The succession of bishops in Cologne is traceable, except for a gap covering the troubled 5th century, from A.D. 313, when the see was founded. It was made the metropolitan see for the bishoprics of the Lower Rhine and part of Westphalia by Charlemagne, the first archbishop being Hildebold, who occupied the see from 785 to his death in 819. Of his successors one of the most illustrious was Bruno (q.v.), brother of the emperor Otto I., archbishop from 953 to 965, who was the first of the archbishops to exercise temporal jurisdiction, and was also “archduke” of Lorraine. The territorial power of the archbishops was already great when, in 1180, on the partition of the Saxon duchy, the duchy of Westphalia was assigned to them. In the 11th century they became ex-officio arch-chancellors of Italy (see [Archchancellor]), and by the Golden Bull of 1356 they were finally placed among the electors (Kurfürsten) of the Empire. With Cologne itself, a free imperial city, the archbishop-electors were at perpetual feud; in 1262 the archiepiscopal see was transferred to Brühl, and in 1273 to Bonn; it was not till 1671 that the quarrel was finally adjusted. The archbishopric was secularized in 1801, all its territories on the left bank of the Rhine being annexed to France; in 1803 those on the right bank were divided up among various German states; and in 1815 by the congress of Vienna, the whole was assigned to Prussia. The last archbishop-elector, Maximilian of Austria, died in 1801.
In Archbishop Hildebold’s day Cologne was still contained by the square of its Roman walls, within which stood the cathedral and the newly-founded church of St Maria (known later as “im Capitol”); the city was, however, surrounded by a ring of churches, among which those of St Gereon, St Ursula, St Severin and St Cunibert were conspicuous. In 881 Norman pirates, sailing up the Rhine, took and sacked the city; but it rapidly recovered, and in the 11th century had become the chief trading centre of Germany. Early in the 12th century the city was enlarged by the inclusion of suburbs of Oversburg; Niederich and St Aposteln; in 1180 these were enclosed in a permanent rampart which, in the 13th century, was strengthened with the walls and gates that survived till the 19th century.
The municipal history of Cologne is of considerable interest. In general it follows the same lines as that of other cities of Lower Germany and the Netherlands. At first the bishop ruled through his burgrave, advocate, and nominated jurats (scabini, Schöffen). Then, as the trading classes grew in wealth, his jurisdiction began to be disputed; the conjuratio pro libertate of 1112 seems to have been an attempt to establish a commune (see [Commune, Medieval]). Peculiar to Cologne, however, was the Richerzeche (rigirzegheide), a corporation of all the wealthy patricians, which gradually absorbed in its hands the direction of the city’s government (the first record of its active interference is in 1225). In the 13th century the archbishops made repeated efforts to reassert their authority, and in 1259 Archbishop Conrad of Hochstaden, by appealing to the democratic element of the population, the “brotherhoods” (fraternitates) of the craftsmen, succeeded in overthrowing the Richerzeche and driving its members into exile. His successor, Engelbert II., however, attempted to overthrow the democratic constitution set up by him, with the result that in 1262 the brotherhoods combined with the patricians against the archbishop, and the Richerzeche returned to share its authority with the elected “great council” (Weiter Rat). As yet, however, none of the trade or craft gilds, as such, had a share in the government, which continued in the hands of the patrician families, membership of which was necessary even for election to the council and to the parochial offices. This continued long after the battle of Worringen (1288) had finally secured for the city full self-government, and the archbishops had ceased to reside within its walls. In the 14th century a narrow patrician council selected from the Richerzeche, with two burgomasters, was supreme. In 1370 an insurrection of the weavers was suppressed; but in 1396, the rule of the patricians, having been weakened by internal dissensions, a bloodless revolution led to the establishment of a comparatively democratic constitution, based on the organization of the trade and craft gilds, which lasted with but slight modification till the French Revolution.
The greatness of Cologne, in the middle ages as now, was due to her trade. Wine and herrings were the chief articles of her commerce; but her weavers had been in repute from time immemorial, and exports of cloth were large, while her goldsmiths and armourers were famous. So early as the 11th century her merchants were settled in London, their colony forming the nucleus of the Steelyard. When, in 1201, the city joined the Hanseatic League (q.v.) its power and repute were so great that it was made the chief place of a third of the confederation.
In spite of their feuds with the archbishops, the burghers of Cologne were stanch Catholics, and the number of the magnificent medieval churches left is evidence at once of their piety and their wealth. The university, founded in 1389 by the sole efforts of the citizens, soon gained a great reputation; in the 15th century its students numbered much more than a thousand, and its influence extended to Scotland and the Scandinavian kingdoms. Its decline began, however, from the moment when the Catholic sentiment of the city closed it to the influence of the Reformers; the number of its students sank to vanishing point, and though, under the influence of the Jesuits, it subsequently revived, it never recovered its old importance. A final blow was dealt it when, in 1777, the enlightened archbishop Maximilian Frederick (d. 1784) founded the university of Bonn, and in 1798, amid the confusion of the revolutionary epoch, it ceased to exist.
