Aachen

Aachen lies over hot springs at the northern edge of the Eifel, where Charlemagne made it the chief residence of the Frankish Empire and was buried in his chapel. Otto I was crowned king here in 936, and until 1531 thirty German kings were crowned in the Marienkirche, the future cathedral. Frederick Barbarossa gave Aachen town rights in 1166 with the Charlemagne Privilege, and in 1336 Emperor Louis IV confirmed them and extended them to the Imperial Domain of Aachen, whose seven outer quarters, heath and forest were guarded by a hedge-and-ditch barrier, the Landgraben.

The Aachen pilgrimage, held every seven years, reached its height from 1349, when pilgrims came to see the Virgin's robe, Christ's swaddling clothes and loincloth, and the cloth of John the Baptist's beheading. In the same year the burghers completed a new town hall on the ruins of the royal hall of the palace. The Gothic choir of the cathedral, begun in 1355, was meant to house the relics, and the cloth trade of the town kept pace with its pilgrims.

Aachen was joined to the Lower Rhenish-Westphalian Circle in 1500. A census in 1601 counted 14,171 inhabitants, of whom only 2,829 held citizenship. On 2 May 1656 a fire broke out in a baker's shop near Saint James' church and destroyed almost all of Gothic Aachen, 4,664 houses in all. The peace of 1668 ended the War of Devolution here, and the congress of 1748 ended the War of the Austrian Succession. French armies occupied Aachen in 1794, made it seat of the department of the Roer in 1798, and took many treasures to Paris. In 1815 it passed to Prussia.