Travel Guide Worms

Worms is a small town on the Rhine with 82,000 inhabitants, 58 km south of Mainz, and has a rich history. With this prestige, it still boasts brilliant vestiges of the past, including its famous cathedral, which is one of the great Romanesque churches in the Rhine Valley. Together with Speyer and Mainz, it was an imperial residence in the Rhineland. It still has a rich and visible heritage, which is worth a visit.Worms, a Roman city, was in the Middle Ages an extremely prosperous and autonomous city, thanks to its status as an Empire free city. The emperors having a residence there, it was a centre of political power in the Germanic world for several centuries. Its many monuments testify to its prosperity at that time.In 1122, Pope Calixte II and Emperor Henry V signed the Worms Concordat, thus putting an end to the quarrels over investitures between the Pope and the Emperor. It was also in Worms that Maximilian I decreed universal peace in 1495 and established his Imperial Court, and that in 1521 Emperor Charles V summoned Luther after he had published his theses at the origin of the Reformation. It was as a result of this meeting that he was banished from the church and his works were destroyed. History therefore retains Worms as the symbol of the definitive rupture between the Catholic Church and Protestantism.