Magdeburg

Table of Contents

• 1 History
• 2 Cathedral of magdeburg
• 3 Other sights
• 4 Trivia
• 5 See also
• 6 External links

Magdeburg , the capital city of the Bundesland of Saxony-Anhalt , Germany , lies on the Elbe river.

• 805 First recorded mention in the Diedenhof Capitulary as Magadoburg . Although settlement on the site had existed for centuries, the first mention of Magdeburg occurred during the reign of the emperor Charlemagne , when he secured the small fishing and trading town.
• 919 King Henry I the Fowler fortified Magdeburg against the Magyars and Slav s.

• 929 Henry I arranged with king Edward the Elder for Edward's daughter Edith (Editha, Eadgyth ) to marry Otto I , son of Henry. At Otto and Edith's wedding she received Magdeburg as a Morgengabe - a Germanic customary gift received by the new bride from the groom and his family after the wedding night. Editha had a particular love for the town and often lived there. The emperor also continually returned to it.
• 937 A royal assembly took place in Magdeburg. At the same time, the Benedictine abbey of Saint Maurice , later the cathedral, was founded.

• 946 Queen Edith died and was buried in the abbey church crypt.
• 968 At the Synod of Ravenna , the Archbishopric of Magdeburg was founded and Adalbert received consecration as its first archbishop. It included the bishoprics of Havelberg , Brandenburg , Merseburg , Meissen , and Zeitz - Naumburg . The archbishops played a preeminent role in the task of German colonizaziont of the Slavic lands east of the Elbe river.

• 973 Emperor Otto I died and was buried in the cathedral of Magdeburg .
• 1035 Magdeburg received a patent giving the city the right to hold trade exhibits and conventions, the basis of the later family of city laws known as Magdeburg rights . Many visitors from many countries began to trade in Magdeburg.

• 1118 The city is almost destroyed by a burning.

• 13th century Magdeburg became a member of the Hanseatic League . At the time of the Hanseatic League it was with Brussels , Antwerp , Cologne , Nuremberg , Lübeck , Padova , Mantova , Cremona , Verona , Piacenza , Milano , Genova , Firenze , Metz and Strasbourg one of the cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants in the Roman Empire. The town had an active maritime commerce on the west (towards Flanders ), with the countries of the Baltic Sea , and maintained traffic and communication with the interior (for example Brunswick ). The city had an autonomous administration form, known as Magdeburger Recht ( Magdeburg Right ), that later was adopted by many cities of Eastern Europe. The people was constantly in struggle against the archbishop, becoming nearly indipendent from him by the end of the 15th century .
• 1524 Martin Luther was called to Magdeburg, where he preached and caused the city's defection from Catholicism. The Reformation had found speedy adherents in in the city, where Luther had been a schoolboy. The archbishops (apart a single exception) themselves embraced the new confession. In the following years Magdeburg therefore gained a reputation as a stronghold of Protestantism and it became the first major city to publish the writings of Martin Luther . The emperor Charles V outlawed repeatedly the unruly town, which had in 1526 joined the Alliance of Torgau , and in 1531 the Smalkaldic League .

• 1550 - 1551 Because it had not accept the "Interim" ( 1548 ), the city was, by the emperor's commands, besieged (1550-1551) by the Margrave Maurice of Saxony ; it defended itself bravely and retained its religious liberty when peace was declared. Here Flacius Illyricus and his companions wrote their bitterest pamphlet s and the great work on church history, The Magdeburg Centuries , in which they tried to prove that the Catholic Church had become the kingdom of Anti-Christ .
• 1631 During the Thirty Years' War imperial troops stormed the city and committed a massacre, killing about 20,000 inhabitants and burning the town in the sack of Magdeburg . The city had withstood a first siege in 1629 by Albrecht von Wallenstein . After the war only a population of 400 remained in the totally destroyed town.

• 1648 The archbishopric is secularized as a duchy.
• 1654 Otto von Guericke made the Magdeburg hemispheres , two hollow shells with rings for attaching ropes, puts them together with grease, and evacuates the air with a pump that he had invented some years before. Sixteen horses failed to pull the hemispheres apart.

