Imperial Palace of Goslar

The palace probably began as the royal hunting lodge Adam of Bremen mentions for the Ottonian period. Around 1005 Henry II raised a first imperial mansion at Goslar, and the rich ore under the neighbouring Rammelsberg soon lifted it past the nearby palace of Werla. Conrad II enlarged the district in the 1030s, laying the foundation stone of the Church of Our Lady, and his son Henry III finished the work: in 1048 he called in the future Bishop of Osnabrück, Benno II, under whom the new Kaiserhaus and the collegiate church of St Simon and St Jude were completed in the first half of the 1050s. The church was consecrated on 2 July 1051 by Archbishop Hermann of Cologne and dedicated to Simon and Jude, whose feast fell on Henry III's birthday; it was then the largest Romanesque church east of the Rhine.

The Kaiserhaus, 54 metres by 18, was the largest secular building of its time. Its hall block held one great room above another, each 47 metres by 15. The upper room was the emperor's, the throne set against the blind west wall, the east side opening in arcades and a balcony facing the cathedral; the lower hall was warmed by air drawn from wood-burning ovens outside the west wall. Henry V added a second residential wing at the southern end early in the 12th century, and when the hall block collapsed in 1132 it was rebuilt at once.

Henry IV was born in the palace district on 11 November 1050. In the late summer of 1056 Pope Victor II stayed several weeks as Henry III's guest, was present at the emperor's death at Bodfeld in the Harz, and then organised the handover of power to his widow, the Empress Agnes. Henry III's heart stayed at Goslar at his own wish, and since 1884 it has been kept in a gilded capsule inside the sarcophagus in the lower chapel of St Ulrich, under a mid-13th-century effigy of him with a dog at his feet.

At Pentecost 1063 the young Henry IV watched the Goslar precedence dispute turn to slaughter in the cathedral: an argument between Bishop Hezilo of Hildesheim and Abbot Widerad of Fulda over the seating order ended in half a day of bloodshed. In summer 1073 Henry fled the palace for the nearby Harzburg ahead of the rebel Saxons, and at Christmas 1075 he received at Goslar the letter in which Pope Gregory VII threatened him with excommunication — the opening of the Investiture Controversy. In 1081 his rival Hermann of Salm was crowned and anointed king in the palace.

Between 1152 and 1188 the palace was at times the venue for, and at times the object of, the quarrel between the Emperor Frederick I and Duke Henry the Lion. In July 1219 Frederick II held an imperial diet here and took delivery of the imperial regalia that Otto IV had kept up at the Harzburg. In 1253 William of Holland became the last German king to reside at Goslar, and the decline began.

A fire in 1289 burnt many of the buildings to their foundations, and the newest residential block was pulled down; the following year the palace district passed to the town of Goslar. The hall long served as a courtroom, for the town bailiff and as a Saxon district court, but was steadily turned over to storage — by the mid-16th century both halls of the Kaiserhaus were in use as a granary. From 1575 the chapel of St Ulrich held prisoners, which at least kept it standing. The towers of the Church of Our Lady fell in 1672 and the rest in 1722, its stone carted off as building material.

The collegiate church went the same way: its walls were reported to be collapsing as early as 1331, a tower came down in 1530, and by 1802 only a ruin was left, sold on 19 July 1819 for 1,504 talers to be demolished. The north porch, added around 1150, is all that survived. The imperial throne from the church was bought in the 1840s by Prince Charles of Prussia; passing to the Hohenzollerns, it served as William I's chair at the opening of the first German Reichstag on 21 March 1871.

When walls inside the Kaiserhaus came down in 1865, demolition reached the agenda of Goslar's town council. It was headed off, a state commission recommended restoration instead, and work began on 14 August 1868; Emperor William I's visit on 15 August 1875 amounted to a national blessing for the project, and the building was finished in 1879. Excavations by Uvo Hölscher in 1913–14 and 1922 recovered the foundations of the Church of Our Lady. As early as the 11th century the place had impressed the chronicler Lambert of Hersfeld enough for him to call it the most famous residence in the empire.