Who ruled Trier?

Trier lies on the Moselle in the west of Germany, in a valley of vine-covered hills close to the border with Luxembourg. Founded by the Romans as Augusta Treverorum, it is regarded as Germany's oldest city, and in the late third and fourth centuries it was one of the residences of the emperors in the West. In the Middle Ages its archbishops were among the seven princes who elected the Holy Roman emperor, and its Roman gate, baths and throne hall are among the finest Roman remains north of the Alps.

Farmers of the early Neolithic linear pottery culture left the first traces of settlement here. In the last centuries BCE the Celtic Treveri lived in the area, and a medieval chronicle of the archbishops, the Gesta Treverorum, credited the city's founding to a legendary figure called Trebeta. The historical record is plainer: Rome subdued the Treveri in the first century BCE and established Augusta Treverorum around 16 BCE, naming it after Augustus. A Roman bridge built across the Moselle in the second century CE is still used by traffic.

Trier served as capital of the Roman province of Belgic Gaul and, after the reforms of Diocletian, the seat of the prefecture of the Gauls, which oversaw much of the western empire. From 293 to 395 emperors of the Western Roman Empire frequently held court in the city. In the fourth century it ranked among the largest cities of the empire, with an estimated 75,000 and perhaps as many as 100,000 inhabitants. The Porta Nigra, the "Black Gate", dates from this period, and the Aula Palatina, a hall 67 metres long, served as Constantine's throne room. Saint Ambrose was born in the city, and the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius was sent into exile here in 336.

The prefecture relocated to Arles at some point between 395 and 418, most likely in 407. Trier stayed inhabited and kept a governor and state workshops making weapons and clothing, but it was never again as prosperous. The Franks took it in 459. In 870 it passed to East Francia, the kingdom that grew into the Holy Roman Empire. Relics of the apostle Matthias brought pilgrims, and the archbishops grew so powerful that their archbishopric became an electorate, one of the strongest states in Germany, ruling territory that stretched from the French border as far as the Rhine. A university was founded in 1473, and an imperial diet met in Trier in 1512. In the seventeenth century the archbishop-electors moved their residence to Ehrenbreitstein, near Koblenz.

Between 1581 and 1593 the diocese of Trier saw one of the largest witch persecutions in German history. In the city itself about 368 people were reportedly put to death; the total for the whole diocese has never been established.

The rivalry between France and the Habsburgs repeatedly brought war to the city. Spain and France fought over it in the Thirty Years' War, and French troops occupied it during the Nine Years' War and the wars of the Spanish and Polish Successions. In 1794 revolutionary France captured Trier again and annexed it, and the electorate was dissolved. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815 the city was handed to the Kingdom of Prussia. Karl Marx was born there in 1818. Trier grew economically as part of the Prussian Rhineland, rose briefly in the revolution of 1848, and was absorbed into the German Empire in 1871.

During the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 the synagogue was looted; it was destroyed by bombing in 1944. In June 1940 more than 60,000 British prisoners taken in northern France were marched to Trier on their way to German camps, and the city itself was heavily bombed and shelled in 1944.

After the Second World War Trier was placed in the newly created state of Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany. The university, closed in 1797, was refounded in the 1970s, the cathedral reopened in 1974 after long restoration, and the city celebrated its 2,000th anniversary in 1984. With roughly 110,000 inhabitants it ranks fourth in size among the state's cities. Its Roman buildings, including the ruins of three Roman bath complexes and an amphitheatre, stand alongside the cathedral, the early Gothic Liebfrauenkirche and St Matthias' Abbey, said to hold the only apostle's tomb north of the Alps, and several of its monuments are listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.