Dinkelsbühl
Dinkelsbühl is a historic town in Central Franconia, a region of Germany, now part of the state of Bavaria, in southern Germany. Dinkelsbühl is a former Free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire. In local government terms, Dinkelsbühl lies near the western edge of the Landkreis of district of Ansbach, north of Aalen. Dinkelsbühl lies on the northern part of the Romantic Road, is one of three striking historic towns on the northern part of the route, the others being Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Nördlingen; the town lies on the southern edge of the Franconian Heights and on the River Wörnitz, which rises in the town of Schillingsfürst. The population in 2013 was 11,315 Fortified by Emperor Henry V, in 1305 Dinkelsbühl received the same municipal rights as Ulm, in 1351 was raised to the position of a Free Imperial City, its municipal code, the Dinkelsbühler Recht, published in 1536, revised in 1738, contained a extensive collection of public and private laws. During the Protestant Reformation, Dinkelsbühl was notable for being – along only with Ravensburg and Biberach an der Riß — a Bi-confessional Imperial City where the Peace of Westphalia caused the establishment of a joint Catholic–Protestant government and administrative system, with equality offices and a precise and equal distribution between Catholic and Protestant civic officials.
This status ended in 1802. Around 1534 the majority of the population of Dinkelsbühl became Protestant; every summer Dinkelsbühl celebrates the city's surrender to Swedish Troops in 1632 during the Thirty Years' War. This reenactment is played out by many of the town's residents, it features an array of Swedish troops attacking the city gate and children dressed in traditional garb coming to witness the event. Paper cones full of chocolate and candy are given as gifts to children; this historical event is called the "Kinderzeche" and can in some aspects be compared with the "Meistertrunk" in Rothenburg. The name is derived from the two German words for "child" and "the bill for food and drink in an inn", is called such because of the legend that a child saved the town from massacre by the Swedish Troops during the surrender; the legend tells that when the Swedish army besieged the town, a teenage girl took the children to the Swedish general to beg for mercy. The Swedish general had lost his young son to illness, a boy who approached him so resembled his own son that he decided to spare the town.
The film The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was filmed on location in Dinkelsbühl. The Werner Herzog film The Enigma of Kasper Hauser premiered on 1 November 1974 in Dinkelsbühl, where it was filmed. Dinkelsbühl towers. There exist a lot of outstanding attractions; the image of this town is typical for a German town of the 15th to early 17th century. St. George's Minster is a beautiful masterpiece in the Gothic style of the late 15th century, it is the largest "hall church" in the country. St. Paul's, now a Protestant church, was rebuilt in the 19th century in the style of the far late Roman architectural style, it was part of a monastery. The Castle of the Teutonic Order has a rococo chapel; the so-called Deutsches Haus is the ancestral home of the Counts of Drechsel-Deufstetten. It is a fine specimen of the German renaissance style of wooden architecture. Situated in front of the Minster is a monument to Christoph von Schmid, a 19th-century writer of stories for the young. Museum of the 3rd Dimension is housed in the former city mill.
The Museum of History shows historical discoveries found within Dinkelsbühl and has reconstructions of the ancient houses of the city. Since 2008, the museum has had a new domicile in the so-called "Steinerne Haus" from the 14th century; the official name is now: "house of history". While many of the artifacts are the same, the presentation is new; the church of St. Vincent, 2 km outside the city; the Summer Breeze Open Air heavy metal festival has been held in Dinkelsbühl since 2007. Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, A theologian during the 14th and 15th centuries. Christoph von Schmid, writer during the 18th and 19th centuries, was born in Dinkelsbühl in 1768. Friedrich von Hermann, an economist and statistician, was born in Dinkelsbühl in 1795. Stefan Reuter, football world champion in 1990, was born in Dinkelsbühl in 1966
Town
A town is a human settlement. Towns are larger than villages but smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish them vary between different parts of the world; the word town shares an origin with the German word Zaun, the Dutch word tuin, the Old Norse tun. The German word Zaun comes closest to the original meaning of the word: a fence of any material. An early borrowing from Celtic *dunom. In English and Dutch, the meaning of the word took on the sense of the space which these fences enclosed. In England, a town was a small community that could not afford or was not allowed to build walls or other larger fortifications, built a palisade or stockade instead. In the Netherlands, this space was a garden, more those of the wealthy, which had a high fence or a wall around them. In Old Norse tun means a place between farmhouses, the word is still used in a similar meaning in modern Norwegian. In Old English and Early and Middle Scots, the words ton, etc. could refer to diverse kinds of settlements from agricultural estates and holdings picking up the Norse sense at one end of the scale, to fortified municipalities.
