History of the City of Worms

Worms (Latin Borbetomagus or civitas Vangionum; Yiddish Vermayze or װערמײַזע, is a city in the southeast of Rhineland-Palatinate. It is situated on the western banks of the Rhine, at the intersection between the Rhine Main and Rhein Neckar metropolitan regions.

Founded by the Celts as Borbetomagus, Worms is in a dispute with Cologne, Augsburg and Trier about the title of Germany’s oldest city. However, it is the only German member of the Most Ancient European Towns Network.

Worms is famed as the main scene of the Nibelungenlied, as a Luther city and for its Cathedral, one of the three so-called Romanesque Imperial Cathedrals (together with those of Mainz and Speyer).

Climate
Situated in the Rhine valley between the low mountain ranges Pfälzerwald and Donnersberg in the west and Odenwald in the east, Worms enjoys one of the warmest and driest weather conditions of Germany. The average rainfall is almost the same as that of Jerusalem.

The city’s coat-of-arms: a silver key on a red field, with a golden star.

From the foundation of the city to the 9th century

Around 5000BC, in the Neolithic age, tillers and cattle breeders settled the area for the first time. On the inconspicuous Adlerberg upheaval on the Rhine, in the south of Worms, 25 graves were discovered from different epochs in 1896 and 1951 diggings. As far as it is known today, eight graves from the Adlerberg culture (around 2300/2200 to 1800BC) date back to the Early Bronze Age. It was a local physician, Karl Koehl, who engaged in the exploration of these finds and who coined the term Adlerberg culture.

The city’s oldest traceable place name is Borbetomagus, of Celtic origin, denoting land of Borbet. The Romans named the city citivas Vangionum, after the Vangiones, a tribe that had settled here in the first century AD, but the city’s inhabitants still called themselves Vangiones in the 16th century. Wangengau, a toponym for the vicinity of Worms that shifted in the vernacular to Wonnegau, is also derived from the term Vangiones. In its Latin form Wormatia, the name Worms appeared for the first time in the 6th/7th century.

The list of traceable bishops of Worms begins in Franconian times, with bishop Berchtulf, who took part in the Synod of Paris in 614. With Worms being one of the centres of the Carolingian rulers’ power, its bishops had close relations with the royal court in the 8th and 9th centuries.

Middle Ages and Modern Times

In the 9th century, Emperor Charlemagne made Worms his winter residence. In 829 and 926, the Diets of the Kingdom of the East Franks were held here. But after the division of the Carolingian Empire, Worms had to cede much of its influence. It was only under the Salian dynasty that the city began to rise to its apex. In 1074 it was granted exemption from taxes. Two years later, on another Diet, King Henry IV declared the deposition of Pope Gregory VII, who excommunicated him by return. One of the consequences of this was Henry’s famous Walk to Canossa.

In the 11th century, the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz were highly regarded in the Empire. In 1096, in the preludes to the First Crusade, the city saw pogroms against Jews, which claimed many lives. The community’s soon recovery is reflected in the new building of the synagogue, which existed until the 1938 pogroms, and the 12th-century mikvah. Rashi, a leading Jewish scholar, studied here at the Jewish academy. Although Jews from other cities were expelled from Worms in 15th century, the Jewish quarter continued to exist.

In 1122, the Concordat of Worms was agreed on between Pope Calixtus II and Henry V. The city’s constitution emerged in that time, with a city council representing the citizens. After the fall of the Salians in 1125, the Hohenstaufen dynasty established close ties with the city. In 1184, Worms was granted far-reaching freedom rights and privileges by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, which may be regarded as the birth of the Free Imperial City. The 12th century was dominated by the emerging conflict between the bishop and the city council about the virtual power over the city—a struggle that was to continue until the 16th century.

In 1495 Emperor Maximilian held another Diet, which introduced general taxation in the Empire, reformed the Imperial High Court and brought the Perpetual Public Peace banning feuds. By then, the city had already passed its economic peak. A civil uprising in 1512/1513 and a feud with Franz von Sickingen from 1515 to 1519 fuelled the city’s financial decline. Effectively, Worms was a Free Imperial City, but bishop and clergy (who, according to various estimates, amounted to 30 to 50 per cent of the city’s population, including servants and menial staff) had succeeded in tough negotiations to get a large number of privileges recognised, severely limiting the city council’s scope of action. Moreover, the influence of the Electors of the Palatinate on the city increased dramatically in the course of the 15th century. At times, the posts of the bishops of Worms and Speyer were filled with the Elector’s brothers.

As in many other cities, the new ideas of the Reformation spread like wildfire in Worms. The process was accelerated by yet another Diet of Worms in 1521, when Martin Luther defended before Emperor Charles V the 95 theses he had published in Wittenberg. The city was made both a centre of and an experimental ground for the Reformation: In 1524, the first German-language Protestant mass was printed here, in 1526, William Tyndale published the first English version of the New Testament in Worms. In the wake of the Peasants’ War in 1525, the city council tried to get rid of the bishop’s supremacy once and for all, but failed. Although Worms got Protestant (for instance, Catholics were banned from the city council until 1792), bishop and clergy retained their privileges and the control of the Cathedral.

In the 1689 War of the Grand Alliance, Worms was looted and burned by the troops of the French king Louis XIV.

19th and 20th centuries

From 1792 to 1814, Worms had been a part of France, since 1816 of Hesse-Darmstadt. Two allied air raids on 21 February and 18 March 1945 almost completely destroyed the city. The British air raid aimed at the train station at the fringe of the inner city and the chemical industry southwest of the inner city, but also wiped out parts of the city centre. Within minutes, 334 planes dropped 1,100 metric tons of bombs there, setting the Cathedral on fire, killing 239, leaving 35,000 without shelter, heavily damaging or destroying 6,490 buildings. After the war, the inner city was rebuilt largely in modern style.

In 1946, the former Hessian province of Rheinhessen was incorporated into the newly established land of Rhineland-Palatinate. Worms was part of the Rheinhessen-Pfalz administrative district from 1968 to the abolition of this district in 2000.

Incorporation of towns and villages as suburbs: