collection. The educational establishments of the town include a gymnasium, a realgymnasium, a realschule, technical schools for building and handicrafts, a high-class commercial school, a school of agriculture, and an academy of music. The most notable industry of Erfurt is the culture of flowers and of vegetables, which is very extensively carried on. This industry had its origin in the large gardens attached to the monasteries. It has also important and growing manufactures of ladies' mantles, boots and shoes, machines, furniture, woollen goods, musical instruments, agricultural machinery and implements, leather, tobacco, chemicals, &c. Brewing, bleaching and dyeing are also carried on on a large scale, and there are extensive railway works and a government rifle factory. Erfurt (Med. _Erpesfurt_, _Erphorde_, Lat. _Erfordia_) is a town of great antiquity. Its origin is obscure, but in 741 it was sufficiently important for St Boniface to found a bishopric here, which was, however, after the martyrdom of the first bishop, Adolar, in 755, reabsorbed in that of Mainz. In 805 the place received certain market rights from the emperor Charlemagne. Later the overlordship was claimed by the archbishops of Mainz, on the strength of charters granted by the emperor Otto I., and their authority in Erfurt was maintained by a burgrave and an _advocatus_, the office of the latter becoming in the 12th century hereditary in the family of the counts of Gleichen. In spite of many vicissitudes (from 1109 to 1137, for instance, the town was subject to the landgraves of Thuringia), and of a charter granted in 1242 by the emperor Frederick II., the archbishops succeeded in upholding their claims. In 1255, however, Archbishop Gerhard I. had to grant the city municipal rights, the burgraviate disappeared, and Erfurt became practically a free town. Its power was at its height early in the 15th century, when it joined the Hanseatic League. It had acquired by force or purchase various countships and other fiefs in the neighbourhood, and ruled a considerable territory; and its wealth was so great that in 1378 it established a university, the first in Europe that embraced the four faculties. By the end of the century, however, its prosperity had sunk owing to the perpetual feud with Mainz, the internecine war in Saxony, and the consequent dwindling of trade. By the convention of Amorbach in 1483 the overlordship of Erfurt was ultimately transferred by the electors of Mainz to Saxony. The political and religious quarrels of the 16th century still further depressed the city, in which the reformed religion was established in 1521. Then came the Thirty Years' War, during which Erfurt was for a while occupied by the Swedes. After the peace of Westphalia (1648) the city was assigned by the emperor to the elector of Mainz, and, on its refusal to submit, it was placed under the ban of the Empire (1660). In 1664 it was captured by the troops of the