Worms

Worms, once the Celtic Borbetomagus and, in the Nibelungen legends, the Burgundian capital, lies on the left bank of the Rhine beneath the Romanesque cathedral of Saint Peter. It was an imperial free city from the twelfth century: Frederick Barbarossa granted it broad liberties in 1184, and the town council spent the next three centuries contesting the town with its bishop. Beside the cathedral stood one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe, with a synagogue consecrated in 1034, a Talmud school where Rashi studied, and a cemetery in use since 1058.

The Black Death brought catastrophe. In 1349 the Jewish community was destroyed in the persecutions that followed the plague, and when Jews were allowed to settle again in 1353 they were confined to a lane around the synagogue. In 1495 King Maximilian held the Reichstag here, which introduced an imperial tax, the Imperial Chamber Court and the Perpetual Public Peace, though the city's prosperity had already passed its height.

On 18 April 1521 Martin Luther refused to recant before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms, which ended with the Edict of Worms condemning him. The city then became a laboratory of the Reformation: the first German evangelical mass was printed here in 1524, and William Tyndale's English New Testament appeared in 1526. In 1689 Louis XIV's troops destroyed the city in the War of the Palatine Succession and expelled its people; ten years passed before urban life resumed.