The city of Weimar, whose oldest record dates from the year 899, becomes important in 1547 as the capital of the Saxe-Weimar duchy.

Destined to become one of the great cultural sites of Europe, home to such luminaries as Bach, Goethe, Schiller, and Herder, it will become a site of pilgrimage for the German intelligentsia from the time Goethe first moves to Weimar in the late eighteenth century.

It will also give its name to the Weimar Republic, the period in German history from 1919-1933.