Many times the city has been devastated and rebuilt. In 718 Bishop Sigibert surrounded the city by a series of walls, and between 975 and 1011 Archbishop Willigis built the cathedral and the church of St. Stephen, at which[{162}] time the real Christianizing of Mayence may be said to have begun.
The venerable old cathedral has many times been battered and bruised, and fire and bombardment have reduced its original form into somewhat of a hybrid thing, but it remains to-day the most stupendously imposing and bizarre cathedral of all the Rhine valley.
In general its architecture is decidedly not good, but it is interesting, and therein lies the chief charm of a great church.
During the siege of the French the cathedral at Mayence, in 1793, again took fire, and the western end of the roof of the choir, the nave, and the transept all succumbed.
For ten years it remained in this state, until the order for restoration came from the omnific[{163}] Bonaparte, then first consul. In 1804 the edifice was consecrated anew.
In the year 636 there was held at Mayence an assembly of the bishops of the Frankish kingdom convoked by Dagobert, then king.
Among the bishops of Mayence none had a reputation so popular as that of St. Boniface, who had been sent out by Pope Gregory III. as a missioner to the Rhine country.
Boniface had given Pepin-le-Bref the sacrament at Soissons in 752, upon the fall of the Merovingian dynasty, and in return King Pepin gave the bishopric of Mayence to St. Boniface.
In 813 a numerous council met here, at the orders of Charlemagne, under the presidency of Hildebold, Archbishop of Cologne and chaplain of the holy palace at Rome.