Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg

The cathedral stands on the site of Argentoratum, a Roman settlement founded about 12 BC. When Otto III died in 1002 his possible successors fought over the throne. Bishop Werner I had not backed the claim of Hermann of Germany, whose troops took Strasbourg, plundered the cathedral and burned it.

Werner appealed to the victor, Henry II, who granted an eighth of his provincial revenues towards a replacement, and in 1015 the bishop laid the first stone. The new church, roofed in timber, burned in 1136, 1140, 1150 and 1176.

After the last of those fires Bishop Heinrich von Hasenburg, who died in 1190, resolved to rebuild the whole cathedral, finer than the Basel Minster then being finished. Work went ahead on the older foundations, and the masons began mixing in the Gothic manner that had appeared in northern France. Between 1200 and 1228 the Romanesque vaults of the north transept were replaced by pointed rib vaults, and the south transept followed. The nave was rebuilt in Gothic form between 1240 and 1274; from 1250 the masons took up the more ambitious Parisian style, and the pillars of that section were copied exactly from those of the Basilica of Saint-Denis.

Bishop Conrad of Lichtenberg laid the first stone of the Rayonnant west front on 25 May 1277, to a design owing something to Saint-Urbain at Troyes. Erwin von Steinbach is credited with major contributions from 1277 until his death in 1318; his son Johannes was chief architect from at least 1332 to 1341.

The design called for two spires of 122 metres. Instead Ulrich Ensingen and, after 1419, Johannes Hültz of Cologne raised a single octagonal tower on the north side, completing the building in 1439 at 142 metres; the south tower was never built. From 1647, when the taller spire of St Mary's at Stralsund burned, until St Nikolai in Hamburg was finished in 1874, it was the world's tallest building. A second tower was proposed in earnest after Alsace passed to Germany in 1871, and Strasbourg received the idea coldly, holding that it would stand for German occupation.

In 1524 the council of what was by then a free imperial city assigned the cathedral to the Protestant faith, and the building suffered some damage from iconoclasm. Louis XIV annexed Strasbourg on 30 September 1681; after a mass on 23 October attended by the king and the prince-bishop Franz Egon of Fürstenberg it was handed back to the Catholics. The choir screen of 1252 was broken out in 1682 and the Renaissance high altar demolished the same year.

Church property was seized on 2 November 1789 and the cathedral was attacked by the Enragés: 215 statues in the voussoirs were smashed with hammers. The sculpture of the central tympanum survived because it had been boarded over with the motto Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité. In April 1794 the Enragés began planning to pull down the spire, on the grounds that it offended the principle of equality; in May the citizens crowned it with a giant tin Phrygian cap, and the tower was saved. Seven bells were melted down for cannon, and in November 1793 the cathedral was proclaimed a Temple of Reason. It was returned to church control on 15 July 1801.

Gustave Klotz led restorations from 1837 to 1888, rebuilding the crypt. During the siege of Strasbourg in 1870 the roof was set alight and a German shell bent the cross at the top of the spire. Alsace was ceded to the German Empire, and Klotz took German nationality to carry on his work. In 1903 Johann Knauth found cracks in the first pillar of the nave's north side, and from 1915 ran a project to replace the cathedral's foundations with concrete, finished in 1926.

Hitler visited on 28 June 1940, intending to turn the church into a national sanctuary of the German people; on 1 March 1941 General Leclerc swore the Oath of Kufra, that he would lay down arms only when French colours flew again from the cathedral. The stained glass, stored during the war in a salt mine near Heilbronn, was brought back by the United States military's Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section. British and American bombs struck the cathedral on 11 August 1944, and repairs were finished only in the early 1990s. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List with the Grande Île in 1988, the year John Paul II said mass here. It belongs to the French state, administered by the mayor of Strasbourg, while the Fondation de l'Œuvre Notre-Dame has overseen its construction and upkeep since at least 1224; the tower's restoration was completed in 2006.