Erfurt

Erfurt was a trading city on the Gera and the Via Regia in Thuringia. Its council acquired villages under the overlordship of Mainz, and woad made the city prosperous.

The Jewish community was destroyed in the Black Death pogrom of 1349. The university founded in 1379 later counted Martin Luther among its students. Mainz imposed direct rule in 1664 and built the Petersberg citadel; in 1808 Napoleon met Tsar Alexander I at the Congress of Erfurt.