The Early Period – from the Town's Formation to the Thirty Years' War

At the historical beginning of the city of Münster stands the founding of a monastery under the aegis of the missionary Liudger on the so-called Horsteberg. The site of the monastery founded in the year 793 was the hill called Mimigern, located at a ford over the Ahwa = water. This now cathedral hill had already been settled in the 6th millennium B.C., and a cult site existed there in Germanic times. This place was now to become the centre of a Christian mission, and the original name Mimigernaford accordingly changed over time to Monastere um, a name first attested around 1106. With the increased influx of merchants and craftsmen the cathedral borough developed into a town.

The town was also granted the right of self-defence, i.e. it had its own military authority with its own soldiers and thus protected its inhabitants against raids and plundering to that extent itself. With the establishment of a bishop's seat in Münster the town also had to be provided with fortifications. Already around 800 an appropriate structure was built around the Horsteberg, and the town wall was completed around 1200, also incorporating the merchants' settlement in front of the cathedral stronghold[1]. Its earlier course corresponds to that of today's Promenade. In addition to the military protection of the townspeople by the encircling wall with its towers and gates, Boockmann describes its other functions in general, but certainly transferable to the situation of the city of Münster in the Middle Ages, as follows: "Even if the town began before the town wall, in many respects the wall was the boundary which separated the town from its surroundings. The stranger was made very clearly aware of this fact. By day a municipal gatekeeper asked him what he wanted in the town, and perhaps the gatekeeper only let him in on presentation of a guarantor. Perhaps the visitor was merely forced to pay a gate toll. If he arrived too late, namely 'after the gates had closed', he probably had to wait until the next morning. The gates, however, also operated in the opposite direction. Leaving the town was also controlled as a consequence of the fortification. At night, or when for some particular reason the gates were closed during the day (for example in the case of internal town disputes), the townspeople could not simply leave the town either – unless they were, for instance, on good terms with a monastery that adjoined the town wall and had its own gate"[2].

[1] See: Peter Werland, Alt-Münsters Stadttore und Festungswerke, in: Das schöne Münster, 12th year (1940), no. 12, pp. 89 ff.

[2] Hartmut Bookmann, Die Stadt im späten Mittelalter, Munich 1986, p. 34.

Since the Middle Ages the Bishopric of Münster had developed into an independent state. Münster was thus part of the Prince-Bishopric of Münster and at times its largest garrison. The city therefore also had to accommodate varying numbers of cathedral soldiers with their wives and children.

Münster was not an imperial free city (reichsunmittelbar), but a so-called territorial (landsässige) city. It was under episcopal authority, yet as a wealthy merchant city it strove for independence and attempted – ultimately unsuccessfully – to become a free imperial city. This pursuit of legal autonomy and the tensions with the respective prince-bishop that necessarily resulted from it shaped the history of the city of Münster over a long period.

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