The same intolerance that ruined the university all but ruined the city too. It is difficult, indeed, to blame the burghers for resisting the dubious reforming efforts of Hermann of Wied, archbishop from 1515 to 1546, inspired mainly by secular ambitions; but the expulsion of the Jews in 1414, and still more the exclusion, under Jesuit influence, of Protestants from the right to acquire citizenship, and from the magistracy, dealt severe blows at the prosperity of the place. A variety of other causes contributed to its decay: the opening up of new trade routes, the gradual ossification of the gilds into close and corrupt corporations, above all the wars in the Netherlands, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Wars of the Spanish and Austrian Succession. When in 1794 Cologne was occupied by the French, it was a poor and decayed city of some 40,000 inhabitants, of whom only 6000 possessed civic rights. When, in 1801, by the treaty of Lunéville, it was incorporated in France, it was not important enough to be more than the chief town of an arrondissement. On the death of the last elector in 1801 the archiepiscopal see was left vacant. With the assignment of the city to Prussia by the congress of Vienna in 1815 a new era of prosperity began. The university, indeed, was definitively established at Bonn, but the archbishopric was restored (1821) as part of the new ecclesiastical organization of Prussia, and the city became the seat of the president of a governmental district. Its prosperity now rapidly increased; when railways were introduced it became the meeting-place of several lines, and in 1881 its growth necessitated the pushing outward of the circle of fortifications.
See L. Ennen, Gesch. der Stadt Köln (5 vols., Cologne, 1863-1880) to 1648, and Frankreich und der Niederrhein (2 vols., ib., 1855, 1856), a history of the city and electorate of Cologne since the Thirty Years’ War; R. Schultze and C. Steuernagel, Colonia Agrippinensis (Bonn, 1895); K. Heldmann, Der Kölngau und die Civitas Köln (Halle, 1900); L. Korth, Köln im Mittelalter (Cologne, 1890); F. Lau, Entwickelung der kommunalen Verfassung der Stadt Köln bis zum Jahre 1396 (Bonn, 1898); K. Hegel, Städte und Gilden der germanischen Völker im Mittelalter (2 vols., Leipzig, 1891), ii. p. 323; H. Keussen, Historische Topographie der Stadt Köln im Mittelalter (Bonn, 1906); W. Behnke, Aus Kölns Franzosenzeit (Cologne, 1901); Helmken, Köln und seine Sehenswürdigkeiten (20th ed., Cologne, 1903). For sources see L. Ennen and G. Eckertz, Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Köln (6 vols., Cologne, 1860-1879); later sources will be found in U. Chevalier, Répertoire des sources hist. Topo-bibliographie (Montbéliard, 1894-1899), s.v. Cologne, which gives also a full list of works on everything connected with the city; also in Dahlmann-Waitz, Quellenkunde (ed. Leipzig, 1906), p. 17, Nos. 252, 253. For the archdiocese and electorate of Cologne see Binterim and Mooren, Die Erzdiözese Köln bis zur französischen Staatsumwälzung, new ed. by A. Mooren in 2 vols. (Düsseldorf, 1892, 1893).
COLOMAN (1070-1116), king of Hungary, was the son of King Geza of Hungary by a Greek concubine. King Ladislaus would have made the book-loving youth a monk, and even designated him for the see of Eger; but Coloman had no inclination for an ecclesiastical career, and, with the assistance of his friends, succeeded in escaping to Poland. On the death of Ladislaus (1095), he returned to Hungary and seized the crown, passing over his legitimately born younger brother Almos, the son of the Greek princess Sinadene. Almos did not submit to this usurpation, and was more or less of an active rebel till 1108, when the emperor Henry V. espoused his cause and invaded Hungary. The Germans were unsuccessful; but Coloman thought fit to be reconciled with his kinsman and restored to him his estates. Five years later, however, fearing lest his brother might stand in the way of his heir, the infant prince Stephen, Coloman imprisoned Almos and his son Béla in a monastery and had them blinded. Despite his adoption of these barbarous Byzantine methods, Coloman was a good king and a wise ruler. In foreign affairs he preserved the policy of St Ladislaus by endeavouring to provide Hungary with her greatest need, a suitable seaboard. In 1097 he overthrew Peter, king of Croatia, and acquired the greater part of Dalmatia, though here he encountered formidable rivals in the Greek and German emperors, Venice, the pope and the Norman-Italian dukes, all equally interested in the fate of that province, so that Coloman had to proceed cautiously in his expansive policy. By 1102, however, Zara, Traú, Spalato and all the islands as far as the Cetina were in his hands. But it was as a legislator and administrator that Coloman was greatest (see [Hungary]: History). He was not only one of the most learned, but also one of the most statesmanlike sovereigns of the earlier middle ages. Coloman was twice married, (1) in 1097 to Buzella, daughter of Roger, duke of Calabria, the chief supporter of the pope, and (2) in 1112 to the Russian princess, Euphemia, who played him false and was sent back in disgrace to her kinsfolk the following year. Coloman died on the 3rd of February 1116.