If there was any distinction between toun and burgh as claimed by some, it did not last in practice as burghs and touns developed. For example, "Edina Burgh" or "Edinburgh" was built around a fort and came to have a defensive wall. In some cases, "town" is an alternative name for "city" or "village". Sometimes, the word "town" is short for "township". In general, today towns can be differentiated from townships, villages, or hamlets on the basis of their economic character, in that most of a town's population will tend to derive their living from manufacturing industry and public services rather than primary industry such as agriculture or related activities. A place's population size is not a reliable determinant of urban character. In many areas of the world, e.g. in India at least until recent times, a large village might contain several times as many people as a small town. In the United Kingdom, there are historical cities; the modern phenomenon of extensive suburban growth, satellite urban development, migration of city dwellers to villages has further complicated the definition of towns, creating communities urban in their economic and cultural characteristics but lacking other characteristics of urban localities.
Some forms of non-rural settlement, such as temporary mining locations, may be non-rural, but have at best a questionable claim to be called a town. Towns exist as distinct governmental units, with defined borders and some or all of the appurtenances of local government. In the United States these are referred to as "incorporated towns". In other cases the town lacks its own governance and is said to be "unincorporated". Note that the existence of an unincorporated town may be set out by other means, e.g. zoning districts. In the case of some planned communities, the town exists in the form of covenants on the properties within the town; the United States Census identifies many census-designated places by the names of unincorporated towns which lie within them. The distinction between a town and a city depends on the approach: a city may be an administrative entity, granted that designation by law, but in informal usage, the term is used to denote an urban locality of a particular size or importance: whereas a medieval city may have possessed as few as 10,000 inhabitants, today some consider an urban place of fewer than 100,000 as a town though there are many designated cities that are much smaller than that.
Australian geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor proposed a classification of towns based on their age and pattern of land use. He identified five types of town: Infantile towns, with no clear zoning Juvenile towns, which have developed an area of shops Adolescent towns, where factories have started to appear Early mature towns, with a separate area of high-class housing Mature towns, with defined industrial and various types of residential area In Afghanistan and cities are known as shār; as the country is an rural society with few larger settlements, with major cities never holding more than a few hundred thousand inhabitants before the 2000s, the lingual tradition of the country does not discriminate between towns and cities. In Albania "qytezë" means town, similar with the word for city. Although there is no official use of the term for any settlement. In Albanian "qytezë" means "small city" or "new city", while in ancient times "small residential center within the walls of a castle"; the center is a population group, larger than a village, smaller than a city.
Though the village is bigger than a hamlet In Australia, towns or "urban centre localities" are understood to be those centers of population not formally declared to be cities and having a population in excess of about 200 people. Centers too small to be called towns are understood to be a township. In addition, some local government entities are styled as towns in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, before the statewide amalgamations of th
Nördlinger Ries
The Nördlinger Ries is an impact crater, large circular depression in western Bavaria, located north of the Danube in the district of Donau-Ries. The city of Nördlingen is located inside about 6 kilometers southwest of its centre. "Ries" is derived from Raetia. The depression is interpreted as a meteorite impact crater formed 14.808 ± 0.038 million years ago in the Miocene. The crater is most referred to as Ries crater or the Ries; the original crater rim had an estimated diameter of 24 kilometers. The present floor of the depression is about 100 to 150 m below the eroded remains of the rim, it was assumed that the Ries was of volcanic origin. In 1960 Eugene Shoemaker and Edward C. T. Chao showed that the depression was caused by meteorite impact; the key evidence was the presence of coesite, which, in unmetamorphosed rocks, can only be formed by the shock pressures associated with meteorite impact. The coesite was found in suevite from Otting quarry, but before, Shoemaker was encouraged by the Nördlingen St. George's church built of locally derived suevite.
