Wittenberg and the Luther Sites

1. What the Luther Trail Is

The Luther trail is a set of German towns, most of them within a few hours of each other, that hold the buildings of Martin Luther's life between his birth in 1483 and his death in 1546. Three of them carry the official prefix Lutherstadt in their names: Lutherstadt Wittenberg, Lutherstadt Eisleben and Lutherstadt Mansfeld, all in Saxony-Anhalt. Eisenach below the Wartburg carries the prefix Wartburgstadt. The trail is a modern travel construction laid over a real geography, and it works because the geography is small. Luther spent most of his working life inside Electoral Saxony, and the distances between the places where the Reformation happened are shorter than most visitors expect.

Six sites carry most of the story. Eisleben holds the birth and the death, sixty-two years apart. Erfurt holds the thunderstorm, the friary and the priesthood. Wittenberg holds the university, the theses, the preaching, the marriage, the household and the grave. Worms holds the refusal to recant before the emperor. The Wartburg holds the German New Testament. Torgau holds Katharina von Bora's grave and the first church built new for Lutheran worship. Augsburg, Coburg and Schmalkalden hold the political and confessional aftermath, when the movement had to write down what it believed and defend it.

Two of these clusters are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The Luther sites in Wittenberg and Eisleben were inscribed in 1996 as the Luther Memorials in Eisleben and Wittenberg, and the Wartburg was inscribed separately in 1999.

The inscriptions are recorded by UNESCO under the names "Luther Memorials in Eisleben and Wittenberg" (1996) and "Wartburg Castle" (1999). Visitor figures for these sites are published by the individual site trusts and the German states rather than by any single authority, and the published series are not comparable with each other, so no numbers are given on this page.

This page walks those places in the order the life ran. Readers who want the argument rather than the buildings, the causes of the break and the Catholic response to it, will find that in our guide to the Reformation and what actually caused the split, and the doctrine and structure of the churches that came out of it in our guide to Lutheranism, its confessions and its churches today. For the wider set of Reformation and revival destinations beyond the Luther story, including Geneva, Zurich, Bedford and Herrnhut, see our survey of Protestant heritage sites and what each one holds.

2. Eisleben and Mansfeld: Birth, Childhood, Death

Eisleben is a small copper-mining town west of Halle where Luther was born on 10 November 1483 and where he died on 18 February 1546. The coincidence gives the town both ends of the trail, and the two houses stand about ten minutes apart. Lutheran visitors usually begin here because the story begins here, and because the town is quiet enough to let the buildings speak.

The birth house and the font

The house shown as the birth house was damaged by fire in 1689 and rebuilt afterwards, so the fabric is later than the event. It has functioned as a memorial since the eighteenth century and now holds an exhibition on late medieval family life, mining and childhood, which is the most useful part of it. The building next to the great questions of the Reformation is a reminder that Luther came out of an ordinary working household: his father Hans leased smelting works, and the family lived by copper.

The more affecting object in Eisleben is the font in the church of St Peter and St Paul, where he was baptised on 11 November 1483, the feast of St Martin of Tours, which is where his name came from. The church was reordered in 2012 around a large baptismal pool set into the floor beside the old font, and it now works as a centre for Lutheran teaching on baptism. Catholic and Lutheran teaching are closer here than anywhere else on the trail. Both hold that baptism is a sacrament, that it is administered with water in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and that it is not repeated; the Catholic Church recognises the validity of baptism conferred in Lutheran churches. Our guide to baptism, what it does and who may receive it sets out the Catholic teaching in full.

The death house and St Andrew's

Luther returned to Eisleben in January 1546 to arbitrate a dispute among the counts of Mansfeld, preached four sermons at St Andrew's church in the fortnight before he died, and died in the town on 18 February. The pulpit he used is still in St Andrew's, and his body lay in that church before the journey back to Wittenberg began. The building shown to visitors as the death house was identified in the eighteenth century; historians now hold that he died in another house on the market square, and the museum presents the building as a memorial to his death rather than as the room itself. That correction is worth carrying, because the trail contains several places where the memorial and the event have come apart.

His body was carried back to Wittenberg for burial, passing through Halle, where the Market Church of Our Lady still displays a death mask and casts taken from his hands. Some visitors find the object grim, and others find it the only place on the trail where he stops being a monument.

