Every tour in this city makes claims. These are where ours come from.
Writing a history of Munich has meant two things. A great deal of time in the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv and the Stadtarchiv München, and a collection built one piece at a time from antiquarian dealers across Germany.
None of it is decoration. Four of these are successive acts of Bavarian law, 1520 to 1616, and together they dismantle the story every visitor to this city is told: that a single unchanging purity law was written in 1516 and left alone. It was rewritten again and again, whenever the state needed it rewritten.
The Nuremberg Chronicle, and inside it the earliest printed view of Munich. Walls, gates, towers, a skyline almost none of which survives. It is the first time anyone showed this city to the world, and it shows a place you cannot visit.
The law the world calls the Reinheitsgebot, in an early printing. It is not a beer law. It is a territorial ordinance about grain, prices and public order, and the famous passage is one clause buried inside it.
Thirty-five years after the law everybody quotes, Bavaria legislated on beer again. That fact alone contradicts most of what gets said on the street about a rule that supposedly never needed changing.
And again two years later. The territorial law reissued, revised, and set down once more, because the problems it was written to solve had not gone away.
The most famous beer hall on earth, at the moment it was a political decision. Wilhelm V did not found it for pleasure. A Catholic state buying its beer from Protestant Saxony was funding its rivals, and he ended that. The paperwork of a rivalry, not a recipe.
Munich drawn at the height of Maximilian I's reign: the fortifications, the ducal quarter, the moat, and the street plan still running beneath the Altstadt today. Stand on one of those streets with this map and eight hundred years collapse into a single view.
Maximilian I's consolidation of Bavarian law, a century after the clause everyone remembers. Put beside the others it closes the argument: this was never one immovable law handed down in 1516. It was legislation, rewritten whenever the state needed it rewritten.
Containing the first appearance in print of Ein Prosit der Gemütlichkeit, sung in every tent, every hour, every year since. Visitors assume it is medieval. It is younger than the Eiffel Tower, and this is where it begins.