Everything here starts with a shallow place in the river. The Weser could be waded at Minden, where the routes north through the Porta Westfalica gap met the east-west road along the hills, and a Frankish army assembly under Charlemagne is the first thing the records mention. A bishopric followed, one of seven founded in his reign, and in 1168 Henry the Lion married Matilda, daughter of Henry II of England, in the cathedral. Emperor Otto II had granted the town rights to a market, a mint and customs duties in 977. The citizens prised themselves loose from the bishop around 1230, got a charter in 1301, and irritated him enough that he moved his residence upriver to Petershagen in 1307. Then came the profitable part: Minden held staple right on the Weser, so passing merchants had to tie up and offer their cargo for sale before continuing. Bremen and Muenden claimed the same privilege, and the lawsuits ran for centuries.

On 1 August 1759, in fields north of the town, an allied army of Prussians, British and German troops broke a French and Saxon force in one of the decisive actions of the Seven Years' War. For Minden itself the lesson ran the other way: the French had occupied the town twice during that war, and Frederick the Great concluded it could no longer be held, so he struck its fortress status in 1764. Prussia changed its mind after 1815 and refortified it by royal order, which is where the six-hundred-metre rule and the strangled economy came from. Relief arrived in 1873, when the Imperial Diet stripped fortress status from a list of towns, Minden among them. The walls were razed by 1880 and the old fortification ground became the Glacis, a parkland ring that still holds the town centre like a setting.

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was born in Minden on 22 July 1784, the second son of a civil servant. He hated Latin, left school at fourteen and went to Bremen as a clerk in an import-export house, where the mathematics of shipping - longitude, navigation, the positions of stars - caught him instead. He had no university degree at all when, at twenty-five, he was made director of the new observatory at Koenigsberg. In 1838 he published the first reliable measurement of the distance to a star other than the Sun, tracking the tiny annual wobble of 61 Cygni and arriving at a figure within about ten per cent of the modern one. Six years later he deduced from its motion that Sirius had an unseen companion; it was found in 1862, sixteen years after his death. A bust of him stands at the head of the St Martin's steps.

A Jewish community had lived in Minden since 1270 and numbered around four hundred in the nineteenth century. The synagogue of 1865 was burned in the pogrom of 9 November 1938, and most of the town's Jewish citizens were then robbed of their property, deported and murdered; brass Stolpersteine set into the pavements now carry their names back to the doorways they were taken from. In the Weser and Wiehen Hills, tunnels were driven for underground armaments works, and prisoners from a subcamp of Neuengamme concentration camp were forced to build weapons inside them. A raid on 26 October 1944 breached the wall of the Mittelland Canal at the aqueduct, and the water drowned workers sheltering nearby. On 28 March 1945, B-17s of the United States Army Air Forces destroyed much of the centre, including the town hall and the cathedral, and killed more than 180 people.

In March 1946 the British brought a prisoner to a Minden interrogation site nicknamed Camp Tomato. On 15 March he signed a statement admitting the mass murder of Jews at the camp he had commanded, the first time Rudolf Hoess had put it on paper - and from Minden he went to Nuremberg. The town lost its status as regional capital to Detmold in 1947 and has been an ordinary Westphalian town of about 84,000 people ever since. Melitta, which moved its coffee-filter production from Dresden in 1929, is still headquartered here and still family-owned. And every other year the Citizen Battalion parades and the Freischiessen is shot: a marksmanship festival held since 1682 whose prize of fifty thaler - set by the Great Elector in 1685 - is still paid, in modern money, by the Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia.