long way from the centres of power, so did not receive much direct support and there were no local lords who felt an association with it. In 1479 Soltau became part of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg and an Amtsvogtei was established. In 1511 the town was totally destroyed by fire. The last known cavalry battle took place in June 1519 on the 'Wiehe Holt' near Soltau and is known as the Battle of Soltau, which represented the high point of the Hildesheim Abbey Feud. According to long tradition it was only thanks to a ruse by the Soltau townsman, Harm Tyding, who pretended to the advancing Brunswick troops that he knew the whereabouts of a large Lüneburg army and led them on a detour, that the town was not destroyed again. The Reformation saw little conflict in Soltau as a result of the firm stand taken by the Lüneburg duke, Ernest I and his commitment to introducing the Protestant-Lutheran faith in 1527. Modern era In 1533 the town hall was established in an old chapel in Marktstraße but it was destroyed in a fire. In 1567 another great fire destroyed large parts of the town. In 1588 the first school building was erected, although the first records of school teaching go back to as early as 1563. The plague raged in 1626 and the population dwindled dramatically. Before 1620 there were several years of legal disputes about the acquisition of building land outside the town wall. In the Thirty Years' War Soltau was once again entirely destroyed. All that remained was a great ruin in the landscape and only one building from that time remains. It was a long time before the town recovered from the war's consequences. The traces of the war and the area's occupation by Swedish troops, which began in 1632, is still documented today by the Ellinger Grenzstein ("Ellingen Boundary Stone"). Market rights and therefore the right to host two fairs a year and a horse market were conferred in 1668. The Old Town Pharmacy (Alte Stadtapotheke) was opened in 1796, the first chemist in Soltau. Soltau first became a garrison town in 1712, a year when the first cloth factory was built. Napoleonic troops occupied the town in 1803 and turned it into a French border town for the Kingdom of Westphalia in 1810. Soltau belonged to the Canton of Harburg in the Department of