhof next to the castle was built in 1586–91 under Elector Christian I as a yard for tournaments and horse displays, and it is one of the very few Renaissance tournament grounds to survive in its original form; the Langer Gang gallery along its north side carries on its outer wall the Fürstenzug, a 102-metre procession of the Wettin rulers from the 12th to the 19th century, executed in 1907 in Meissen porcelain tiles. The medieval Frauenkirche that stood outside the walls was replaced by George Bähr’s baroque dome in 1726–43, destroyed in February 1945 and rebuilt by 2005; the Kreuzkirche on the Altmarkt has 13th-century origins under its post-war form.
Very little of medieval Dresden survives above ground: the town burned in 1491 and 1685, was rebuilt in baroque, and lost its last Gothic church, the Franciscan Sophienkirche, to demolition in 1962–63. What the old town keeps is the medieval street plan, the Altmarkt — where the Striezelmarkt, first documented in 1434, is held every Advent — and the castle quarter with the Stallhof, where the medieval Christmas market and the Rauhnächte are staged each winter.
