Editing Jena (section)

=== Middle Ages ===
[[File:Lobdeburg near Jena by Night.jpg|thumb|Lobdeburg Castle above Lobeda district]]
Until the [[High Middle Ages]], the [[Saale]] was the border between [[Germanic peoples|Germanic]] regions in the west and [[Slavs|Slavic]] regions in the east. Owing to its function as a river crossing, Jena was conveniently located. Nevertheless, there were also some more important Saale crossings such as the nearby cities of [[Naumburg (Saale)|Naumburg]] to the north and [[Saalfeld]] to the south, so that the relevance of Jena was more local during the Middle Ages. The first unequivocal mention of Jena was in an 1182 document. The first local rulers of the region were the Lords of [[Lobdeburg]] with their eponymous castle near [[Lobeda]], roughly {{convert|6|km|0|abbr=on}} south of the city centre on the eastern hillside of the Saale valley.

In the 13th century, the Lords of Lobdeburg founded two towns in the valley: Jena on the west bank and Lobeda&nbsp;– which is one of Jena's constituent communities today&nbsp;– {{convert|4|km|0|abbr=on}} to the south on the east bank. Around 1230, Jena received town rights and a regular city grid was established between today's Fürstengraben, Löbdergraben, Teichgraben and Leutragraben. The city got a marketplace, main church, town hall, council and city walls during the late 13th and early 14th centuries making it into a full-fledged town. In this time, the city's economy was based mainly on wine production on the warm and sunny hillsides of the Saale valley. The two monasteries of the [[Dominican Order|Dominicans]] (1286) and the [[Cistercian]]s (1301) rounded out Jena's medieval appearance.

As the political circumstances in Thuringia changed in the middle of the 14th century, the weakened Lords of Lobdeburg sold Jena to the aspiring [[House of Wettin|Wettins]] in 1331. Jena obtained the [[Gotha]] municipal law and the citizens strengthened their rights and wealth during the 14th and 15th centuries. Moreover, the Wettins were more interested in their residence in the nearby city of [[Weimar]], and so Jena could develop itself relatively autonomously.