The death mask and hand casts are described and displayed by the Marktkirche Unser Lieben Frauen in Halle, which is the source for their provenance. The reattribution of the Eisleben death house follows the position taken by the Luther Memorials Foundation of Saxony-Anhalt, which runs the museum and states the uncertainty in its own presentation.

Mansfeld

The family moved to Mansfeld a few miles away in 1484, when Luther was a few months old, and he grew up there and went to school there. Excavations in the early 2000s uncovered a great deal of the family's yard, including kitchen waste that told archaeologists more about how the household ate than any document had. The parents' house opened as a museum in 2014 and is the least visited of the major sites, which is part of its appeal. Mansfeld is where the poverty of the Luther legend comes apart: the family was not poor by the end, and the excavation showed a substantial household.

3. Erfurt and the Augustinian Monastery

Erfurt in Thuringia is where Luther became a friar and a priest, and the friary he entered still stands with its cloister, its church and its medieval glass. He matriculated at the university in 1501 and took his master's degree in 1505. On 2 July 1505, caught in a thunderstorm at Stotternheim outside the city, he vowed to St Anne that he would become a monk if he survived. He entered the Augustinian friary at Erfurt on 17 July 1505, was ordained priest in 1507, and celebrated his first Mass that year with his father present and unreconciled to the decision.

The friary passed into Protestant hands at the Reformation and is now run as a monastery site, conference centre and place of retreat by the Evangelical Church in Central Germany. Visitors see the cloister, the church with its fourteenth-century windows, and a reconstructed cell of the kind Luther would have occupied. The stone floor of the cloister is the single most atmospheric surface on the trail, because the buildings around it are largely medieval and the visitor is standing where a young friar walked to the daily office.

Why Catholics come to Erfurt too

Erfurt is the most ecumenical stop on the route. Pope Benedict XVI visited the Augustinian monastery on 23 September 2011 and met the council of the Evangelical Church in Germany in that cloister, speaking about the question that drove Luther as a friar: how to find a gracious God. That visit is why Erfurt appears on Catholic itineraries. The city also remains a Catholic see. Erfurt Cathedral, the seat of the bishop, stands beside the church of St Severus on the same great flight of steps above the square, and the two together are worth a morning on their own. The cathedral holds the Wolfram, a bronze candle-bearing figure from around 1160, and the Gloriosa of 1497, one of the great medieval bells of Europe, which the cathedral rings only on major feasts.

Romans 1:17 is the verse Luther identified as the turning point in his own understanding, and every German Luther site quotes it. Lutheran teaching draws from it the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and the Augsburg Confession states that believers are justified freely for Christ's sake through faith. Catholic teaching has never held that anyone earns the grace of justification: the Council of Trent taught in 1547 that nothing preceding justification, whether faith or works, merits that grace, and that we are said to be justified by faith because faith is the beginning of human salvation. The 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification records a common confession by Catholics and Lutherans that sinners are justified by grace through faith in Christ's saving work. Real differences remain over merit, the place of good works in the justified life, and the authority that settles such questions. Standing in the Erfurt cloister with all three of those documents in mind is a more honest way to visit than either triumph or embarrassment.

4. Wittenberg: How the Town Is Laid Out

Lutherstadt Wittenberg is a small town on the Elbe whose Reformation sites sit along a single street about a kilometre long, with the Castle Church at the west end and the Luther House at the east. Nothing in the historic centre needs a taxi. Luther came here in 1508, took his doctorate in theology in October 1512, and taught in the university until his death, so almost everything he wrote was written within a few hundred metres of that street.

The university itself, founded in 1502 by Frederick the Wise and known as the Leucorea, was the engine of the whole thing. Luther held the chair of biblical theology and lectured on the Psalms, Romans, Galatians and Hebrews between 1513 and 1518. Philip Melanchthon arrived in 1518 as professor of Greek at the age of twenty-one and became the movement's systematiser and the author of the Augsburg Confession. Johannes Bugenhagen was pastor of the town church, confessor to Luther, and the organiser who wrote church orders for cities across northern Germany and Denmark. Lucas Cranach the Elder ran a painting workshop, a printing operation and the town pharmacy, served as mayor, and gave the Reformation its visual language.

