Prince-Bishopric of Worms

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Prince-Bishopric of Worms was a church-run state in the Holy Roman Empire from 861 to 1802. Its capital was Worms until 1400, then Ladenburg. It lay along both sides of the Rhine around Worms, near the Rhine–Neckar junction, and was mostly surrounded by the Electorate of the Palatinate. The city of Worms itself was an Imperial Free City and became Protestant during the Reformation, while the prince-bishops kept control of the Cathedral of Worms inside the city. In 1096, during the Worms massacre, Bishop Adalbert II tried to shelter the city’s Jews in his palace, but the effort failed. In 1795 France occupied Worms and the left-bank lands. In 1802, during mediatization, the bishopric was secularized and annexed by Hesse-Darmstadt.