Halberstadt

Halberstadt, seat of a bishop from the ninth century until 1648, lies in the northern Harz foreland. Henry the Lion burned the town, the cathedral and the cathedral hill in a feud in 1179, and from 1236 to 1239 the great cathedral was begun anew in the style of French Gothic, though it was consecrated only in 1491. The town had a town hall and its own law by 1241, and walls built between 1199 and 1236. In 1326 it allied with Aschersleben and Quedlinburg in the Halberstadt League of Three Towns, which lasted until 1477, and it joined the Hanse some time before 1387.

In 1363 the town bought the neighbouring Klus hills from Quedlinburg Abbey, and an earthquake is recorded in 1408. In 1423 the Halberstadt Schicht began, a revolt in which the craft guilds around Matthias von Hadeber, called the Long Matz, seized control of the town, until Bishop Johann of Hoym restored the old order in 1425. Bishops and burghers remained uneasy neighbours, with the cathedral chapter ruling the cathedral hill and the council ruling the town.

The first sermons of the Reformation came in 1521 but were driven out in 1523, and only in 1591 did the first Protestant bishop, Henry Julius, introduce Protestant teaching in the cathedral. The plague returned in 1577, 1597 and 1611. Wallenstein's troops occupied the town in 1625 and 1629, and with the Edict of Restitution the cathedral briefly returned to the old faith. The peace of 1648 turned the bishopric into a Protestant duchy within Brandenburg-Prussia. Huguenots settled here from 1685 and founded a glove industry, while the court Jew Issachar Berend Lehmann built a baroque synagogue consecrated in 1712 and a rabbinical seminary, making the Jewish community the largest in central Germany. From about 1750 Johann Gleim made his house a meeting place of the German Enlightenment.