8 stories from this place.
According to a 13th-century Dominican chronicle, an English-born woman called Joan reigned as Pope John VIII from about 855 to 858 CE, gave birth during a Lateran procession, and was killed by the crowd. No 9th- or 10th-century source mentions her. The story is almost certainly a 13th-century fabrication. It was treated as historical fact for 400 years.
Read the story →Martin Luther sent his *Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum* — the Ninety-Five Theses — to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz on 31 October 1517. The famous door-nailing detail is from a single later source. Within five years the document had substantially detonated Western Christendom.
Read the story →Pope Calixtus II issued the original *Sicut Judaeis* protective bull in 1120 in direct response to the 1096 First Crusade massacres of Rhineland Jews. The bull prohibited Christian violence against Jewish communities and was reissued by approximately twenty-five subsequent popes through the next three centuries.
Read the story →Count Emicho of Flonheim led the unofficial 'German Crusade' of 1096 — the substantial armed band that conducted the Mainz, Worms, and Cologne massacres of Rhineland Jews. The army never reached Constantinople. King Coloman of Hungary destroyed it in a series of military engagements in late summer 1096. Emicho himself survived and returned home in disgrace.
Read the story →The Worms synagogue was first built in 1034. It was destroyed by Count Emicho's army in 1096, by the Black Death mob in 1349, and by the Nazis on Kristallnacht in 1938. It was rebuilt each time, most recently in 1961. It is the longest continuously rebuilt religious building in central Europe.
Read the story →After the Rhineland massacres of 1096, the papacy issued a formal bull that prohibited the killing or forced conversion of Jews. Every subsequent medieval pope reissued it. The bull was widely violated. It nonetheless established the legal framework on which medieval Jewish communities could appeal.
Read the story →In the spring of 1096, before the First Crusade reached Asia, an army of pilgrims spent six weeks killing the Jewish communities of the Rhine.
Read the story →In the summer of 1349 thousands of penitents marched through plague-stricken Europe flogging themselves twice a day. The Pope banned them within months.
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