The city that owed its walls to salt
Munich's founding story has nothing to do with monks. It begins with a bishop who wouldn't let the salt through.
In 1158, Duke Henry the Lion of Bavaria wanted a piece of the most lucrative trade in Central Europe: salt moving from Reichenhall south to Austrian markets. The only problem was that the road passed through a bridge controlled by the Bishop of Freising, who collected the tolls. Henry destroyed the bridge, built his own a few miles upstream, and ordered all salt caravans to cross there instead. The bishop complained to the Holy Roman Emperor. The emperor ruled in Henry's favour. The new crossing grew into a market town. That market town became Munich.
Salt shaped medieval Europe more ruthlessly than any general. The Hanseatic League's dominance of Baltic trade rested on Lüneburg's salt mines. Venice controlled Mediterranean politics partly through salt monopolies. France's gabelle—a hated salt tax first enacted in 1286—charged Parisians twenty times what Bretons paid for the same product, and that disparity became one of the grievances that fed the Revolution five centuries later.
Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History traces this thread across forty millennia, arguing that wherever salt was scarce, power was up for grabs. The mineral that now costs almost nothing once built cities, dissolved empires, and sent armies marching across deserts.