What to see beyond the four main sites

• The Cranach courtyards on the market square, the workshop and house complex where the painting and printing were done, now restored with a working historic press.
• The Luther Oak at the eastern edge of the old town, marking the traditional site of the Elster Gate where Luther burned the papal bull Exsurge Domine and a volume of canon law on 10 December 1520.
• The market square with its nineteenth-century statues of Luther and Melanchthon and the old town hall.
• The Augusteum next to the Luther House, the eighteenth-century university building that now holds exhibition space.
• The Fronleichnamskapelle, the Corpus Christi chapel beside the town church, a medieval survival from before the split.

5. The Castle Church and the Theses Door

The Castle Church, the Schlosskirche, was the university's own church, and its north door served as the notice board where academic disputations were advertised. Lutheran tradition holds that Luther posted his ninety-five theses on indulgences there on 31 October 1517, which is why the Reformation is dated from that day and why Protestant churches keep Reformation Day. The building went up between 1496 and 1506 as the collegiate church of the electors of Saxony, and Frederick the Wise had assembled in it an enormous relic collection whose viewing carried indulgences, which is one of the ironies the guides enjoy.

What is documented and what is not

The theses themselves are certain. They were written in Latin, framed as propositions for academic debate, and directed at the preaching of an indulgence being sold in nearby territory to fund the rebuilding of St Peter's in Rome and to service the debt Albrecht of Brandenburg had incurred to hold several sees at once. On 31 October 1517 Luther sent them to Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz, with a letter objecting to what the preachers were telling people the indulgence would do. That letter survives.

The nailing is uncertain. The account of a posting on the door comes from Philip Melanchthon, who wrote it after Luther's death in 1546, and Melanchthon was not in Wittenberg in 1517. Luther himself never described nailing anything up. Some historians, following an argument first made in 1961 by the Catholic scholar Erwin Iserloh, hold that the posting did not happen as described; others point out that posting notices on that door was the ordinary way to advertise a disputation and that a later note in the hand of Luther's secretary Georg Rorer refers to the theses being affixed to the doors of the Wittenberg churches. Honest guides in Wittenberg say the question is open, and Lutheran visitors are generally more relaxed about it than outsiders expect.

Erwin Iserloh set out the argument in a lecture in 1961, published shortly afterwards as Luthers Thesenanschlag: Tatsache oder Legende? The Rorer note was identified in the collections of the Thuringian University and State Library in Jena and reported in 2006. Both are cited here as the two sides of a live scholarly question, not as a settled conclusion either way.

The doors, the grave and the nave

The original wooden door burned in 1760 when the church was shelled during the Seven Years War. The bronze doors now in the opening were installed in 1858 at the direction of Frederick William IV of Prussia and carry the Latin text of the ninety-five theses cast into the metal. Visitors photograph a Prussian monument to the event rather than the object itself, and knowing that improves the visit rather than spoiling it.

Inside, Luther is buried beneath a brass plate in the floor near the pulpit, and Melanchthon lies opposite him. Frederick the Wise and his brother John the Steadfast are buried in the choir under bronze monuments from the Vischer workshop of Nuremberg. The nave carries statues and painted portraits of the princes, cities and theologians of the Reformation, a programme installed during the nineteenth-century restoration that reads the Reformation as a German national achievement. Lutheran visitors often describe standing at the grave as the emotional centre of the whole trip.

Catholic visitors will notice something else. The building is a late Gothic Catholic collegiate church with a Protestant nationalist interior fitted inside it, and that description covers a good deal of German Reformation heritage. Nothing on the trail was purpose-built until Torgau in 1544.

6. The Town Church of St Mary

The Stadtkirche St Marien in the market square is the parish church where Luther actually preached, week after week for more than thirty years, and Lutherans call it the mother church of the Reformation. The Castle Church holds the famous door; this building holds the working life. Most of his preaching was done in this building, and the pulpit he used now stands in the Luther House museum at the other end of the street. Bugenhagen married him to Katharina von Bora at the friary on 13 June 1525, and the public wedding celebration followed on 27 June with a procession to this church. His children were baptised here, and Bugenhagen is buried here.

The Cranach altarpiece

The altarpiece completed in 1547 by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son is the single most instructive object in Wittenberg. Its three main panels show the Lord's Supper, baptism and confession. Christ sits at table with the apostles in the centre panel, with a face among them commonly identified as Luther in his Junker Jorg disguise being handed the cup. Bugenhagen holds the keys in the confession panel. Melanchthon, a layman all his life, is shown baptising. The lower panel shows Luther preaching from a pulpit, one hand on the open Bible and the other pointing at a crucified Christ who hangs in the middle of the picture between preacher and congregation, and the congregation looks where he points.

