Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Germany gathers six cities, each one a place where Latin Christianity's authority was tested, contested or split, by relic, by council or by open confrontation.

Trier, held to be the oldest bishopric north of the Alps, has displayed the Seamless Robe since medieval times, a relic venerated as the tunic Jesus wore and exhibited only rarely, most recently in 2012. Cologne's cathedral was begun in 1248 to house the shrine of the Three Kings, relics brought from Milan in 1164 that made the city a great pilgrimage destination, and its scholarly life drew Albertus Magnus, who is buried there.

Constance, on the lake that shares its name, hosted the council of 1414 to 1418 that ended the Western Schism among three rival claimants to the papacy and condemned John Wycliffe's teaching, burning Jan Hus in 1415 despite the safe conduct he had been given. Worms held one of the oldest Jewish communities in northern Europe, part of the SchUM league with its yeshiva scholarship including Rashi, and it was where Martin Luther appeared before the Diet of Worms in 1521 and refused to recant. Marburg is where Landgrave Philip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together in 1529 to settle Lutheran and Swiss differences; they agreed fourteen of fifteen articles and split permanently over the fifteenth, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Magdeburg's archbishopric, founded by Otto I in 968, produced the Magdeburg Centuries, the first systematic Protestant history of the church, before the city was stormed and burned in 1631 during the Thirty Years War.

From a robe kept for centuries to a colloquy that failed on a single article, the six cities trace where Western Christianity held together and where, repeatedly, it did not.