Otto I secured papal approval in 968 for an archbishopric at Magdeburg with a set of suffragan sees, and its purpose was explicit: to convert and organise the Slavic peoples living east of the Elbe. It was a missionary command post, and it doubled as an instrument of imperial expansion, which is a combination the Slavs on the receiving end understood perfectly well. A general revolt in 983 destroyed most of the new church structures beyond the river and pushed the frontier back for generations.
Otto is buried in the cathedral, beside his English wife Edith, whose remains were identified in a lead coffin during work in 2008. The present building, begun in 1207 after a fire, was the first cathedral on German soil built in the Gothic manner, and it holds an equestrian statue of the 1240s that is the earliest free standing rider carved in the north.
The city also exported a legal system. Magdeburg law, its code of municipal rights and procedures, was adopted by hundreds of towns across Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, Lithuania and Ukraine as they were chartered, so that a template worked out on the Elbe governed markets, courts and Jewish residence rights across eastern Europe for centuries. Religious mission, imperial politics and civic law travelled the same road together, and this city is where all three set out.