Around 845, Saint Altfrid founded an abbey here for the daughters and widows of the higher Saxon nobility. These were not nuns in the ordinary sense. Apart from the abbess herself, the women were not required to take vows of chastity, and the place functioned more like a residence and finishing school for the imperial elite. In 973, Mathilde II, granddaughter of Emperor Otto I, took charge and reigned for nearly 40 years - the most consequential abbess in the city's history. She filled the treasury with what are still some of the greatest objects of Ottonian art, including the Golden Madonna of Essen. By 1216, the abbess was titled Reichsfürstin, Princess of the Empire, and Essen's princess-abbesses would fight the city council over who actually ran the place for nearly six hundred years.

Coal was first mentioned in Essen in 1371; commercial mining began in 1450. By the late 16th century, the city was already a weapons town, with gunsmiths producing 14,000 rifles and pistols a year by 1620. Then, in 1811, Friedrich Krupp opened Germany's first cast-steel factory in Essen and laid the cornerstone of what would briefly be Europe's largest enterprise. The Krupp Works pulled in workers by the tens of thousands. Essen passed 100,000 residents in 1896 and would peak at over 720,000 by 1960. A sign at the main railway station welcomed Hitler and Mussolini in 1937 to the "Armory of the Reich." That title turned the city into a target: the RAF dropped 36,429 long tons of bombs on Essen, destroying 90 percent of the center and 60 percent of the suburbs.

Under the Nazi regime, tens of thousands of forced laborers were made to work in 350 camps scattered across the city - many in Krupp factories and Siemens works, much of it underground mining. They were prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates, civilians abducted from across occupied Europe. After the war, Alfried Krupp was convicted at the Nuremberg Krupp trial for his role in this system. He was pardoned by the United States in 1951 and resumed control of the company two years later. The story is often told as one of industrial revival, but the human cost was paid first, by people whose names mostly never made it into the company ledgers. Essen today maintains memorials and research projects that try to give those names back.

Coal mining in the region collapsed through the 1970s and 1980s, and the population followed it down. But the city did not empty out into a Rust Belt ruin. The Zollverein Coal Mine, once the largest hard-coal mine in the world, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001 and converted into a vast cultural complex of museums, design schools, and concert halls. In 2010, Essen and the wider Ruhr served as European Capital of Culture, a designation explicitly tied to the region's reinvention. ThyssenKrupp returned its headquarters to the old Krupp grounds the same year. Old administration buildings hold university institutes; one is now an IKEA parking lot. A pedestrian bridge over Altendorfer Straße still rests on the steel beams of the 19th-century factory railway.

The Museum Folkwang holds one of the Ruhr's great art collections, supported in part by the Alfried Krupp foundation. The Grillo-Theater, donated by industrialist Friedrich Grillo in 1892, still stages its season. The coat of arms is itself a curiosity: granted in 1886, it shows two shields under a single crown, one bearing the double-headed Imperial Eagle of the Holy Roman Empire and the other a sword the city long believed had beheaded its patron saints, Cosmas and Damian. Walk the southern boroughs and you will hear locals call the place Äßße in their Limburgish dialect - a reminder that, whatever the etymology, Essen has always been a border city: between Catholic and Protestant, abbey and council, coal and culture, what was and what comes next.