The whole of Lutheran teaching on word and sacrament is set out there in paint, and it repays twenty minutes. Lutherans hold that Christ is truly present in the Supper, and the Augsburg Confession states that the body and blood of Christ are truly present and distributed to those who eat. That is closer to Catholic teaching than most visitors on either side assume, and the remaining difference over transubstantiation, sacrifice and the ordained priesthood is real. Our guides to the Eucharist and the Real Presence and to confession and the sacrament of penance set out the Catholic teaching that the panels are responding to.

The Judensau relief

On the outside of the same church, high on a corner of the south-east wall, is a medieval sandstone relief of the kind called a Judensau, an obscene anti-Jewish caricature carved around 1300, two centuries before the Reformation. The congregation set a bronze memorial into the ground beneath it in 1988 and added an explanatory panel. A legal attempt to compel the removal of the relief was rejected by the German Federal Court of Justice in 2022, which held that the memorial and explanation had turned the ensemble into a monument of remembrance. Visitors should look at it and read the plaque rather than walk past.

The 2022 ruling was issued by the Bundesgerichtshof, the German Federal Court of Justice. The 1988 memorial and the interpretive panel are the work of the congregation of the Stadtkirche and the town.

The relief is medieval and the responsibility for it is medieval, and Luther's own late writings against the Jews, above all the 1543 treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, are a separate matter dealt with in section fifteen below. Lutheran bodies have repudiated those writings by name, including the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, whose 1994 declaration to the Jewish community rejected them; we cover that church in our guide to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

7. The Luther House and the Melanchthon House

The Lutherhaus at the east end of the street is the Augustinian friary Luther entered as a monk in Wittenberg and kept as a family home after the electorate gave him the building following his marriage. It is now the main museum of the Reformation, and the Luther Memorials Foundation of Saxony-Anhalt, which runs it, describes its holdings as the largest collection on the history of the Reformation. The rooms give the domestic picture that the churches do not: a married professor, a household with six children of his own and several fostered, a lodging house full of students, and a brewery run by his wife in the yard.

The characterisation of the Lutherhaus collection is the Luther Memorials Foundation of Saxony-Anhalt's own description of the museum it runs, used here as an attributed claim rather than an independently verified comparison.

The Luther Room

The Lutherstube, a wood-panelled room installed in 1535, is the room where the table talk was recorded by students boarding in the house, and it is close to intact. The tiled stove, the panelling, the benches and the table are the original fittings. Visitors have carved their names into the wood for four centuries, and one of the signatures is said to be that of Peter the Great. The house also holds early printings, indulgence letters, a copy of the papal bull, Cranach portraits of Luther and of Katharina, and the pulpit from the town church.

Katharina von Bora's household

Katharina von Bora was a Cistercian nun at Nimbschen who left her convent with several others in 1523, after Luther's writings reached the house, and married Luther on 13 June 1525. She ran the friary as a farm and a business: gardens, a fish pond, cattle, a brewery and a permanent crowd of student lodgers. Lutheran visitors treat the marriage as the founding of the Protestant parsonage and of a whole model of Christian family life, and the museum presents her as a figure in her own right.

Catholic teaching regards the vows she and Luther had taken as real obligations, and the marriage of a friar and a nun as a grave matter, which is exactly what contemporaries on the Catholic side said at the time. The Catholic Church continues to hold celibacy as the discipline of the priesthood in the Latin Church, while ordaining married men in the Eastern Catholic Churches and, since the 1980s, receiving some married former Anglican and Lutheran clergy into the priesthood by papal provision. Our guide to the Catholic priesthood, holy orders and celibacy sets out that discipline and the reasons given for it.

The Melanchthon House

A few doors along the same street, the Melanchthon House is a Renaissance town house built for Philip Melanchthon in 1536 and preserved close to the way he left it, with a garden behind. Melanchthon wrote the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and the Apology that followed it, and Lutheran churches still subscribe both. He was also the conciliator of the movement, and the Augsburg Confession was drafted to show how much of the Catholic faith the Lutheran princes still held rather than how much they had dropped. Reading its opening articles on God, sin, the Son, justification and the sacraments before visiting his house makes the visit far more interesting.

