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Founding
Founding of Frankfurt
most populated city of Hesse, Germany
- 1st century – 1st century CE
- Europe
Founding
most populated city of Hesse, Germany
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Frankfurt am Main, usually shortened to Frankfurt, is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 778,589 inhabitants as of 2025 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located in the foreland of the Taunus on its namesake river Main, the city forms a continuous conurbation with Offenbach; its urban area has a population of more than 2.7 million. Frankfurt is the heart of the larger Rhine-Main metropolitan region, which has a population of more than 5.8 million and is Germany's fourth-largest metropolitan region after the Rhine-Ruhr region, the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region and the Munich Metropolitan Region. Home to the European Central Bank, the city serves as one of the four institutional seats of the European Union. Frankfurt is classified by the GaWC as an Alpha world city.
Frankfurt was first mentioned in a document in 794 and has been an imperial city since 1372. Frankfurt was a city state, the Free City of Frankfurt, for nearly five centuries, and was one of the most important cities of the Holy Roman Empire, as a site of Imperial coronations; it lost its sovereignty upon the collapse of the empire in 1806, regained it in 1815 and then lost it again in 1866, when it was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia following the Austro-Prussian War. It has been part of the state of Hesse since 1945. Frankfurt is culturally, ethnically and religiously diverse, with half of its population, and a majority of its young people, having a migrant background. A quarter of the population consists of foreign nationals, including many expatriates. In 2015, Frankfurt was home to 1,909 ultra high-net-worth individuals, the sixth-highest number of any city.
Frankfurt is a global hub for commerce, culture, education, tourism and transportation, and is the site of many global and European corporate headquarters. Due to its central location in former West Germany, Frankfurt Airport became the busiest in Germany, one of the busiest in the world, the airport with the most direct routes in the world, and the primary hub for Lufthansa, the national airline of Germany and Europe's largest airline. Frankfurt Central Station is Germany's second-busiest railway station after Hamburg Hbf, operated by Deutsche Bahn, the world's largest railway company, whose Frankfurter division DB InfraGO manages the largest railway network in Europe. Frankfurter Kreuz is the most-heavily used interchange in the EU. Frankfurt is one of the major financial and business centers of Europe, with the headquarters of the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Deutsche Bank, DZ Bank, KfW, Commerzbank, DekaBank, Helaba, several cloud and fintech startups, and other institutes. Automotive, technology and research, services, consulting, media and creative industries complement the economic base. Frankfurt's DE-CIX is the world's largest internet exchange point. Messe Frankfurt is one of the world's largest trade fairs. Other major fairs include the Music Fair and the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest book fair. The city also has 93 consulates, among which the largest is the US Consulate General.
Frankfurt is home to influential educational institutions, including the Goethe University with the Universitätsklinikum Frankfurt (Hesse's largest hospital), the FUAS, the FUMPA, and graduate schools like the FSFM. The city is one of two seats of the German National Library (alongside Leipzig), the largest library in the German-speaking countries and one of the largest in the world. Its renowned cultural venues include the concert hall Alte Oper, continental Europe's largest English theater and many museums, including the Städel, Liebieghaus, German Film Museum, Senckenberg Natural History Museum, Goethe House and Schirn art venue. Frankfurt's skyline is shaped by some of Europe's tallest skyscrapers, which has led to the term Mainhattan.
The city has many parks and major botanical gardens. Roughly 52% of the city area is green. Frankfurt is a founding member of the Climate Alliance of European Cities and has pledged to work reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. Frankfurt is the seat of the German Football Association, is home to the first division association football club Eintracht Frankfurt, the Löwen Frankfurt ice hockey team, and the basketball club Frankfurt Skyliners, and is the venue of the Frankfurt Marathon and the Ironman Germany.
Frankonovurd (in Old High German) or Vadum Francorum (in Latin) were the first names mentioned in written records from 794. It transformed to Frankenfort during the Middle Ages and then to Franckfort and Franckfurth in the modern era. The name is derived from the Franconofurd, from the Germanic tribe of the Franks and Furt (cf. English ford) where the river was shallow enough to be crossed on foot.
Thietmar of Merseburg in the 11th century reported a founding legend in which Charlemagne and his army of Franks discovered the ford at Frankfurt when a doe crossed over it, showing them the way; in honor of this, the city was named "ford of the Franks". By the 19th century, the name Frankfurt had been established as the official spelling. The older English spelling of Frankfort is now rarely seen in reference to Frankfurt am Main, although more than a dozen other towns and cities, mainly in the United States, use this spelling, including Frankfort, Kentucky, Frankfort, New York, and Frankfort, Illinois. The New York Times first used the Frankfurt spelling for Frankfurt am Main on 24 October 1953 and last used the Frankfort spelling on 10 June 1954.
