Erfurt

Erfurt, first recorded in 742 when Boniface founded its bishopric, stands on the Gera where the east-west road across Thuringia crosses the river, and under the archbishops of Mainz it kept a high degree of autonomy. Its medieval Jewish community left the Old Synagogue, begun in 1094, but a plague pogrom in 1349 ended that first community. In 1331 Emperor Louis IV gave Erfurt the right to hold fairs, and the woad it sold made it one of the largest woad markets in the Empire.

With some 18,000 to 20,000 inhabitants in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Erfurt was a great city, surpassed in size only by Cologne, Nuremberg and Magdeburg. It was also a centre of learning: no other German town had more students in the late thirteenth century, and in 1392 the council, not the archbishop, opened the third university on German soil.

Martin Luther studied at the university from 1501 to 1505 and took his master's degree, and in 1521 the town appointed its first Lutheran preacher. In 1618 a treaty with the Archbishop of Mainz confirmed religious freedom but declared the town the property of the archbishopric, without a seat in the Empire. Swedish troops occupied Erfurt during the Thirty Years' War, and in 1664 the elector of Mainz conquered it with French and imperial troops; a Mainz governor ruled it afterwards from a citadel on the Petersberg. Prussia took Erfurt in 1802.