8. Torgau and Katharina von Bora

Torgau on the Elbe, about an hour south of Wittenberg, holds the first church built new for Protestant worship and the grave of Luther's wife. The town was the political capital of Electoral Saxony while Wittenberg was its university, and Luther visited it repeatedly. Hartenfels Castle above the river is a large Renaissance complex with a famous open spiral staircase in the courtyard, and its chapel was consecrated by Luther on 5 October 1544.

The chapel matters architecturally because everything else on the trail is a converted medieval building. Here the design starts from Lutheran worship: a plain rectangular room with galleries, the pulpit set on the long side halfway down so the congregation gathers around the preaching, the altar and font in view, and no side chapels or shrines. In his sermon at the consecration Luther said the purpose of the house was that nothing else be done in it than that our Lord speak to us through his holy word and that we in turn speak to him through prayer and praise. Lutheran visitors quote that sentence more often than anything else he said about buildings.

Katharina von Bora died at Torgau on 20 December 1552. She had fled Wittenberg with her children during an outbreak of plague, was injured when her cart overturned near the town, and died some weeks later. Her grave is in the town church of St Mary in Torgau, marked by a carved stone slab with her figure on it, and the house where she died is a small museum. The distance between her grave in Torgau and Luther's in Wittenberg surprises visitors who assumed the two would lie together.

9. Worms and the Imperial Diet of 1521

Worms on the Rhine is where Luther was summoned before the imperial Diet in April 1521 and refused to recant his writings in front of the Emperor Charles V. The hearing took place on 17 and 18 April in the bishop's palace beside the cathedral. That building was destroyed in later wars, and the approximate site is marked in the Heylshof garden next to the cathedral, so the most important spot in Worms is a patch of lawn with a stone on it. Visitors should be warned in advance, because the disappointment otherwise colours the day.

Lutheran accounts of the second day report Luther saying that unless he were convinced by the testimony of Scripture or by clear reason his conscience was captive to the word of God, and that he could not and would not recant, because to act against conscience is neither safe nor right. The famous closing sentence, "Here I stand, I can do no other", appears in early printed versions and is missing from the notary's record, so historians generally treat it as a later addition. The Edict of Worms, issued the following month, declared him an outlaw and made it a crime to shelter him.

The Luther Monument

The Luther Monument by Ernst Rietschel, unveiled in 1868, is a large bronze ensemble in a public park, and the city of Worms describes it as the largest Reformation monument in the world. Luther stands on a plinth surrounded by figures the sculptor treated as forerunners, including Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, Girolamo Savonarola and Peter Waldo, with the Reformation princes and cities ranged below. The programme is a nineteenth-century Protestant reading of history rather than a neutral one, and reading it as such is part of the interest. Peter Waldo's followers, the Waldensians, were a distinct twelfth-century movement with their own history, which we cover in our guide to the Waldensians.

The characterisation of the Rietschel monument as the largest Reformation monument in the world is the city of Worms's own description of it, used here as an attributed claim rather than an independently verified measurement.

Worms Cathedral, one of the three great Rhenish imperial cathedrals with Speyer and Mainz, remains a Catholic church and is a major Romanesque building. Standing in it after the Heylshof garden gives the visitor the other half of the picture: the institution Luther was summoned before was not an abstraction, and its architecture was already four hundred years old when he arrived.

10. The Wartburg and the German New Testament

The Wartburg, the castle on a ridge above Eisenach in Thuringia, is where Luther translated the New Testament into German while hiding from the imperial ban. After Worms, Frederick the Wise had him intercepted on the road in a staged abduction and taken to the castle, where he lived from May 1521 into March 1522 disguised as a knight under the name Junker Jorg, with a beard and a sword. Working from the Greek text edited by Erasmus, he produced the translation in about eleven weeks. It was printed at Wittenberg in September 1522 and is known as the September Testament; the complete Bible followed in 1534.

German readers regard that translation as one of the foundations of the modern written language, which is why the Wartburg matters to secular German visitors as much as to Christian ones. Luther described his method as listening to the mother in the house, the children in the street and the common man in the market, and translating so that they would recognise their own speech. The Catholic Church had vernacular translations before him, including German printed Bibles from the 1460s, and the scale of Luther's achievement lies in the quality of the German rather than in being first.

