When: 1424

The town fire of 1424

One fire took much of the houses, the castle, the town church and the town hall — and Weimar's oldest surviving buildings are what replaced them.

In 1424 a fire destroyed much of medieval Weimar: the chronicle names the houses, the castle, the town church and the town hall in a single line. Almost nothing a visitor sees in the old town is older than that afternoon, because the buildings the town is admired for are the ones built afterwards.

What the chronicle records

A devastating fire destroyed large parts of the houses, the castle, the town church and the town hall.^[1] Four institutions in one line of the chronicle — domestic, ducal, ecclesiastical and civic. For a town whose council would shortly be legislating the ingredients of beer, it is the largest thing the chronicle records happening to it.

What went up in its place

The castle came back as the Renaissance building called Hornstein, which stood until the next fire in 1618.^[2] The town church was rebuilt from 1498 as the late Gothic hall church finished in 1500 — the one a visitor walks into today, over a predecessor of 1245–1249.^[3] Weimar's oldest standing fabric is, in this sense, a consequence of the disaster.

The scale of the recovery

Nine years later the council issued its own brewing ordinance: hops and malt in the beer, nothing else.^[1] That is the register of a small town getting on with things. It took the rest of the century to raise the new church, and the market square only acquired the Renaissance houses it is known for in the 1540s, when a court arrived.