The suffix am Main has been used regularly since the 14th century. In English, the city's full name of Frankfurt am Main means "Frankfurt on the Main" (pronounced like English mine or German mein). Frankfurt is located on an ancient ford (German: Furt) on the river Main. As a part of early Franconia, the inhabitants were the early Franks, thus the city's name reveals its legacy as "the ford of the Franks on the Main".
Among English speakers, the city is commonly known simply as Frankfurt, but Germans occasionally call it by its full name to distinguish it from the other (significantly smaller) German city of Frankfurt an der Oder in the Land of Brandenburg on the Polish border. The common abbreviations for the city, primarily used in railway services and on road signs, are Frankfurt (Main), Frankfurt (M), Frankfurt a. M., Frankfurt/Main or Frankfurt/M. The common abbreviation for the name of the city is "FFM". Also in use is "FRA", the IATA code for Frankfurt Airport.
At the western borders of Frankfurt lies the Kapellenberg as part of the Taunus with one of the first Stone Age cities in Europe. The Celts had different settlements in the Taunus mountains north of Frankfurt, the biggest one the Heidetrank Oppidum. The first traces of Roman settlements established in the area of the river Nidda date to the reign of Emperor Vespasian in the years 69 to 79 AD. Nida (modern Heddernheim, Praunheim) was a Roman civitas capital (Civitas Taunensium).
Alemanni and Franks lived there, and by 794, Charlemagne presided over an imperial assembly and church synod, at which Franconofurd (alternative spellings end with -furt and -vurd) was first mentioned. It was one of the two capitals of Charlemagne's grandson Louis the German, together with Regensburg. Louis founded the collegiate church, rededicated in 1239 to Bartholomew the Apostle and now Frankfurt Cathedral.
Frankfurt was one of the most important cities in the Holy Roman Empire. From 855, the German kings were elected and crowned in Aachen. In 1372, Frankfurt became a Reichsstadt (Imperial Free City) and was as such directly subordinate to the Holy Roman Emperor rather than a regional ruler or a local nobleman. From 1562 onward the kings and emperors were crowned and elected in Frankfurt, starting with Maximilian II. This tradition ended in 1792, when Francis II was elected. His coronation was deliberately held on 14 July Bastille Day, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The elections and coronations took place in St. Bartholomäus Cathedral, known as the Kaiserdom (Imperial Cathedral), or the four other structures known to have existed at this location. The cathedral spire was constructed according to plans by Madern Gerthener in 1415 and is 95 meters tall.
The Messe Frankfurt ('Frankfurt Trade Fair') was first mentioned in 1150. In 1240, Emperor Frederick II granted an imperial privilege to its visitors, meaning they would be protected by the empire. The fair became particularly important when similar fairs in French Beaucaire lost attraction around 1380. Book trade fairs began in 1478. In 1585, Frankfurt traders established a system of exchange rates for the various currencies that were circulating to prevent cheating and extortion. Therein lay the early roots for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
Frankfurt managed to remain neutral during the Thirty Years' War, but suffered from the bubonic plague that refugees brought to the city. After the war, Frankfurt regained its wealth. In the late 1770s the theater principal Abel Seyler was based in Frankfurt, and established the city's theatrical life.
Following the French Revolution, Frankfurt was occupied or bombarded several times by French troops. It remained a Free city until the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1805/6. In 1806, it became part of the principality of Aschaffenburg under the Fürstprimas (Prince-Primate), Karl Theodor Anton Maria von Dalberg. This meant that Frankfurt was incorporated into the Confederation of the Rhine. In 1810, Dalberg adopted the title of a Grand Duke of Frankfurt. Napoleon intended to make his adopted son Eugène de Beauharnais, already Prince de Venise ("prince of Venice", a newly established primogeniture in Italy), Grand Duke of Frankfurt after Dalberg's death (since the latter as a Catholic bishop had no legitimate heirs). The Grand Duchy remained a short episode lasting from 1810 to 1813 when the military tide turned in favor of the Anglo-Prussian-led allies that overturned the Napoleonic order (→ Battle of the Nations). Dalberg abdicated in favor of Eugène de Beauharnais, which of course was only a symbolic action, as the latter effectively never ruled after the ruin of the French armies and Frankfurt's takeover by the allies.