The Luther Room and the inkwell

The room shown as Luther's study is small, bare and panelled in dark wood, with a whale vertebra used as a footstool. Guides point out a patch of wall associated with the story that he threw an inkwell at the devil. There is no early evidence for the incident, generations of visitors chipped the plaster away for souvenirs, and the mark has been renewed more than once. The room is disappointing to anyone expecting drama, and that is the correct impression: the translation was done by a hunted man in a cold room.

The rest of the castle

The Wartburg is far older than the Reformation and is not primarily a Luther site. It was founded in the eleventh century and was the seat of the landgraves of Thuringia. Elizabeth of Hungary lived there as landgravine, gave away her goods to the poor, and was canonised as a Catholic saint in 1235, four years after her death at the age of twenty-four; several rooms and a mosaic-covered hall are given to her story, and she appears in our people section as St Elizabeth of Hungary. The great hall is where Wagner set the singers' contest in Tannhauser. In 1817 student fraternities held the Wartburg Festival there to mark three hundred years since the theses and the anniversary of the battle of Leipzig, and burned books they considered reactionary, which is one of the uglier moments in the castle's afterlife. Most of what visitors see of the interior is a nineteenth-century restoration in a medievalising style.

11. Coburg and Schmalkalden

Coburg and Schmalkalden are the two places where the Reformation stopped being a university argument and became a political and confessional structure. Both are less visited than Wittenberg, and both explain more about how Lutheranism survived than the famous sites do.

The Veste Coburg

The Veste Coburg is a huge hill fortress in northern Bavaria where Luther stayed from April to October 1530 while the Diet of Augsburg was sitting. He could not attend the Diet himself, because the imperial ban of 1521 still stood and Augsburg lay outside the protection of his own prince, so Coburg was the closest point in Saxon territory. He worked on translation, wrote a stream of letters to Melanchthon urging him to hold firm, and learned there of his father's death. The Luther rooms in the fortress are preserved, and the castle also holds major collections of prints and historic arms.

Schmalkalden

Schmalkalden in Thuringia gave its name to the Schmalkaldic League, the defensive alliance of Lutheran princes and cities formed there in 1531, and to the Schmalkaldic Articles that Luther drafted in 1537 as a statement of what the Lutherans could not concede in any council. Those articles are among the confessional documents Lutheran churches still subscribe in the Book of Concord of 1580. The league was defeated by imperial forces at Muhlberg in 1547, and the settlement that eventually followed came at Augsburg in 1555. Wilhelmsburg Castle above the town, built between 1585 and 1590, holds a well-preserved Lutheran chapel of the kind Torgau began.

These two sites explain a detail that puzzles many visitors: why the Reformation held in some German territories and collapsed in others. The answer is largely territorial politics, and standing in a fortress built to defend a confession makes the point better than a book does.

12. Augsburg: Confession, Peace and 1999

Augsburg in Bavaria holds three moments, one from the beginning of the split, one from the settlement of it, and one from the modern attempt to heal it. The city is a long way south of the Saxon sites and is usually visited on its own rather than as part of a Luther circuit, and it is the stop that changes the shape of the trip.

In October 1518 Luther was examined at Augsburg by Cardinal Cajetan, the Dominican theologian sent as papal legate, and refused to retract. He lodged at the Carmelite house of St Anne, whose church still stands with the Fugger burial chapel and the Golden Hall nearby. On 25 June 1530 the Lutheran princes presented the Augsburg Confession to Charles V, and that document remains the primary confession of Lutheran churches worldwide. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 ended the first round of the religious wars by allowing each prince to determine whether his territory would be Catholic or Lutheran, a settlement that protected no individual conscience and that left the Reformed out entirely.

On 31 October 1999 the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in the church of St Anne in Augsburg, with an ecumenical service that day in the basilica of St Ulrich and St Afra. The World Methodist Council associated itself with the declaration in 2006, and the Anglican Consultative Council and the World Communion of Reformed Churches later did the same. Augsburg is therefore the place where the itinerary stops being only about a quarrel, and it is a good place to end a trip that began at a church door.

13. How Lutherans Understand These Places

Lutherans do not treat the Luther sites as shrines, and most Lutherans would reject the suggestion that visiting one confers any spiritual benefit. The vocabulary matters here. A Lutheran congregation visiting Wittenberg will talk about memory, gratitude, instruction and the renewal of a common confession, and will usually avoid the word pilgrimage entirely. The theological reason is precise: Lutheran teaching holds that God gives himself to the believer through the preached word and the sacraments, and that no place, relic or journey adds anything to that. Frederick the Wise's relic collection in the Castle Church is exactly what the Reformation was reacting against, and the guides in Wittenberg say so.

