Magdeburg

Otto I secured papal approval in 968 for an archbishopric at Magdeburg with a set of suffragan sees, and its purpose was explicit: to convert and organise the Slavic peoples living east of the Elbe. It was a missionary command post, and it doubled as an instrument of imperial expansion, which is a combination the Slavs on the receiving end understood perfectly well. A general revolt in 983 destroyed most of the new church structures beyond the river and pushed the frontier back for generations.

Otto is buried in the cathedral, beside his English wife Edith, whose remains were identified in a lead coffin during work in 2008. The present building, begun in 1207 after a fire, was the first cathedral on German soil built in the Gothic manner, and it holds an equestrian statue of the 1240s that is the earliest free standing rider carved in the north.

The city also exported a legal system. Magdeburg law, its code of municipal rights and procedures, was adopted by hundreds of towns across Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, Lithuania and Ukraine as they were chartered, so that a template worked out on the Elbe governed markets, courts and Jewish residence rights across eastern Europe for centuries. Religious mission, imperial politics and civic law travelled the same road together, and this city is where all three set out.

A team of Lutheran scholars working at Magdeburg from the 1550s produced the first systematic Protestant history of the church, organised century by century and generally known as the Magdeburg Centuries. Directed by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, it sent collectors into libraries and archives across Europe to copy manuscripts, and it argued from that evidence that the early church had not taught what Rome now taught, so that the Reformation was a restoration rather than an innovation. Rome answered with the Annales of Cardinal Baronius, and the two works between them turned church history into a scholarly discipline with source criticism at its centre, whatever the confessional purposes on either side.

In May 1631, during the Thirty Years War, an imperial army under Tilly stormed the Protestant city. Fire broke out, the cause of which was disputed then and has been ever since, and the town burned almost completely. Contemporary estimates put the dead at around twenty thousand out of a population of perhaps twenty five to thirty thousand, mostly civilians.

The sack became one of the most reported atrocities in early modern Europe, with pamphlets and engravings circulated across the continent within weeks, and it hardened Protestant opinion at exactly the moment Sweden entered the war. Two grim phrases entered German, one referring to the sack as a wedding and the other to Magdeburg justice, and the city took a century to recover.