Munich

MUNICH

MUNICH. Although settlement along the Isar River, south of the Danube, dates from Roman times, this city owes its German name München (meaning 'monks') to the brothers of the Benedictine abbey of Tegernsee, who first nurtured an agricultural outpost in the region in Carolingian times. In 1158, the Saxon duke Henry the Lion granted the town its first market charter, allowing the fledgling settlement to compete commercially against the rival trade and diocesan capital of Freising, about thirty miles north of the modern city center. Despite fits and starts, Munich's role as a commercial outpost developed from its control of an important bridgehead on the Isar and its strategic location on the trade route between Salzburg and the north. Its commerce in Bavarian salt, gold, and other commodities grew in the later Middle Ages, although its population lagged far behind the other great cities of the German south, including Augsburg (which by the sixteenth century had a population of around forty thousand), Nuremberg (with around twenty thousand), and Regensburg (fifteen thousand). The city's fourteenth-century defensive walls proved largely sufficient to hold Munich's population until the eighteenth century, and the town's inhabitants probably numbered around five thousand in 1500. Despite its modest size, Munich's prosperity is attested to by the surviving monuments of the late fifteenth century, including the imposing Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady; 1468–1488) and the Altes Rathaus (Old Town Hall; 1470–1480). During the sixteenth century the city rose to prominence as a center of government, of Catholic reform, and of art. As a result of the brief Landshuter Erbfolgekrieg (Bavarian Succession War; 1503–1505), several previously separate Bavarian possessions in the region were joined into a single duchy, and in the course of the century that followed, the Wittelsbach dynasty increasingly identified Munich as their capital. In the city a lavish building program began in the 1560s with the expansion of the ducal palace, the Residenz. Its Antiquarium or library, completed between 1569 and 1571, was hailed in the early modern period as the "eighth wonder of the world." Other additions to the Residenz followed, including the rococo-era Cuvilliés Theater (constructed between 1746 and 1777). Although minorities of Protestant artisans were present in Munich during the mid-sixteenth century, the building program also expressed the attachment of the Wittelsbachs and the city's burghers to Catholicism. These included the massive Michaelskirche (Church of St. Michael; completed 1597), the first structure in northern Europe to be modeled on the famous Roman church of the Jesuit order, Il Gesú; the seventeenth-century Theatinerkirche (Church of the Theatines), which was decorated for more than a century by a succession of Italian and French artists and architects; and the fantastically ornate Church of St. Johann Nepomuk (also known as the Asamkirche), designed by the brothers Cosmas and Aegidius Asam and built between 1733 and 1746. The role of architecture was considerable in establishing a Catholic confessional identity in early modern Munich. At the same time, the Wittelsbach dynasty pioneered governmental innovations that were mimicked elsewhere and were designed to rid the city and the surrounding territory of Protestant sympathizers and to foster a new purified culture of Catholic religious practice. In the late sixteenth century Munich became home to the duchy's Clerical Council, an institution of both clerical and secular officials that supervised the Catholic clergy and all aspects of religious practice in the duchy for more than two centuries. Music was yet a third prong of the Wittelsbach's counteroffensive against Protestants. In 1556 Duke Albrecht V recruited the Franco-Flemish musician Orlando di Lasso (1532–1594) to serve in his court chapel, elevating him to the status of musical director in 1562. During his more than thirty years in this position, Lasso reigned as the greatest composer of the Catholic Reformation in Europe, with hundreds of his compositions being printed in France, the Netherlands, and Italy. The alliance between the Wittelsbach dukes and artists deepened in the seventeenth century, although the city's fortunes fell into a decline for a time during the Thirty Years' War, especially during the years between 1632 and 1634, when occupation by the Protestant King Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden and an outbreak of the plague decreased the town's population by as much as a third. Munich's staunchly Catholic allegiances softened somewhat during the eighteenth century, as the Wittelsbach dukes adopted an enlightened despotic stance similar to that of the Habsburgs in Austria or the Hohenzollern in Brandenburg-Prussia. The more worldly sensibilities of the age are displayed in the monuments of that time, including the suburban pleasure palaces of Schloss Nymphenburg and the Amalienburg on Munich's outskirts, as well as the grand, but naturalistic Englischer Garten (English Garden) first laid out in the city in 1789. While the great monuments of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries show that Munich was an important early modern provincial capital, its rise to the status of a major international city occurred only in the nineteenth century as the town's population increased fivefold in the half century after 1850. During the early modern centuries Munich displayed traits typical of many German provincial capitals, including local autonomy, guild dominance, concerns for confessional purity, and grand dynastic pretensions.

See also Bavaria ; Palatinate ; Wittelsbach Dynasty (Bavaria) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nöhbauer, Hans F. Munich, City of the Arts. Translated by Peter Green. Munich, 1994.

Spindler, Max, ed. Handbuch der bayerischen Geschichte. 4 vols. Munich, 1967–.

Philip M. Soergel