Mainz was heavily damaged in World War II; more than 30 air raids destroyed around half of the old town in the city centre, but many buildings were rebuilt post-war.

[15][16] While the Mainz legion camp was founded in 13/12 BC on the Kästrich hill, the associated vici and canabae (civilian settlements) were erected towards the Rhine.

Remains of Roman troop ships (navis lusoria) and a patrol boat from the late 4th century were discovered in 1982/86 and may now be viewed in the Museum of Ancient Seafaring.

The city was the provincial capital of Germania Superior, and had an important funeral monument dedicated to Drusus, to which people made pilgrimages for an annual festival from as far away as Lyon.

[24] The last emperor to station troops serving the western empire at Mainz was Valentinian III (reigned 425–455), who relied heavily on his Magister militum per Gallias, Flavius Aëtius.

[41] Nowadays the Jewish community is growing rapidly, and a new synagogue by the architect Manuel Herz was constructed in 2010 on the site of the one destroyed by the Nazis on Kristallnacht in 1938.

The army of Napoleon Bonaparte occupied the German territory to the west of the Rhine, and the Treaty of Campo Formio awarded France this entire area, initially as the Cisrhenian Republic.

On 17 February 1800, the French Département du Mont-Tonnerre was founded here, with Mainz as its capital, the Rhine being the new eastern frontier of la Grande Nation.

From 1816 to 1866, a part of the German Confederation, Mainz was the most important fortress in the defence against France, and had a strong garrison of Austrian, Prussian and Bavarian troops.

Beginning in 1874, the city of Mainz assimilated the Gartenfeld, an idyllic area of meadows and fields along the banks of the Rhine to the north of the rampart.

[65] During the German Revolution of 1918 the Mainz Workers' and Soldiers' Council was formed which ran the city from 9 November until the arrival of French troops under the terms of the occupation of the Rhineland agreed in the Armistice.

The Rhineland (in which Mainz is located) was to be a demilitarized zone until 1935 and the French garrison, representing the Triple Entente, was to stay until reparations were paid.

[68] One was the political organizer for the SPD, Friedrich Kellner, who went to Laubach, where, as the chief justice inspector of the district court, he continued his opposition against the Nazis by recording their misdeeds in a 900-page diary.

[72] The city was also the location of four subcamps of the Hinzert concentration camp, mostly for Luxembourgish, Polish, Dutch and Soviet prisoners, but also Belgian, French and Italian.

[73] During World War II, several air raids destroyed about 80 per cent of the city's centre, including most of the historic buildings.

Today United States Army Europe and Africa only occupies McCulley Barracks in Wackernheim and the Mainz Sand Dunes for the training areas.

[78] The destruction caused by the Bombing of Mainz in World War II led to the most intense phase of building in the history of the town.

[79] The attack on the afternoon of 27 February 1945 remains the most destructive of all 33 bombings that Mainz has suffered in World War II in the collective memory of most of the population living then.

Mainz lay within the French-controlled sector of Germany and it was a French architect and town-planner, Marcel Lods, who produced a Le Corbusier-style plan of an ideal architecture.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Oberstadt had been extended, Münchfeld and Lerchenberg added as suburbs, the Altstadttangente (intersection of the old town), new neighbourhoods as Westring and Südring contributed to the extension.

[90] In accordance with section 29 paragraph 2 Local Government Act of Rhineland-Palatinate, which refers to municipalities of more than 150,000 inhabitants, the city council has 60 members.

The most recent city council election was held on 26 May 2019, and the results were as follows: Mainz is home to a Carnival, the Mainzer Fassenacht or Fastnacht, which has developed since the early 19th century.

Known collectively as Shum, the cities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz played a key role in the preservation and propagation of Talmudic scholarship.

[101][102] The city is the seat of Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (literally, "Second German Television", ZDF), one of two federal nationwide TV broadcasters.

[110][111] As a result of the 2008 invasion of Georgia by Russian troops, Mainz acted as a neutral venue for the Georgian Vs Republic of Ireland football game.

The most famous athletes of the present are the sprinter Marion Wagner (world champion in 2001 in the 4 × 100 Metres Relay) and the pole vaulters Carolin Hingst (Eighth of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing) and Anna Battke.

Mainz is documented to be a wine-growing region since bishop Boniface acquired a vineyard boardering the city wall and further vine platations in Bretzenheim in 752[118] and is one of the centres of the German wine industry.

[121] The Schott AG, one of the world's largest glass manufactures,[122] as well as the Werner & Mertz, a large chemical factory,[123] are based in Mainz.

BioNTech, a biotechnology company developing immunotherapies including a vaccine against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was founded in 2008 in Mainz by scientists Uğur Şahin, and Özlem Türeci, with the Austrian oncologist Christoph Huber.

[128] Mainz offers a wide array of bicycle transportation facilities and events, including several miles of on-street bike lanes.