The town's founding date is not known. There were
"Bandkeramiker" settlements right on the western town limits, partly from 5,000 years BC. Iron ore extraction and smelting in and around Wetzlar has been documented as early as the Celtic La Tène period. Iron processing has a tradition of around 2500 years there. There were also pit fields for copper, silver and gold in and around Wetzlar, albeit much later. In the proximity of Wetzlar there are also a few
Roman remains, which were constructed during the reign of the emperor
Augustus (reigned 27 BC – 14 AD). There was a military camp at Dorlar and some Roman roadwork. The most important finding however is an uncompleted city (
Waldgirmes Forum), which has been excavated since 1993. After their defeat in the
battle of the Teutoburg Forest the Romans abandoned the area and withdrew to the
Rhine border. The name "Wetzlar" had come into being most likely by the 3rd century to the 8th century. The last syllable
"―lar" suggests that the town was in existence by the 3rd century. The ending may be
Celtic or
Frankish (in the latter case, most likely referring to wooden defences around the town). The
Conradine Gebhard, Count in the
Wetterau, and as of 904
Duke of Lorraine, had a Church of the Saviour consecrated in 897, which replaced earlier structures. In the early 10th century came the founding of the
Marienstift (
monastery).
Free Imperial City At some unknown time, Wetzlar was granted
market rights, and thereby, the right to levy market dues. Within a year, a market community came into being. The monastery's forerunners were surely part of the crystallization point at which believers, traders and craftsmen met, above all on holidays. The
Hohenstaufen Emperor
Frederick I Barbarossa (r. 1152–1190) created a
Reichsvogtei (roughly "Imperial Bailiwick"), and in 1180 put Wetzlar's citizens on the same level as
Frankfurt's. Wetzlar became a
Free Imperial City and kept this distinction until 1803. For the town's protection, and to secure the Wetterau as an Imperial Province, he expanded high above Wetzlar the Imperial Castle (
Reichsburg), which had most likely already stood in one form or another before then. The origin of the name "Reichsburg Kalsmunt" is not quite clear. The following explanation cannot be ruled out:
Kals- =
Karls and
munt ≈ vassal, that is, a liege of the Frankish court. Thus it would seem to be a case of a building work from
Charlemagne's time ("Charlemagne" is "
Karl der Große" – "Charles the Great" (740s–814) – in
German). Imperial coinage was struck at Kalsmunt. The commercial road, which crossed the Lahn at Wetzlar, the town's
iron production, to which the Iron Market (
forum ferri) still bears witness, the
wool weaving mill and
tanning seemed a good basis on which to develop the town further. In 1285 the "false emperor" Dietrich Holzschuh, called
Tile Kolup, who claimed to be
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor (who actually had already died in Italy in 1250) came to Wetzlar. When the rightful king,
Rudolph I (r. 1273–1291), heard of this and came to Wetzlar, the city leaders seized Tile Kolup and handed him over. He was sentenced as a
warlock, a
heretic and a
blasphemer to a
fiery death, which he suffered the next day in Wetzlar at the stake. Until 1250, most of the town fortifications, whose remains can still be seen today, were complete. By the middle of the 14th century, it is reckoned, the town's population was 6,000, making it by the standards of the time a "city". About 1350, the high point of the town's development in the
Middle Ages was reached. Decades-long feuds with the Counts of Solms, who were trying to make Wetzlar into a Solms-domain city, threatened the vital commercial road. The Emperor supported the town, albeit vainly. The city plunged into debt and in 1387 it fell under forced administration; however, it was incorporated into the
Swabian League of Towns. The town's decline led by the end of the
Thirty Years' War to a drop in population, to 1,500. A stroke of luck came Wetzlar's way in 1689 when the
Holy Roman Empire's highest court, the
Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber Court), was moved from
Speyer to Wetzlar after
Speyer had been devastated by the French in the
War of the Palatinate Succession. Besides
Vienna (residence of the Emperor) and
Regensburg (seat of the
Imperial Diet) Wetzlar thus gained a central function within the
Holy Roman Empire and although it remained a tiny town it was regarded as one of its capitals. The court became the town's main employer; at the Empire's dissolution in 1806, it had a staff of about 150 including 20 judges, while a further 750 derived their income from it. In the summer of 1772,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was at the
Reichskammergericht as a trainee. His novel
The Sorrows of Young Werther is inspired by real events which Goethe experienced in Wetzlar. In 1803 Wetzlar came under the rule of
Karl Theodor Anton Maria von Dalberg, the Archchancellor of the Holy Roman Empire and a close ally of
Napoleon Bonaparte and thus lost its status as a free town. With the Empire's dissolution in 1806, the great court also met its end. It was replaced by a school of law founded by Karl von Dalberg in 1808, which not only continued the Reichskammergericht's function of training constitutional lawyers, but also employed many of the former staff as teachers. A former legal trainee, Franz Stickel (1786–1848), was selected to translate the Code Napoleon that Dalberg introduced in his territories in 1810–11. After the
Congress of Vienna, the area passed to
Prussia in 1815, and in 1822 it became the seat of the newly formed district of Wetzlar, which later became an
exclave of the
Rhine Province.
