Speyer Cathedral

Speyer Cathedral was built as a statement of imperial power. In 1025 the Salian emperor Conrad II ordered what was meant to be the largest church in the Christian West, in a Rhineland town of perhaps 500 people, and to serve as his tomb. Work began in 1030 on a rise beside the Rhine safe from floods, using red sandstone from the Palatinate Forest. Conrad was buried in the unfinished building in 1039 and his son Henry III in 1056. The first church was consecrated in 1061. Around 1090 his grandson Henry IV, then locked in the Investiture Controversy with Pope Gregory VII, rebuilt it on a bigger scale: the nave was raised by 5 m and covered with a groin vault, one of the great engineering feats of Romanesque building. At 134 m long, the finished cathedral was one of the largest buildings of its time, and with Cluny Abbey in ruins it is today the largest Romanesque church that survives.

Henry IV's rebuild gave the building its character. A small arcaded gallery runs right around it just below the roofline, the earliest such gallery in Germany, which was copied at Worms, Mainz and across Italy. The pale green copper roofs, the four towers and the two octagonal domes stand in balance at each end. Inside, the nave is plain and massive, a series of square vaulted bays carried on alternating piers, which gives it an almost Roman gravity. Only a cycle of 19th-century paintings of the life of the Virgin survives between the windows; the rest of the Nazarene frescoes were removed in the 1950s and now hang, restored, in the Kaisersaal above the west porch.

Beneath the choir lies the crypt, consecrated in 1041. It is Europe's largest Romanesque hall crypt: 42 vaults on 20 short columns with cushion capitals, built of sandstone in alternating yellow and rust-red bands. Beneath the main altar, a burial crypt built in 1906 holds eight German kings and emperors, from Conrad II to Albert I of Habsburg (died 1308), along with queens and bishops. The graves had been looted by French troops in 1689, and their exact location was lost until excavations in 1900. In 1970 renovators found the last leaf of the Codex Argenteus here, the famous Gothic-language Gospel book, hidden in a box of relics that had been walled up in 1859.

The cathedral survived the fire of 1689, service as a stable and a French plan to quarry it for stone; the west front with its two towers and dome is a neo-Romanesque rebuild of 1854–58. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981. Some of the clothing found in the imperial graves is shown at the Historical Museum of the Palatinate near the cathedral.

Getting there

The cathedral stands at the eastern end of Speyer's old town, less than 1 km from the centre. Speyer Hauptbahnhof has frequent regional trains to Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and Karlsruhe. The nearest airport, Mannheim City (MHG), is about 18 km away but has very few flights; Frankfurt (FRA), about 80 km away, is the practical gateway, with rail connections via Mannheim. By road, Speyer sits just south of the A61.