The Musée historique de Mulhouse is a municipal history museum and archaeology museum in Mulhouse. It is housed since 1969 in Mulhouse's Old Town Hall, a Northern Renaissance building dating mainly from 1552.
The interiors of the Old Town Hall with their intact original decoration are an integral part of the museum. The museum's medieval sculptures are on display in the neighbouring Museum of Fine Arts, such as a Saint George Slaying the Dragon from 1490, originally from Tyrol. That work, as well as many others, is on permanent loan to the municipal collections of Mulhouse by the Société industrielle de Mulhouse (SIM), a learned society established in 1826 by local industrialists such as Dollfus, Koechlin, and Schlumberger which had begun collecting artworks in 1831.
Ehrenbreitstein Fortress was built as the backbone of the regional fortification system, Festung Koblenz, by Prussia between 1817 and 1832 and guarded the middle Rhine region, an area that had been invaded by French troops repeatedly before. The fortress was never attacked.
Early fortifications at the site can be dated back to about 1000 BC. At about AD 1000 Ehrenbert erected a castle. The Archbishops of Trier expanded it with a supporting castle Burg Helferstein and guarded the Holy Tunic in it from 1657 to 1794. Successive Archbishops used the castle's strategic importance to barter between contending powers; thus in 1672 at the outset of war between France and Germany the Archbishop refused requests both from the envoys of Louis XIV and from Brandenburg's Ambassador, Christoph Caspar von Blumenthal, to permit the passage of troops across the Rhine.