From “to the monks” to Bavaria’s million-plus capital
Munich, capital of Bavaria and Germany’s third-largest city with about 1.6 million residents in late 2024, began as a tiny tenth-century monastic settlement. Its name comes from Old High German for “to the monks,” and its official founding day is 14 June 1158.
Long before the town, the Isar valley was busy. The river served as a prehistoric trade route, and in the Bronze Age the area was among Europe’s largest raft ports, with settlements up to four thousand years old. Celtic remains lie around Ramersdorf-Perlach, the Roman road between Augsburg and Salzburg crossed the river just south of today’s city, and the Baiuvarii settled districts such as Pasing and Bogenhausen from the sixth century.
The city proper owes its start to Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, who burned the rival bridge at Föhring and built his own toll bridge, customs house and market upstream to control the salt trade. When Bishop Otto of Freising complained to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, an arbitration at Augsburg on 14 June 1158 sided with Henry but made him pay the bishop a third of his income. Pottery shards found at Marienhof in 2012 show the settlement is older still.
Munich gained city walls in 1175 and passed to the Wittelsbach dukes, who ruled until 1918. Louis IV, born here, became Holy Roman Emperor in 1328 and granted a lucrative salt monopoly. The Gothic Frauenkirche rose in about twenty years from 1468, William V built the Hofbräuhaus in 1589, and the city became a stronghold of the Counter-Reformation, founding the Catholic League in 1609. Swedish troops occupied it in 1632, and plague struck in 1634 and 1635.
Allied with Napoleon, Munich became capital of the new Kingdom of Bavaria in 1806. A festival in October 1810 celebrating the crown prince’s wedding grew into Oktoberfest, and Ludwig I filled the city with neoclassical museums. Today it is the wealthiest city in the European Union by GDP per head among cities of over a million people, and was ranked third worldwide for living standards by Mercer in 2018.
Source: Munich
