Diocese of Halberstadt
| Prince-Bishopric of Halberstadt | ||||||||||
| Hochstift Halberstadt | ||||||||||
| State of the Holy Roman Empire | ||||||||||
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 Coat of arms
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 Prince-Bishoprics of Hildesheim, Halberstadt
and Magdeburg (violet), about 1250 |
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| Capital | Halberstadt | |||||||||
| Languages | Eastphalian | |||||||||
| Government | elective theocratic monarchy, bishops elected by the chapter, confirmed by the pope and invested as prince by the emperor | |||||||||
| Historical era | Middle Ages | |||||||||
| • | Diocese founded | 804 | ||||||||
| • | Prince-Bishopric | 1180 | ||||||||
| • | Joined Lower Saxon Circle |
1500 | ||||||||
| • | Albert of Brandenburg | 1513 | ||||||||
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Secularised to Principality of Halberstadt |
1648 | ||||||||
| • | To Province of Saxony | 1816 | ||||||||
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The Bishopric of Halberstadt was a Roman Catholic diocese (German: Bistum Halberstadt; 804–1648) and a state within the Holy Roman Empire, the Prince-bishopric of Halberstadt (German: Hochstift Halberstadt; 1180–1648). Its capital was Halberstadt in present-day Saxony-Anhalt, north of the Harz mountain range, Germany.
In the aftermath of the Saxon Wars, Emperor Charlemagne in 804 established a missionary diocese at Osterwieck (then called Seligenstadt) in Eastphalia, in the course of the Christianisation of the pagan Saxons and Polabian Slavs. Under its (supposed) first bishop Hildegrim of Châlons the capital was moved to Halberstadt, confirmed by Charles' son Louis the Pious in an 814 deed. The bishopric's boundaries originally reached the Elbe and Saale rivers in the east, nevertheless, when Emperor Otto I founded the Archbishopric of Magdeburg in 968, Halberstadt lost the eastern half of its district to it. Halberstadt diocese was a suffragan of the Archdiocese of Mainz.
The Halberstadt bishops rivalled with Magdeburg to gain political influence in the days of the Ottonian and Salian dynasty. Under the rule of Emperor Henry III they were vested with further territorial rights and in 1062 Bishop Burchard II was sent to Rome as an Imperial mediator in the conflict between Pope Alexander II and Antipope Honorius II. However the former favourite of Dowager Empress Agnes of Poitou and her son Henry IV in 1073 allied with Pope Gregory VII in the Investiture Controversy and became one of the leading figures of the Great Saxon Revolt. After the deposition of the Saxon duke Henry the Lion the episcopal and capitular temporalities forming the Stift of Halberstadt evolved to an Imperial State, the prince-bishopric. The political entity of the prince-bishopric only comprised parts of the ecclesiastical entity of the diocese, which also included neighbouring political entities of other rulers.
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