Rothenburg ob der Tauber sits on a spur above the Tauber river in Franconia, and for visitors it is the textbook image of a German medieval town: a near-complete ring of walls with covered wall-walks, gate towers, steep roofs and the crooked Plönlein corner that appears on most postcards. Rothenburg was granted the status of a free imperial city in 1274 under King Rudolf of Habsburg, which meant it answered to the emperor rather than a local lord, and it ran its own affairs and a sizeable rural territory through the later Middle Ages.
The town’s golden age was the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Under mayor Heinrich Toppler (died 1408) it was one of the larger cities in the Holy Roman Empire, and the buildings that survive from that era include the Gothic town hall, St. Jakob’s church with Tilman Riemenschneider’s Altar of the Holy Blood (carved 1500–1505), and the hospital quarter at the southern end of the walls. Economic decline after the Thirty Years’ War meant there was no money to rebuild in later styles, which is the main reason so much of the old fabric survived.
The event that still defines Rothenburg’s calendar is the siege of October 1631, when the Catholic League army under General Tilly took the Protestant town. According to a legend first staged as a play in 1881, the town was spared when former mayor Nusch accepted Tilly’s wager to drink a huge tankard of wine in one draught — the ‘Meistertrunk’. The story is probably later embroidery, but the play, the Whitsun procession and the mechanical figures on the Ratstrinkstube clock keep it alive every year.
What survives today is extensive: the wall circuit can be walked for most of its length, the old town is compact enough to cross on foot in fifteen minutes, and the Medieval Crime Museum and the Imperial City Museum cover justice and daily life in the former free city. Part of the eastern old town was destroyed by bombing in March 1945 and rebuilt afterwards with donations from around the world, which is why many wall stones carry donors’ names.
