Cologne

The archbishops had lost the city to its burghers at Worringen in 1288, and from then on they lived in Bonn and could enter Cologne only for religious ceremonies. The fight for power inside the walls lasted longer. In 1371 the weavers rose against the patrician council and were bloodily put down, but in 1396 a bloodless revolution ended patrician rule for good: the guild-like associations of the citizens, the Gaffeln, set up a council of 49 under a constitution that stayed in force until the end of the free city in 1794. In 1475 Emperor Frederick III formally confirmed that Cologne answered to no lord but the Emperor.

Cologne never followed the Reformation, the only large free imperial city of the Empire to stay Catholic. When Archbishop Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg left the Church in 1582 and married, the pope excommunicated him and installed Ernst of Bavaria; the Cologne War of 1583–88 that followed devastated Deutz, Bonn and Neuss. In the Thirty Years' War the city paid troops to pass it by, earned well from arms production, and gave refuge to Catholic leaders, so it came through the war unscathed.