Erlangen

Erlangen, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Bavaria, on a fertile plain, at the confluence of the Schwabach and the Regnitz, 11 m. N.W. of Nuremberg, on the railway from Munich to Bamberg. Pop. (1905) 23,720. It is divided into an old and a new town, the latter consisting of wide, straight and well-built streets. The market place is a fine square. Upon it stand the town-hall and the former palace of the margraves of Bayreuth, now the main building of the university. The latter was founded by the margrave Frederick (d. 1763), who, in 1742, established a university at Bayreuth, but in 1743 removed it to Erlangen. A statue of the founder, erected in 1843 by King Louis I. of Bavaria, stands in the centre of the square and faces the university buildings. The university has faculties of philosophy, law, medicine and Protestant theology. Connected with it are a library of over 200,000 volumes, geological, anatomical and mineralogical institutions, a hospital, several clinical establishments, laboratories and a botanical garden. Among the churches of the town (six Protestant and one Roman Catholic), only the new town church, with a spire 220 ft. high, is remarkable. The chief industries of Erlangen are spinning and weaving, and the manufacture of glass, paper, brushes and gloves. The brewing industry is also important, the beer of Erlangen being famous throughout Germany and large quantities being exported.

Erlangen owes the foundation of its prosperity chiefly to the French Protestant refugees who settled here on the revocation of the edict of Nantes and introduced various manufactures. In 1017 the place was transferred from the bishopric of Würzburg to that of Bamberg; in 1361 it was sold to the king of Bohemia. It became a town in 1398 and passed into the hands of the Hohenzollerns, burgraves of Nuremberg, in 1416. There for nearly three centuries it was the property of the margraves of Bayreuth, being ceded with the rest of Bayreuth to Prussia in 1791\. In 1810 it came into the possession of Bavaria. Erlangen was for many years the residence of the poet Friedrich Rückert, and of the philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm von Schnelling.

See Stein and Müller, Die Geschichte von Erlangen (1898).

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