Who ruled Aachen?

Aachen is Germany's westernmost major city, lying where the country meets Belgium and the Netherlands. Its warm springs drew Celts and Romans, but its fame comes from Charlemagne, who made his palace here the political centre of the Frankish realm around 800. For six centuries afterwards German kings were crowned in his chapel, which is now the city's cathedral.

Flint quarries on the hills around the city were worked in the Neolithic, between about 3000 and 2500 BCE, and Bronze Age burial mounds have also been found. In the Iron Age Celtic peoples lived in the area, perhaps attracted by the hot sulphur springs, where they worshipped Grannus, a god of light and healing. It seems that soldiers of the Sixth Legion first channelled the springs into baths early in the first century CE, and the spa town of Aquae Granni grew to about 25 hectares, with several bath complexes, a colonnaded forum and a residential quarter. A later legend credited its founding to a figure named Grenus in the reign of Hadrian.

Roman civil life broke down around 375, as the migration period began, when the baths and other public buildings were destroyed. The town remained inhabited, and by 470 it was ruled by the Ripuarian Franks from their capital at Cologne.

Pepin the Short had a residence built at Aachen, and his son Charlemagne first spent Christmas there in 768, the year he became king. From 792 until his death in 814 he passed most winters at Aachen, which became the centre of his court and of the Carolingian Empire. He built the palace and the Palatine Chapel, and the court produced important manuscripts. In 802 a Jewish merchant named Isaac, returning from an embassy to the caliph Harun al-Rashid, brought the emperor an elephant called Abul-Abbas. Charlemagne was buried in his chapel; the original tomb is lost, and the remains said to be his rest in a shrine, the Karlsschrein.

When his grandsons divided the empire under the Treaty of Verdun, Aachen fell to Lothair's Middle Francia, and the Treaty of Meerssen in 870 assigned it to East Francia. Otto I was crowned king in Charlemagne's church in 936, and until Ferdinand I in 1531, around thirty German kings were crowned at Aachen. West Frankish forces raided the town in 978.

Frederick Barbarossa had Charlemagne declared a saint in 1165, making the chapel a goal of pilgrims, and granted Aachen city rights in 1166; walls were built around palace and town between 1172 and 1176. As a free city of the Holy Roman Empire, answerable only to the emperor, it lived on the wool-cloth trade and its privileges but carried little political weight. In 1330 a new town hall replaced Charlemagne's audience hall.

From the sixteenth century Aachen declined. Coronations moved to Frankfurt, Spanish troops intervened in the city's religious disputes in 1598, and a great fire in 1656 destroyed most of the city, which was rebuilt in Baroque style. It gained a reputation as a spa, and congresses held there in 1668 and 1748 produced treaties ending the War of Devolution and the War of the Austrian Succession.

French revolutionary troops occupied Aachen in 1794, and the city was stripped of its free imperial status. The Peace of Lunéville in 1801 ceded it to France, and under Napoleon it was the chief town of the Roer department. In 1815 it passed to the Kingdom of Prussia, and in 1818 a congress there decided the future of occupied France. Railways arrived from 1838, and the city became an industrial centre making locomotives, needles, textiles and much else.

More than 120 air raids struck Aachen between 1940 and 1944, and a raid in July 1943 destroyed its Baroque old town. In October 1944 it became the first German city captured by the Western Allies, its garrison surrendering on 21 October after weeks of fighting, though the cathedral survived largely intact. Of the 1,345 Jews living in Aachen in 1933, only 62 remained in 1945. After the war the city joined North Rhine-Westphalia and, in 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany. Today it is a university and technology city of about 264,000 people, and since 1950 its citizens have awarded the Charlemagne Prize for service to European unity.