Wittenberg received town rights on 27 June 1293 from Duke Albert II and had a governing council by 1317. In 1356 the Emperor Charles IV raised the Duke of Saxe-Wittenberg to Elector, and the town became an electoral residence - a serious address, though not yet an intellectual one. That came in 1502, when the University of Wittenberg, the Leucorea, was founded on Collegienstraße. Luther taught there, and so did Philipp Melanchthon, who arrived at twenty-one as professor of Greek and stayed to become the Reformation's systematiser. The original university quadrangle still stands in the town centre. The town's coat of arms compresses much of the rest: a crenellated wall for a place fortified by 1409, the crossed swords of the Arch-Marshal of the Holy Roman Empire, flowing water for the Elbe, and a salmon for the fishermen, who got their guild charter in 1422 when the river still teemed with them.

The Cranach family worked out of two properties, the house at Markt 4 and the pharmacy and courtyard at Schlossstraße 1, and between Lucas the Elder, Lucas the Younger, Hans, Augustin and Lucas III they gave the Reformation its face. The portraits of Luther that every schoolbook reproduces are theirs. So is the altarpiece in the Stadtkirche, where Cranach the Elder painted the Last Supper with the features of Luther and his colleagues on the apostles - a piece of theology and a piece of political messaging in one panel. After the courtyards were restored, a working letterpress shop was re-established on Schlossstraße, and a Gutenberg press in the Cranachhof at Markt 4 shows how the whole business was done. The market square around them keeps the Renaissance town hall, the Marktbrunnen, and statues of Luther by Schadow and Melanchthon by Drake.

High on the outside of the Stadtkirche, where Luther preached for decades, is a sandstone carving dating from around 1305. It shows a rabbi lifting a sow's tail to look beneath it while other Jews suckle at her teats, and an inscription reads "Rabini Schem HaMphoras." It is a Judensau, one of dozens that survive on German churches, and it was carved two centuries before Luther was born. He knew it well. In his 1543 tract Vom Schem Hamphoras he described it approvingly and elaborated on it. In 1988, on the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a memorial was set into the ground beneath the carving, recording the six million Jews murdered under the sign of the cross. Michael Düllmann, a member of Berlin's Jewish community, sued in 2018 for its removal. Courts in Dessau and Naumburg rejected the claim in February 2020, and in June 2022 a federal appeal court held that the sculpture is disparaging but that the law does not require its removal, pointing to the memorial as sufficient context. The argument has not ended, and it is not obvious that it should.

Wittenberg's later history is mostly a record of things being knocked down and rebuilt smaller. A bombardment in 1760, during the Seven Years' War, burned the doors of the Schlosskirche and gutted the electoral palace; the church was practically rebuilt, restored again between 1885 and 1892, and given bronze doors carrying the Latin text of the theses in 1858. The castle, wrecked in 1760 and again in 1814, spent the nineteenth century as a barracks. The town's twentieth century supplied its own darkness: Otto Rasch, Lord Mayor from 1934 to 1936, went on to command Einsatzgruppe C and bears responsibility for the massacre at Babyn Yar. Arsenalplatz was closed off by the Red Army from 1945 until 1992, reopening to the public only when a visitor centre was built there in 2014 and 2015.

Almost everything worth seeing sits along a single walkable stretch the town calls the Culture Mile. The Bugenhagenhaus beside the town church is the oldest Protestant vicarage in the world, lived in continuously by Wittenberg's superintendents from the Reformation until 1997. The Melanchthon House on Collegienstraße is a confident piece of Renaissance domestic architecture, given a grey-brick extension in 2013. At the southern end of Lutherstraße an oak marks the spot outside the Elster Gate where Luther burned the papal bull in 1520, the gesture that made his break final. Underfoot runs the Röhrwasser, a sixteenth-century piped spring-water system still working through some twenty wells - the only functioning medieval water supply of its kind north of the Alps, superseded in 1883 and never quite abandoned. Trains run hourly to Berlin and to Leipzig, and the town's Luther sites have been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1996.