• 1680 Brandenburg annexed Magdeburg, which thus lost its status as an Imperial Free City .
• 1806 The fortress surrendered to the French troops, in the course of the Napoleonic Wars . The city is annexed to the French-controlled Kingdom of Westphalia .

• 1815 After the Napoleonic Wars Prussia set up the province of the Prussia n Province of Saxony , with Magdeburg as its capital.
• 1912 The fortress is dismantled.

• Before the Second World War Magedburg was the seat of the German section of the Watchtower Society .
• 1945 During World War II Magdeburg (then a city of 350,000 inhabitants) suffered near total destruction from Allied firebombing. The very impressive Gründerzeit suburbs north of the city, called the Nordfront, were destroyed. It was the second most devastated city in Germany; only Dresden suffered more. American and Soviet troops occupied the city; however, the Americans soon left, leaving the city under Soviet stewardship.

• 1945 - 1990 In the postwar years, most of the remaining city buildings were destroyed, with only a few buildings near the Cathedral restored to their pre-war state. Prior to Reunification, many surviving Gründerzeit buildings were left uninhabited and, after years of degradation, are waiting for demolition. From 1949 on until German reunification on 3 october 1990 Magdeburg belonged to the German Democratic Republic .
• 1990 Magdeburg became the capital of the new state of Saxony-Anhalt within reunified Germany. The city center has been rebuilt almost exclusively in a modern style.

• 1994 Magdeburg became the seat of a Roman Catholic diocese.

Cathedral of Magdeburg

Magdeburg's most impressive building, the cathedral of Saints Catherine and Maurice, has a height of 104 m.: the highest church building of eastern Germany.

The predecessor of the cathedral was a church built in 937 within an abbey, called St. Maurice. Emperor Otto I the Great was buried here beside his wife in 973 . St. Maurice burnt to ashes in 1207 . The exact location of that church remained unknown for a long time. The foundations were rediscovered in May 2003 , revealing a building 80 m long and 41 m wide.

The construction of the new church lasted 300 years. The cathedral of Saints Catherine and Maurice was the first Gothic church building of Germany. The completion of the steeples took place only in 1520 .

While the cathedral was virtually the only building to survive the massacres of the Thirty Years' War , it nevertheless suffered destruction in World War II . But it was soon rebuilt and completed in 1955 .

The place in front of the cathedral (sometimes called "new marketplace", Neuer Markt ) was occupied by an imperial palace ( Kaiserpfalz ), which was destroyed in the fire of 1207 . The stones of the ruin served for building the cathedral. The presumptive remains of the palace were excavated in the 1960s .

Other sights

Monastery "Unser Lieben Frauen"

• Monastery "Unser Lieben Frauen" (literally "Our Beloved Ladies"), 11th century, containing the church of St. Mary.
• Town hall (1698); a town hall has stood on the marketplace since the 13th century, but it was destroyed in the Thirty Years' War; the new town hall was built in a Renaissance style influenced by Dutch architecture.

• Landtag; the seat of the government of Saxony-Anhalt is a Baroque palace built in 1724 .
• Monuments: the city has monuments depicting emperor Otto I (old marketplace, 1240) and Otto von Guericke (1907).

• Ruins of the greatest stronghold of the former kingdom of Prussia
• Rotehorn-Park

• Elbauenpark containing the highest wooden tower in the world
• Hundertwasser-Building, built in 2005

• Johannischurch
• Magdeburg Water Bridge Europe's longest water bridge

SC Magdeburg is an important handball club. Georg Philipp Telemann , Otto von Guericke and SPD politician Erich Ollenhauer were from Magdeburg. Also FDP politician Burkhard Hirsch is from Magdeburg. In the Magdeburg Diet the FDP has the highest share of the seats of any state. The German twin town of Magdeburg is Braunschweig .

• Magdeburg rights

• Official Magdeburg homepage (English)
• Official Student Community WebUni
• IKUS - the intercultural Students of Magdeburg (English/German)
• Satellite photo from April, 2005