What Lutherans do at these sites is largely liturgical and educational. Congregations attend services in the town church and the Castle Church, which are working parish churches of the Evangelical Church in Central Germany with regular Sunday worship. Confirmation groups and youth groups come to see where the confessions were written. Choirs sing. Seminaries run study weeks. Reformation Day on 31 October fills Wittenberg, and the town also holds an annual festival of Luther's wedding in June that is closer to a civic pageant than to anything religious.

Catholic readers travelling with Lutheran friends or family should take two things from this. Describing the trip as a pilgrimage in front of a Lutheran host will land badly, however warmly it is meant. And a Lutheran visitor is not looking for what a Catholic looks for at Lourdes or Assisi. Our guide to what a pilgrimage is and why Catholics make them sets out the Catholic understanding, which is a genuinely different practice with a different theology behind it.

The Lutheran world is also not a single body. The Evangelical Church in Germany, which holds most of these buildings, is a federation of Lutheran, Reformed and United regional churches. The Lutheran World Federation gathers most Lutheran churches internationally and signed the 1999 declaration. Confessional Lutheran bodies including the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod stand outside that federation, did not sign the declaration, and hold a stricter subscription to the Book of Concord. A visitor who assumes all Lutherans think alike about ecumenism will misread the conversation at the site.

14. Where a Catholic Visitor Stands

A Catholic may visit all of these places, and Catholic bishops and popes have done so. Nothing in Catholic teaching forbids entering a museum, a castle or a Lutheran parish church, and there is a great deal to learn in all three. Benedict XVI went to the Erfurt cloister in 2011. Pope Francis travelled to Lund in Sweden on 31 October 2016 to take part in an ecumenical commemoration with the Lutheran World Federation at the opening of the five hundredth anniversary year. The Catholic Church treats Lutherans as baptised Christians in a real if imperfect communion with the Church, and the Second Vatican Council's decree Unitatis Redintegratio says that those born into separated communities and brought up in the faith of Christ cannot be charged with the sin of the separation.

What a Catholic can say honestly about the quarrel

The abuse Luther attacked in 1517 was real. Indulgence preaching in Albrecht of Brandenburg's territory was tied to a financial arrangement, and preachers were telling people things about what the indulgence would accomplish that the Church did not teach. The Council of Trent condemned the abuses directly and abolished the office of the questors of alms who collected for indulgences. The Catholic Church retained the doctrine while suppressing the trade, and defines an indulgence as a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which is a narrower thing than the sixteenth-century preaching implied.

The definition follows the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1471, which quotes the Apostolic Constitution Indulgentiarum Doctrina of Paul VI. The suppression of the questors of alms was decreed in the twenty-first session of the Council of Trent.

Trent also did the doctrinal work the movement had forced. Its 1547 decree on justification taught that justification is by grace, that nothing preceding it merits it, and that faith is the beginning of salvation, while rejecting the Lutheran formulations on imputation and assurance. The Catholic Church continues to hold what Lutherans rejected: the sacrifice of the Mass, transubstantiation, the ordained priesthood in apostolic succession, the seven sacraments, purgatory, the intercession of the saints, and the authority of Scripture and Tradition together under the teaching office. Our guides to the Catholic and Protestant differences set side by side and to Scripture and Tradition take those up one at a time.

Practical notes for a Catholic on the trail

• Sunday Mass. Wittenberg, Eisleben and Torgau are in historically Protestant regions with small Catholic parishes, and Erfurt, Worms and Augsburg are Catholic sees with cathedrals. Plan the Sunday around the Catholic parish rather than assuming one is nearby.
• Attending a Lutheran service is permitted and can be a courtesy to a host. A Catholic does not receive communion there, and Lutheran ministers are usually familiar with the practice and untroubled by it.
• Do not treat the graves in the Castle Church as objects of veneration. They are graves, and the people buried there died outside communion with the Catholic Church.
• Erfurt Cathedral and Worms Cathedral are working Catholic cathedrals and great medieval buildings in their own right, and Naumburg Cathedral within reach of the Saxon sites is a major medieval building now in Protestant care. A route that includes them is a better route.
• Do not use the trip to argue. A visitor who spends the Cranach altarpiece explaining what is wrong with it has wasted the altarpiece.

