Electorate of Cologne - History

History

Cologne is the ancient Roman city of Colonia Agrippina within Germania Inferior and has been a bishop's see since Roman times. In 953, the archbishops of Cologne first gained noteworthy secular power, when bishop Bruno was appointed as duke by his brother Emperor Otto I. In order to weaken the secular nobility, who threatened his power, Otto endowed Bruno and his successors on the bishop's see with the prerogatives of secular princes. This was the beginning of the electoral state of Cologne. It was formed by the temporal possessions of the archbishopric and included in the end a strip of territory along the left Bank of the Rhine east of Jülich, as well as the Duchy of Westphalia on the other side of the Rhine, beyond Berg and Mark.

By the end of the 12th century, the right to elect the Holy Roman Emperor was limited to four secular and three ecclesiastical princes, among them the Archbishop of Cologne. Besides being prince elector, he was Archchancellor of Italy as well, technically from 1238 and permanently from 1263 until 1803. Following the Battle of Worringen in 1288, Cologne gained its independence from the archbishops and became a Free City. Eventually, the archbishop moved to Bonn to escape jurisdiction conflicts with the Free City. The first pogrom against the Jews was in 1349, when they were used as scapegoats for the Black Death, and therefore burnt in an auto de fe. Political tensions arose from issues of taxation, public spending, regulation of business, and market supervision, as well as the limits of corporate autonomy.

Long-distance trade in the Baltic intensified, as the major trading towns came together in the Hanseatic League, under the leadership of Lübeck. It was a business alliance of trading cities and their guilds that dominated trade along the coast of Northern Europe and flourished from the 1200 to 1500, and continued with lesser importance after that. The chief cities were Cologne on the Rhine River, Hamburg and Bremen on the North Sea, and Lübeck on the Baltic. Thus Cologne's central location on the Rhine river placed it at the intersection of the major trade routes between east and west and was the basis of Cologne's growth. The economic structures of medieval and early modern Cologne were based on the city's major harbor, its location as a transport hub and its entrepreneurial merchants who built ties with merchants in other Hanseatic cities.

During the 16th century, two Archbishops of Cologne converted to Protestantism. The first, Hermann von Wied, resigned the archbishopric on converting, but Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg, on converting to Calvinism in 1582, attempted to secularise the archbishopric. His marriage the following February, and his refusal to relinquish the territory, resulted in the election of a competing archbishop and prince-elector, Ernst of Bavaria. The pope funded Italian and Spanish mercenaries; the Bavarians also sent an army; the Protestant Dutch states supported Protestant efforts to maintain Calvinism in the Electorate. The Cologne War ruined most of the Electoral economy. Many villages and towns were besieged and destroyed. The Siege of Godesberg in November–December 1583 ended with the destruction of the Godesburg castle and the slaughter of most of its inhabitants. After several more sieges, the Protestant contender, who had been elected in 1579, gave up his claim to the see and retired to Strasbourg with his wife. A Bavarian army installed the brother of the Duke of Bavaria, Ernst as archbishop-—the first major success of the Counter-Reformation in Germany. Under his direction, Jesuits supervised the reintroduction of Catholicism in the Electorate. From then until the mid-18th century, the archbishopric was effectively a secundogeniture of the Wittelsbach rulers of Bavaria. As the archbishop in this period usually also held the Bishopric of Münster (and often the Bishopric of Liège), he was one of the most substantial princes of northwestern Germany.

After 1795, the electorate's territories on the left bank of the Rhine were occupied by France, and were formally annexed in 1801. The Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803 secularised the rest of the archbishopric, giving the Duchy of Westphalia to the Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt. Cologne was, however, reestablished as the seat of a Catholic archbishop in 1824, and is an archdiocese to the present day.