Like a lot of Rhine cities, Düsseldorf was a border region in Roman times, with Germanic tribes on the eastern side of the river and Roman control on the west. From the 1300s through the 1600s, it was the court seat of regional dukes and counts, and for a brief period in the late 17th century its count was the Elector Palatine of the Holy Roman Empire. Today, it's the capital city of the North Rhine-Westphalia economic powerhouse.
I arrived on the train from Amsterdam. There are several every day.
The Düssel River flows into the Rhine in the middle of the city, and up river it also runs by the site where in 1856 Neanderthals were first discovered. I've posted on the local Neanderthal museum here.
Dusseldorf is an arts center, with several large museums. I've posted on the Kunstpalast here and here.
The Hofgarten is a large urban park, and it connects the Kunstpalast with the Altstadt and the fashionable, modern, high end shopping Konigsallee.
Where the Hofgarten opens out toward the Altstadt is a statue of late 18th and early 19th Century German painter Peter von Cornelius.
Down this alley in the Altstadt is the the Brick Gothic style St. Lambertus Church. There has been a church on this site since the 12th Century, but this one was built in the late 14th Century, and expanded and repaired many times since. From the 15th to the 17th Centuries, members of the ducal families were entombed here.
I didn't get any shots of the altar, because a service was being performed, but the tomb of Duke Wilhelm V of Jülich-Kleve-Berg (1539-1592) in the ambulatory is considered the most significant piece of art in the church.
Wilhelm was involved in many of the political power intrigues of his time, including marrying Jeanne d'Albret, niece of France's King Francois, and then waging war on the Holy Roman Empire's Spanish Netherlands, on France's behalf. When France didn't give him the support he needed, and the war didn't work out, he had the marriage annulled and switched sides, marrying Maria von Habsburg, niece of Holy Roman Emperor Karl V. He also had his sister Ann of Kleve married to England's King Henry VIII. The marriage lasted less than a year, but she was one of the lucky ones, and got to keep her head.
Wilhelm was also considered a humanist, and gave sanctuary at his court to humanist scholars. His humanism didn't stop him from expelling Jews from his Duchy.
A short walk from St Lambertus was the ducal castle, which was built in the 13th Century, It burned down in 1872. Only the tower remains. Those dark stones in the Burgplatz form the ground plan of the former castle.
The Burgplatz was pedestrianized in the 1990s, and it leads into the also pedestrianized Altstadt, which is as lovely as are many old European city centers.
St. Andreas is a Baroque Dominican church originally built for the Jesuits in the 1620s.
Although Düsseldorf was only briefly the site of the court of the Holy Roman Empire's Elector Palatine, several of the Electors are buried here.
The high altar was destroyed in World War II, and rebuilt in the 1960s.
Count Wolfgang Wilhelm von Pfalz-Neuburg had the church built, and he is entombed in its mausoleum. His grandson was Duke Johann Wilhelm II.
The organ dates to the 18th Century, but was significantly repaired after damage in World War II.
A couple of reliquaries from 1800 were stolen in 1985, and the church decided to leave the damage as they found it, as a lesson.
It was Duke Johann Wilhelm II who as Elector Palatine moved his court to Düsseldorf, where he was born, after the old court seat of Heidelberg was heavily damaged in the Nine Years' War with France. He later moved his court back to Heidelberg. Marriage being about power, his were to Maria Anna Josepha, daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III, then after her death, to Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, daughter of Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo III.
A great patron of art, it was Wilhelm who established Düsseldorf's long history as a cultural center. Much of his collection is now in Münich. A sculpted bust of him is at the Kunstpalast, as shown here, in one of my posts on the museum.
Wilhelm would die in Düsseldorf, and is entombed here.
Konigsallee is the modern high end shopping district, with a canal at its center. Kö-Bogen is an office and shopping complex, designed by Daniel Libeskind.
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