The document worth reading before travelling is From Conflict to Communion, the 2013 report of the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity, prepared for the anniversary. It is the joint account both churches produced of what happened, and it says plainly that the two sides now tell the story together. Our guide to ecumenism, what the Church seeks and what it does not concede sets out the Catholic position on that work.

15. The Hard Parts of the Story

Three parts of the Luther story are handled badly by tour guides in both directions, and a visitor is better served by knowing them plainly. Lutheran institutions in Germany have addressed all three publicly, and the museums do not hide them.

The Peasants' War

In 1524 and 1525 peasants across southern and central Germany rose in revolt, drawing on Reformation preaching in their demands. Luther first urged the princes to hear the grievances, then, as the revolt spread, published Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, which called on the authorities to strike the rebels down. The suppression killed tens of thousands. He never withdrew the tract, and defended it afterwards. Historians of the period treat this as the moment the Reformation attached itself to the princes, and Lutheran scholarship does not defend the tract.

The writings against the Jews

Luther's late treatise On the Jews and Their Lies of 1543 called for the burning of synagogues and Jewish homes and schools, the confiscation of books, and the expulsion of Jews from German lands. The text is indefensible, it was quoted approvingly by the Nazi regime four centuries later, and it stands in a long European history of Christian anti-Jewish writing to which Catholics contributed heavily. Lutheran bodies have repudiated it by name, including the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 1994. Catholics have no ground to use it as a debating point: the Catholic Church's own record required the Second Vatican Council's declaration Nostra Aetate in 1965 and the Holy See's 1998 document We Remember on the Shoah.

The landgrave's second marriage

In 1539 and 1540 Philip of Hesse, the most powerful Lutheran prince, took a second wife while his first was living. Luther, Melanchthon and Bucer gave a written opinion permitting it as a matter of confessional advice on condition that it be kept secret, and the secret did not hold. The episode damaged the Lutheran cause politically and is an embarrassment in the sources rather than a hidden one. Catholic teaching holds marriage to be one man and one woman for life, and the Catholic Church's own conflict with Henry VIII over exactly this question was running at the same time. Our guide to marriage, annulment and the indissoluble bond sets out the teaching.

None of these belongs in a conversation with a Lutheran host as a scoring move. They belong in the visitor's head so that the story being told at each site is the whole one. The German museums include all three.

16. Planning the Route

The Saxon and Thuringian sites cluster tightly enough that a week covers them without hurry, and the natural order follows the life rather than the map. Eisleben and Mansfeld first, Erfurt next, then Wittenberg for two days, Torgau as a half-day from Wittenberg, and the Wartburg from Eisenach. Worms and Augsburg sit far to the south and west and are usually added as separate trips rather than squeezed into the same loop.

How long each place needs

• Wittenberg: two days for the four main sites, the Cranach courtyards and a service in one of the churches. One day if pressed.
• Eisleben and Mansfeld together: one day, with the font at St Peter and St Paul as the thing not to miss.
• Erfurt: one day for the monastery, the cathedral and St Severus, and the medieval merchants' bridge.
• Wartburg and Eisenach: half a day for the castle, more if you walk up, plus the Bach house in the town below for anyone with an interest in the music the Lutheran tradition produced.
• Torgau: half a day from Wittenberg for the chapel and Katharina von Bora's grave.
• Worms: one day, with the cathedral given as much time as the Reformation sites.
• Augsburg: one day, ideally separate from the rest.

Practical shape

Opening arrangements, ticket prices and transport timetables change constantly and are not listed on this page, because a printed figure would be wrong within a year. Check each site's own website while planning. What does not change is the geography: the Saxon sites lie along the Leipzig, Halle and Wittenberg corridor with good rail connections, Erfurt and Eisenach lie along the Thuringian line to the west, and Worms and Augsburg are separate. Anniversary years, particularly 31 October in any year, bring crowds to Wittenberg.

Travellers building a wider trip through the region will find neighbouring Catholic destinations in our guide to pilgrimage sites in central Europe, and the general Catholic case for travelling to holy places in our overview of Catholic pilgrimage sites around the world. Those pages describe a different kind of journey from this one, and the difference is worth keeping clear in your own mind while you walk the Luther trail.