Marburg is a historic centre of the pharmaceutical industry in Germany, and there is a plant in the town (by BioNTech) to produce vaccines to tackle Covid-19.

In 1228, the widowed princess-landgravine of Thuringia, Elizabeth of Hungary, chose Marburg as her dowager seat, as she did not get along well with her brother-in-law, the new landgrave.

[5] In 1264, St Elizabeth's daughter Sophie of Brabant, succeeded in winning the Landgraviate of Hessen, hitherto connected to Thuringia, for her son Henry.

Its "old enemy" was the Archbishopric of Mainz, the seat of one of the prince-electors, who competed with Hessen in many wars and conflicts for coveted territory, stretching over several centuries.

These include Greifswald, Erlangen, Jena, and Tübingen, as well as the city of Gießen, which is located 30 km south of Marburg.

Owing to its neglect during the entire 18th century, Marburg – like Rye or Chartres – survived as a relatively intact Gothic town, simply because there was no money spent on any new architecture or expansion.

Prussia won and took the opportunity to invade and annex the Electorate of Hessen (as well as Hanover, the city of Frankfurt, and other territories) north of the Main River.

However, there was hardly any industry to speak of, so students, professors, and civil servants – who generally had enough but not much money and paid very little in taxes – dominated the town.

Franz von Papen, vice-chancellor of Germany in 1934, delivered an anti-Nazi speech at the University of Marburg on 17 June.

As a result of its designation as a hospital city, and because of a lack of important industrial sites, there was not much damage from bombings except along the railroad tracks.

[citation needed] In May 1945, the Monuments men officer Walker Hancock set up the first so-called Central Collecting Point in the Marburg State Archives.

With the relocation of the sarcophagus of Field Marshal and President Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934) to the Elisabethkirche in August 1946 the project ended.

[citation needed] Milton Mayer's 1955 book They Thought They Were Free, which attempted to gage how ordinary German citizens felt about Nazi Germany, used interviews of ten men from Marburg (which it called "Kronenberg") as its case study.

The mayor of Marburg, Thomas Spies, in office since December 2015, and his predecessor Egon Vaupel (directly elected in January 2005), are members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

The flag has three horizontal stripes colored, from top to bottom, red (from the background), white (from the horse) and blue (from the shield).

He promoted urban renewal and the restoration of the Oberstadt (upper town) and established one of the first pedestrian zones in Germany.

It is spread over two campuses: Firmanei in the centre of Marburg and Lahnberge to the east of the town near the Botanischer Garten (Botanical Garden).