special religious celebrations and special events of the archbishopric. The cathedral and its district were included by the municipal fortifications, but politically they formed an exclave. Protestantism in Bremen When the Protestant Reformation swept through northern Germany, the first Reformed sermon in Bremen was held in 1522, and in 1534 the city established a Protestant rule of churches. The cathedral chapter was still catholic and closed St Peter's cathedral, after on Palm Sunday of 1532 a delegation of Bremen's revolutionary Council of the 104 men (de.wiki) had forcefully interrupted a Catholic mass and prompted a pastor to hold a Lutheran service. The Roman Catholic Church was condemned as a symbol of the abuses of a long Catholic past by most local citizens and the building fell into disuse and then disrepair. In 1547 the chapter, meanwhile prevailingly Lutheran, appointed the Dutch Albert Hardenberg, called Rizaeus, as the first Cathedral preacher of Protestant affiliation. Rizaeus turned out to be a partisan of the rather Zwinglian understanding of the Lord's Supper, which was rejected by the then Lutheran burghers, city council, and chapter. So in 1561 - after tremendous quarrels - Rizaeus was dismissed and banned from the city and the cathedral shut again its doors. While the majority of Bremen's burghers and city council adopted Calvinism until the 1590s, the chapter, being simultaneously the body of secular government in the neighbouring Prince-Archbishopric, clung to Lutheranism. Tower disasters On 27 January 1638, the southern belfry, that already had looked instable since more than a century, collapsed causing severe damage to surrounding buildings and killing eight people. Its lower storeys received a flat roof. Also in 1638, the Prince-Archbishopric's Lutheran Administrator Frederick II reopened St Peter's as a Lutheran place of worship, while meanwhile all other churches in town had become Calvinist. In 1642, a Lutheran Latin School opened at St Peter's. Just eighteen years later, a lightning struck the northern tower and burned the roof, which collapsed into the nave destroying the roof. The walls of northern tower were quickly rebuilt, covered with a simple pyramidal roof. The southern tower suffered a second collapse and remained an open ruin for almost two and a half centuries. Interior development Though the outer appearance of the Building remained quite poor for more than two centuries, the importance of the church increased. The Lutheran community in the walls of Bremen lacked the status of a