Visitors from all countries see and marvel at how an ingenious invention from Mainz 500 years ago conquered the world. But the age of Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century was just one of the fruitful epochs in the history of Mainz, which was often also the history of the Holy Roman Empire.

The adoptive son of the Roman Emperor Augustus, Drusus, is regarded as being the founder of the city. In the year 13 B.C., he established his legion’s camp on the rising ground above the confluence of the Main and Rhine: Moguntiacum, today’s Mainz, was born. The location, the mild climate and political developments in the ancient empire led to the city flourishing early. The excavations of the shrine of Isis and Mater Magna, the Roman theatre and numerous finds in the city area bear eloquent witness to this.

The Christian metropolis’s roots also date back to the early Roman period. The first legendary bishops were already in the second century. But, after the period of the migrations of peoples, it was the luminous figure of Boniface in the eighth century who converted large parts of Germany by missionary work from Mainz, creating the largest archbishopric to the north of the Alps.

Some two hundred years later, one of his important successors to the “Holy See of Mainz“ was the cathedral builder and tutor to the emperor, Willigis. The influence of the Mainz ecclesiastics as archchancellors of the Holy Roman Empire and organisers of the elections of the German kings in the Middle Ages was enormous. This finds self-confident expression in the epithet “Golden Mainz”. This still stands for the city on the Rhine even today. The Jewish tradition of “Magenza” also lasted from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century.  Poetry and prayers bear witness to the fame of the city’s scholars.

Mainz’s Jewish Cemetery contains Europe’s oldest gravestone. People of Mainz, including the polymath Georg Forster, made history, also for the development of German democracy. In 1792, following the model of the French revolutionaries, committed men founded a Jacobin Club. The Elector had already fled from the city before the revolutionary army which was thus able to take Mainz almost without a fight. The Rhenish-German National Convention met in the Deutschhaus and is regarded as the first German parliament. Even today, traces of “Mayence” are to be found in the State Capital of Rhineland-Palatinate: in the language, in its inhabitants’ way of life, in their love of wine. And in quite concrete terms in the Landesmuseum, the founding of which has its origin in the gift of valuable works of art by Napoleon Bonaparte to the citizens of the city in 1805.