Königsberg, Kant's home city, was named in honour of a Bohemian king
For almost seven centuries Königsberg was a German Baltic port where Prussian kings were crowned and Immanuel Kant spent his life. Founded by crusading knights in 1255 and named after the Bohemian king who funded its first fortress, it was wrecked in 1944 and 1945 and reborn as Soviet Kaliningrad in 1946.
Before the city there was Twangste, a fort of the Old Prussians, a Baltic people whose name for it meant a pond formed by a dam. During the crusade against the pagan Prussians in 1255, the Teutonic Knights destroyed it and raised their own castle, calling it King's Mountain after Ottokar II of Bohemia, who paid for the first fortress. Polish and Lithuanian names for the city are direct translations of the German. The knights used it as a base against pagan Lithuania, and after rebels destroyed the first settlement during uprisings in 1262 and 1263, a new Old Town grew up between the castle hill and the river.
Königsberg joined the Hanseatic League in 1340 and traded with England and Flanders. In 1454, as part of the Prussian Confederation, it rebelled against the knights and briefly accepted the Polish king, sparking the Thirteen Years' War; its three constituent towns split, and two soon went back to the Order. When the Grand Master fled his fortress at Marienburg for Königsberg in 1457, the magistrates reportedly gave him a barrel of beer out of sympathy.
The city later served as capital of the Teutonic state and then the Duchy of Prussia, and from 1701 Prussian monarchs were crowned there even though Berlin was the capital. Germans and Old Prussians were joined over the centuries by Poles, Lithuanians and French Huguenots. The Albertina University, founded in 1544, anchored a remarkable intellectual life: besides Kant, the city was home to E. T. A. Hoffmann, Käthe Kollwitz, the mathematician David Hilbert and Hannah Arendt.
Between the world wars it sat in East Prussia, cut off from the rest of Germany by the Polish Corridor. Allied bombing in 1944 and the Soviet capture in early 1945 left it heavily damaged. Renamed after the Soviet leader Mikhail Kalinin in 1946 and resettled mainly by Russians, its historic core was demolished. In 1990 Germany formally gave up any claim to it.
Source: Königsberg
