Speyer Cathedral

In 1025 Emperor Conrad II ordered a church at Speyer that was to be the largest in the Western Christian world and his own burial place. Work began in 1030 on a plateau by the Rhine safe from floods, and the crypt was consecrated in 1041. Conrad died in 1039 and was buried in the unfinished church, and his son Henry III was laid beside him in 1056; the cathedral was consecrated in 1061.

Around 1090 Conrad's grandson Henry IV had the east end pulled down and the foundations strengthened, raised the nave by 5 m and replaced its flat wooden ceiling with stone groin vaults. A dwarf gallery was set under the roofline all round the building, the first known gallery to encircle a whole structure. The enlarged cathedral, 134 m long, was finished in 1106, the year Henry died, and for almost 300 years it was the burial place of German rulers, eight emperors and kings from Conrad II to Albert of Habsburg.

In 1689, during the Nine Years' War, fire badly damaged the cathedral and the western part of the nave collapsed. The nave was rebuilt in the 18th century; under King Ludwig I of Bavaria the interior was painted with frescoes from 1846 to 1853, and from 1854 to 1858 Heinrich Hübsch built a neo-Romanesque westwork. The imperial graves were found and opened in an excavation in 1900, the coffins were moved to a new crypt in 1906, and the cathedral was inscribed in 1981.