Wetzlar becomes an industrial town Industrialization began once the Lahn was made into a navigable waterway. With the opening of two
railway lines in 1862–1863 (the
Lahntal railway from Wetzlar to
Koblenz and the
Cologne-Gießen Railway, the section through Wetzlar is now called the
Dill Railway), which met in Wetzlar, the town found itself connected to raw material and outlet markets, becoming an industrial town. The strategic
Cannons Railway, which was completed from
Berlin to
Metz via Wetzlar in 1882, was also sometimes known as the Wetzlar Railway (
Wetzlarer Bahn) or Berlin–Wetzlar Railway (
Berlin-Wetzlarer Bahn). In 1869, in the municipal area alone, 100
ore mines were in operation. Wetzlar's first
blast furnace, built by the brothers Buderus, went into service in 1872. As well, world-famous optical and precision mechanics companies such as Leitz (
Leica), Hensoldt (
Zeiss Optronics in the past, now
Airbus),
Pfeiffer Vacuum,
Philips, Loh, Seibert, Hollmann,
Minox and many others set up shop in the town. For more than one hundred years, the
iron ore found in the Lahn-Dill area (
haematite) was processed at the
Sophienhütte ironworks. As of 1887, iron ore mines were being shut down one by one, interrupted only by the
First World War, because foreign ore from
strip mines was being offered at lower prices on the world market. In 1926, mining came to an end altogether.
Wetzlar in the 20th century As part of the progressing industrialization, the town outgrew its mediaeval town limits. In 1903 came the amalgamation of Niedergirmes with its extensive industrial works and the
railway station neighbourhood. By the end of the First World War, the population had risen to over 15,000. Owing to increasing transportation problems, a ringroad was built to the west of the Old Town (Altstadt), taking the load off the old stone bridge across the Lahn by building a further bridge. In the
Second World War, the town, being an industrial stronghold, also became the target of heavy bombing, which destroyed much of the railway station neighbourhood and Niedergirmes. The historic Old Town, however, was mostly spared from the
air raids. After the Second World War ended in 1945, Wetzlar found itself in the American occupation zone, and later, once new boundaries had been drawn, in the
Federal State of
Hesse. By the beginning of the 1950s, owing to the huge numbers of displaced people from lost territories and refugees flooding into the town, the population had doubled to 30,000. On 1 January 1977, as part of Hesse's municipal reforms, Wetzlar was united with the neighbouring town of
Gießen and fourteen outlying communities to form the city of
Lahn. This district-free city had about 156,000 inhabitants. The amalgamation was very unpopular, and after persistent protests – not least of all from Wetzlar – the city of Lahn was dissolved on 31 July 1979, and Wetzlar once again became an independent town. The municipal reforms, however, had been "worth the trouble" for Wetzlar inasmuch as the town gained eight new outlying communities in the deal, making both the town's area and population considerably greater than they had been. Moreover, Wetzlar has since this time been the seat of the Lahn-Dill-Kreis, which also came into being at the same time. ==Politics==