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In 798 CE, Charlemagne held an army assembly at Minden. He found it useful enough to establish a bishopric there around 800, one of seven dioceses he founded as he built the Carolingian church infrastructure across northwestern Europe. Minden sat where the Weser River leaves the Weser Uplands and spreads onto the North German Plain, and that topographic fact made it strategically important for over a thousand years.

The most peculiar thing about Minden now is not its medieval history but its modern hydraulics.

The Mittelland Canal, built in the early 20th century to connect the Rhine with the Elbe, crosses the Weser here. It does not run alongside the river or through a lock system. It crosses over it. The Minden Aqueduct carries boats in the canal across the top of the river below. If you stand at the right point you can see canal barges floating overhead while the Weser runs beneath them. It is one of those engineering solutions so elegant it seems obvious in retrospect and impossible before it happened.