The suevite was formed from mesozoic sediments shocked by the bolide impact. The Ries impact crater was a rampart crater, thus far a unique finding on Earth. Rampart craters are exclusively found on Mars. Rampart craters exhibit a fluidized ejecta flow after impact of the meteorite, most compared to a bullet fired into mud, with the ejecta resembling a mudflow. Another impact crater, the much smaller Steinheim crater, is located about 42 km west-southwest from the centre of Ries; the two craters are believed to have formed nearly by the impact of a binary asteroid. Recent computer modeling of the impact event indicates that the impactors had diameters of about 1.5 kilometers and 150 meters, had a pre-impact separation of some tens of kilometers, impacted the target area at an angle around 30 to 50 degrees from the surface in a west-southwest to east-northeast direction. The impact velocity is thought to have been about 20 km/s; the resulting explosion had the power of 1.8 million Hiroshima bombs, an energy of 2.4×1021 joules.
The Ries crater impact event is believed to be the source of moldavite tektites found in Bohemia and Moravia. The tektite melt originated from a sand-rich surface layer, ejected to distances up to 450 km downrange of the crater. Stone buildings in Nördlingen contain millions of tiny diamonds, all less than 0.2 mm across. The impact that caused the Nördlinger Ries crater created an estimated 72,000 tonnes of them when it impacted a local graphite deposit. Stone from this area was used to build the local buildings. On one edge of the Nördlinger Ries are the Ofnet Caves, where, at the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologists discovered thirty-three human skulls dating to the Mesolithic period. Ries at Earth Impact Database Travel for Kids: Nordlingen, Germany Information on meteorite and aerial photo of town, scroll two thirds of the way down page
Germany
Germany the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north, the Alps to the south. It borders Denmark to the north and the Czech Republic to the east and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, Luxembourg and the Netherlands to the west. Germany includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of 357,386 square kilometres, has a temperate seasonal climate. With 83 million inhabitants, it is the second most populous state of Europe after Russia, the most populous state lying in Europe, as well as the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is a decentralized country, its capital and largest metropolis is Berlin, while Frankfurt serves as its financial capital and has the country's busiest airport. Germany's largest urban area is the Ruhr, with its main centres of Essen; the country's other major cities are Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Bremen and Nuremberg. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity.
A region named Germania was documented before 100 AD. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation. After the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederation was formed in 1815; the German revolutions of 1848–49 resulted in the Frankfurt Parliament establishing major democratic rights. In 1871, Germany became a nation state when most of the German states unified into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the revolution of 1918–19, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic; the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 led to the establishment of a dictatorship, the annexation of Austria, World War II, the Holocaust. After the end of World War II in Europe and a period of Allied occupation, Austria was re-established as an independent country and two new German states were founded: West Germany, formed from the American and French occupation zones, East Germany, formed from the Soviet occupation zone.
Following the Revolutions of 1989 that ended communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, the country was reunified on 3 October 1990. Today, the sovereign state of Germany is a federal parliamentary republic led by a chancellor, it is a great power with a strong economy. As a global leader in several industrial and technological sectors, it is both the world's third-largest exporter and importer of goods; as a developed country with a high standard of living, it upholds a social security and universal health care system, environmental protection, a tuition-free university education. The Federal Republic of Germany was a founding member of the European Economic Community in 1957 and the European Union in 1993, it is part of the Schengen Area and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999. Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G7, the G20, the OECD. Known for its rich cultural history, Germany has been continuously the home of influential and successful artists, musicians, film people, entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors.
