When: 1552

Weimar becomes a residence, 1552

A defeated elector picked the town that was left to him, and Weimar stopped being provincial.

Everything Weimar later became rests on a defeat. In 1552 a prince who had lost the electorship chose the town that was left to him, and a market place of brewers and guilds acquired a court — with everything a court drags behind it, starting with a painter.

The defeat behind the move

Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous led the Protestant princes of the Schmalkaldic League and was beaten by the Emperor in 1547. The settlement took his electoral title and the Wittenberg district with it — the university town, Luther's town, the centre of Lutheran Saxony. What remained to him was Thuringian land with Weimar in the middle of it, and five years of captivity to think about what to do with that.

One sentence in the town chronicle

The city's own compact chronicle records the year in a line: "Johann Friedrich der Großmütige wählt nach dem Verlust des Kurkreises Wittenberg die Stadt Weimar zur seiner neuen Residenz; mit ihm kommt der Maler Lucas Cranach d. Ä. in die Stadt."^[1] A residence chosen, and a painter arriving in the same breath — the entry reads like an afterthought and turns out to be the whole cultural history of the place in miniature.

What a court brings with it

A court means officials, a chancellery, builders, and people who are paid to make things that are not useful. Cranach was eighty when he came; he moved into his son-in-law's new Renaissance house on the market square, worked on the altarpiece for the town church, and died a year later.^[2] The house and the altar are both still there, a few streets apart.

Why 1552 is the hinge

From this year the Ernestine line sat in Weimar, and it never left. Two centuries later that inheritance is what Anna Amalia has to work with, and what makes it possible for a duke of a small state to invite a young poet from Frankfurt and keep him. Trace the library, the theatre and the classical era back far enough and the trail ends at a defeated prince picking the only address he had left.