Magdeburg

Magdeburg stands on the Elbe, where Otto the Great made it the seat of an archbishopric in 968 and was buried in the cathedral in 973. In the late Middle Ages it was one of the largest cities in the Empire, a Hanseatic member and the leader of the Saxon cities, and its municipal law, the Magdeburg Law, was adopted in towns far to the east. In 1207 a fire burned much of the city together with the Ottonian cathedral, and the Gothic cathedral that replaced it rose through the fourteenth century.

The burghers' quarrels with their archbishop were constant. In 1493 Archbishop Ernest II of Saxony expelled all Jews from the archbishopric, and in 1503 the archbishop moved his residence to Halle, leaving the city to govern itself.

Luther preached repeatedly in the city from June 1524, and that July the Reformation was introduced in all its churches except the cathedral. Magdeburg became a centre of the Schmalkaldic League and of resistance to re-Catholicization. In the Thirty Years' War, imperial troops of the Catholic League under Tilly stormed and devastated it on 20 May 1631, the "Magdeburg wedding." In 1680 the secularized archbishopric passed to Brandenburg, which made the city into the strongest fortress of the Prussian kingdom.