Germany has a large number of World Heritage sites and is among the top tourism destinations in the world. The English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine; the German term Deutschland diutisciu land is derived from deutsch, descended from Old High German diutisc "popular" used to distinguish the language of the common people from Latin and its Romance descendants. This in turn descends from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz "popular", derived from *þeudō, descended from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- "people", from which the word Teutons originates; the discovery of the Mauer 1 mandible shows that ancient humans were present in Germany at least 600,000 years ago. The oldest complete hunting weapons found anywhere in the world were discovered in a coal mine in Schöningen between 1994 and 1998 where eight 380,000-year-old wooden javelins of 1.82 to 2.25 m length were unearthed. The Neander Valley was the location where the first non-modern human fossil was discovered.
The Neanderthal 1 fossils are known to be 40,000 years old. Evidence of modern humans dated, has been found in caves in the Swabian Jura near Ulm; the finds included 42,000-year-old bird bone and mammoth ivory flutes which are the oldest musical instruments found, the 40,000-year-old Ice Age Lion Man, the oldest uncontested figurative art discovered, the 35,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels, the oldest uncontested human figurative art discovered. The Nebra sky disk is a bronze artefact created during the European Bronze Age attributed to a site near Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt, it is part of UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme. The Germanic tribes are thought to date from the Pre-Roman Iron Age. From southern Scandinavia and north Germany, they expanded south and west from the 1st century BC, coming into contact with the Celtic tribes of Gaul as well
Swabian Circle
The Circle of Swabia or Swabian Circle was an Imperial Circle of the Holy Roman Empire established in 1500 on the territory of the former German stem-duchy of Swabia. However, it did not include the Habsburg home territories of Swabian Austria, the member states of the Swiss Confederacy nor the lands of the Alsace region west of the Rhine, which belonged to the Upper Rhenish Circle; the Swabian League of 1488, a predecessor organization, disbanded in the course of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. The directors of the Swabian Circle were the Duke of Württemberg. Though it was shattered into a multitude of very small states, the circle had an effective government, which, in view of the eastward expansion of France, from 1694 on maintained its own army based at the Kehl fortress; as of 1792 the Swabian Circle consisted of 88 territories, of which only the Duchy of Württemberg, the Margraviate of Baden and the Bishopric of Augsburg were of any significance. The Reichsdeputationshauptschluss reduced the number to the 1806 Rheinbundakte to seven.
The circle was made up of the following states: Imperial Circles in the 16th Century Historical Maps of Germany Media related to Swabian Circle at Wikimedia Commons
Schmalkaldic War
The Schmalkaldic War refers to the short period of violence from 1546 until 1547 between the forces of Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, commanded by Don Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League within the domains of the Holy Roman Empire. In the course of the Lutheran Reformation numerous Imperial States had adopted the new confession, against the opposition of the ruling Catholic House of Habsburg, who recognised these conversions as a quest for increasing autonomy to the detriment of the central Imperial authority. At the 1521 Diet of Worms Emperor Charles V had Martin Luther banned and the proliferation of his writings prohibited; the edicts of the Diet condemned Luther and banned citizens of the Holy Roman Empire from defending or propagating his ideas, subjecting advocates of Lutheranism to forfeiture of all property, half of the seized property to be forfeit to the imperial government and the remaining half forfeit to the party who brought the accusation.
While it was understood that Luther was to be arrested and punished, enforcement of this was suspended on account of the strength of his current popular appeal. After the Diets of Nuremberg failed to accomplish the goal of arresting Luther, the Diet of Speyer reversed course and temporarily suspended of the Edict of Worms; this diet was condemned at the Diet of Speyer, provoking the Protestation at Speyer and giving rise to the term "Protestant." This led to the presentation of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession and Catholic Confutatio Augustana at the 1530 Diet of Augsburg. In response to the Confutatio, Philipp Melanchthon prepared the Prima delineatio. Although this was rejected by the Emperor, Melanchthon improved it as a private document until it was signed at a meeting of the Schmalkaldic League as the 1537 Apology of the Augsburg Confession, but the Catholic side did not respond to it until the 1545–63 Council of Trent. In turn several Lutheran states led by Elector John Frederick I of Saxony and Landgrave Philip I of Hesse met at the town of Schmalkalden, where they established the Schmalkaldic League in 1531.
