Frankfurt Cathedral

Frankfurt Cathedral (German: Frankfurter Dom, officially Kaiserdom Sankt Bartholomäus) is a Gothic church located in the centre of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It is dedicated to Saint Bartholomew.

Frankfurt Cathedral was an imperial collegiate church, termed Dom in German - a synecdoche for all collegiate churches used totum pro parte also for cathedrals -, and thus translated as cathedral in English. St. Bartholomew's is the main church of Frankfurt and was constructed in the 14th and 15th centuries on the foundation of an earlier church from the Merovingian time.

From 1356 onwards, emperors of the Holy Roman Empire were elected in this collegiate church as kings in Germany, and from 1562 to 1792, emperors-elect were crowned here. The imperial elections were held in the Wahlkapelle, a chapel on the south side of the choir (Hochchor) built for this purpose in 1425 (See the Plan to the right) and the anointing and crowning of the emperors-elect as kings in Germany took place before the central altar–believed to enshrine part of the head of St. Bartholomew – in the crossing of the church, at the entrance to the choir (See the Plan to the right).

In the course of the German Mediatisation the city of Frankfurt finally secularised and appropriated the remaining Catholic churches and their endowments of earning assets, however, leaving the usage of the church buildings to the existing Catholic parishes. Thus St. Bartholomew's became of the city's dotation churches, owned and maintained by the city but used by Catholic or Lutheran congregations.

St. Bartholomew's has been recognised as symbol for the national unity of Germany, especially during the 19th century. Although it has never been a bishop's seat, it was the largest church in Frankfurt and its role in imperial politics made the church one of the most important buildings of Imperial history and justified the use of the term (imperial) cathedral for the church since the 18th century. In 1867, the St. Bartholomew's was destroyed by a fire and rebuilt in its present style.

The St. Bartholomew's suffered severe damage and the interior was burned out completely. The building was reconstructed in the 1950s. The height of the spire is 95 m.