After Napoleon's final defeat and abdication, the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) dissolved the grand-duchy and Frankfurt became a fully sovereign city-state with a republican form of government. Frankfurt entered the newly founded German Confederation (till 1866) as a free city, becoming the seat of its Bundestag, the confederal parliament where the nominally presiding Habsburg Emperor of Austria was represented by an Austrian "presidential envoy".
After the ill-fated revolution of 1848, Frankfurt was the seat of the first democratically elected German parliament, the Frankfurt Parliament, which met in the Frankfurter Paulskirche (St. Paul's Church) and was opened on 18 May 1848. In the year of its existence, the assembly developed a common constitution for a unified Germany (Frankfurt Constitution), with the Prussian king as its monarch. The institution failed in 1849 when the Prussian king, Frederick William IV, declared that he would not accept "a crown from the gutter".
Frankfurt lost its independence following the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, when Prussia annexed several smaller states, including the Free City of Frankfurt. The city was subsequently incorporated into the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau. The occupation and annexation were widely regarded in Frankfurt as a grave injustice, yet the city retained its distinctly Western European, urban, and cosmopolitan character. The formerly independent towns of Bornheim and Bockenheim were incorporated in 1890.
In 1914, the citizens founded the University of Frankfurt, later named Goethe University Frankfurt. This marked the only civic foundation of a university in Germany; today it is one of Germany's largest.
From 6 April to 17 May 1920, following military intervention to put down the Ruhr uprising, Frankfurt was occupied by French troops. The French claimed that Articles 42 to 44 of the peace treaty of Versailles concerning the demilitarization of the Rhineland had been broken. In 1924, Ludwig Landmann became the first Jewish mayor of the city, and led a significant expansion during the following years. In 1933, the Nazi regime seized power. In November 1938, the regime ordered the Kristallnacht. The synagogues of Frankfurt were destroyed. Later, the vast majority of the Jewish population fled or was killed during the Holocaust.
During World War II, Frankfurt was the location of a Nazi prison for underage girls with several forced labour camps, a camp for Sinti and Romani people (see Romani Holocaust), the Dulag Luft West transit camp for Allied prisoners of war, and a subcamp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.
Frankfurt was severely bombed in World War II (1939–1945). About 5,500 residents were killed during the raids, and the once-famous medieval city center, by that time one of the largest in Germany, was almost completely destroyed. It became a ground battlefield on 26 March 1945, when the West Allied advance into Germany was forced to take the city in contested urban combat that included a river assault. The 5th Infantry Division and the 6th Armored Division of the United States Army captured Frankfurt after several days of intense fighting, and it was declared largely secure on 29 March 1945. In spite of the wartime destruction, more than 40% of Frankfurt's buildings still date from before the Second World War.
After the end of the war, Frankfurt became a part of the newly founded state of Hesse, consisting of the old Hesse-(Darmstadt) and the Prussian Hesse provinces. The city was part of the American Zone of Occupation of Germany. The Military Governor for the United States Zone (1945–1949) and the United States High Commissioner for Germany (HICOG) (1949–1952) had their headquarters in the IG Farben Building, intentionally left undamaged by the Allies' wartime bombardment.
Frankfurt was the original choice for the provisional capital city of the newly founded state of West Germany in 1949. The city constructed a parliament building that was never used for its intended purpose (it housed the radio studios of Hessischer Rundfunk). In the end, Konrad Adenauer, the first postwar Chancellor, preferred the town of Bonn, for the most part because it was close to his hometown, but also because many other prominent politicians opposed the choice of Frankfurt out of concern that Frankfurt would be accepted as the permanent capital, thereby weakening the West German population's support for a reunification with East Germany and the eventual return of the capital to Berlin.
Postwar reconstruction took place in a sometimes simple modern style, thus changing Frankfurt's architectural face. A few landmark buildings were reconstructed historically, albeit in a simplified manner (e.g., Römer, St. Paul's Church, and Goethe House). The collection of historically significant Cairo Genizah documents of the Municipal Library was destroyed by the bombing. According to Arabist and Genizah scholar S.D. Goitein, "not even handlists indicating its contents have survived."
The end of the war marked Frankfurt's comeback as Germany's leading financial hub. In 1948, the Allies founded the Bank deutscher Länder, the forerunner of the Deutsche Bundesbank. Following this decision, more financial institutions were re-established, such as Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank. In the 1950s, Frankfurt Stock Exchange regained its position as the country's leading stock exchange. In 1998, the European Central Bank was founded in Frankfurt, followed by the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority in 2011, and the Anti-Money Laundering Authority in 2024.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Frankfurt”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.