Cologne Cathedral briefly ruled the world's skyline
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city and the biggest in North Rhine-Westphalia, with over a million residents and more than 3.1 million in the Cologne Bonn region. Its medieval cathedral was the tallest building on Earth from 1880 to 1890 and is still the world's tallest cathedral.
The Ubii, a Germanic tribe, settled here in 38 BC, and in AD 50 the Romans founded a colonia on the Rhine named for Emperor Claudius and his wife Agrippina the Younger, who was born there. Over time only Colonia survived, becoming Köln in German, while English took the French form. It became capital of Germania Inferior in 85, served as capital of the breakaway Gallic Empire from 260 to 271, and gained a Rhine bridge under Constantine in 310. An edict of Constantine in 321 allowing Jews to settle is Germany's oldest documented evidence of a Jewish community. A Roman boat about 1,900 years old turned up near the wharf in 2007.
Ripuarian Franks took the city in 462. Charles Martel suffered the only defeat of his career there in 716, then recaptured it the same year. Its bishop became an archbishop under Charlemagne in 795, and from 953, when Otto I made his brother Bruno a duke, the archbishops wielded princely power, becoming by the end of the twelfth century one of the seven electors who chose the emperor. Cologne grew into a free imperial city, a leading Hanseatic League member and one of Europe's largest medieval towns.
The cathedral was built to house the Shrine of the Three Kings, and twelve Romanesque churches also mark the skyline. The French ruled from 1794 to 1815, Prussia from 1815, and the British occupied it from 1918 to 1926. Allied bombing in World War II destroyed about 80 percent of the old centre, and evacuation cut the population by 93 percent; about a quarter of today's buildings predate the war.
Eau de Cologne has been made here since 1709. The city has over 30 museums, the German Aerospace Center, the European Astronaut Centre and Lufthansa's headquarters.
Source: Cologne