At first, the Nuremberg Religious Peace of 1532 granted religious liberty to members of the Schmalkaldic League. But, in 1544 Charles V returned to Germany from the Italian War after he had signed the Treaty of Crépy and began to forge alliances not only with Pope Paul III but with Lutheran princes, foremost with Duke Maurice of Saxony, the Albertine cousin of Saxon Elector John Frederick I. In view of the Emperor's preparations for battle, the Schmalkaldic leaders on 4 July 1546 gathered at Ichtershausen. Here they negotiated. Both John Frederick and Philip of Hesse agreed that the Emperor had larger financial resources and thus could set up a larger army. However, they noticed that they were positioned to mobilize their troops faster than the emperor because Charles V had not yet concentrated a significant amount of mercenaries; as a result they decided to wage a preventive war. Since Martin Luther had died in February, this eliminated a major obstacle to their decision. Luther had argued against the legality and morality of a war between the Empire and the Schmalkaldic League.
To Luther, only a beerwolf type ruler could be legitimately resisted by his own subjects. The Emperor gathered an army of around 52,000 men for his campaign, to start on the Danube; the war broke out in Swabia when a united army of several Lutheran Imperial cities occupied the Catholic town of Füssen, a possession of the Augsburg prince-bishops, made the Imperial forces move toward the fortress of Ingolstadt in the Bavarian duchy. However, plans to invade Austrian Tyrol in order to bar the Emperor from bringing up Italian troops did not meet the approval of the Schmalkaldic princes. Both Duke William IV of Bavaria and the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand I of Habsburg declared themselves neutral in the conflict, allowing Charles V to concentrate a mighty Imperial army without disturbances. Further on the Schmalkaldic leaders could not resolve upon delivering a battle against the entrenched Imperial troops. On 20 July 1546 Elector John Frederick I and Landgrave Philip I were placed under the Imperial ban, under the pretext that they had deposed the Catholic Duke Henry V of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel in 1542.
Duke Maurice of Saxony took the chance and in October with the aid of Ferdinand I of Habsburg, King of Bohemia, invaded the lands of his rival and cousin in Ernestine Saxony, forcing Elector John Frederick I to turn his troops around. He came on from Swabia and liberated Ernestine Saxony with his army, whereafter he in turn invaded Albertine Saxony and the adjacent Bohemian lands; the onset of winter left the armed conflict inconclusive. In Swabia the Hessian troops took no further action, while the forsaken Imperial cities, like the Lutheran princes Duke Ulrich of Württemberg and Count Palatine Frederick II chose to submit to the Emperor. On 28 March 1547 Charles V set off for Bohemia, where he united forces with his brother King Ferdinand I of Bohemia; because the Bohemian Lutherans did not provide any military assistance to Elector John Frederick I, as he had hoped for, the Spanish-Imperial forces of Charles V forced him into retreat. Due to disagreement in strategy, the League's defenses were routed on 24 April 1547 at the Battle of Mühlberg, where John Frederick I was taken prisoner.
After the battle, which determined the result of the war, only two cities continued to resist: Bremen and Magdeburg. Both cities refused to pay the fines Charles imposed on them and avoided o
Wörnitz (river)
The Wörnitz is a river in Bavaria, Germany, a left tributary of the Danube. Its source is in the Middle Franconia region of Bavaria, it flows south, through the Nördlinger Ries, flows into the Danube in Donauwörth. Towns along the Wörnitz include Wörnitz, Dinkelsbühl, Wassertrüdingen, Oettingen and Donauwörth. List of rivers of Bavaria
