A landmark 632 years in the making: the odyssey of Cologne Cathedral.
How 19th century builders finished a plan set in motion more than six centuries before, and whose legacy endures today.
One hundred and forty-one years ago last week, on August 14, 1880, a dedication ceremony was held to celebrate the completion of Cologne Cathedral in Cologne, Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm I attended and the event was celebrated throughout Germany as a day of national pride. If this sounds to you like the beginning of the story of Cologne Cathedral, you'd be wrong—it's actually much closer to the end. Construction on Germany's finest Gothic church took a staggering 632 years.
The story of Cologne Cathedral begins not with construction, but destruction—specifically, the conquest of Milan, Italy by Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1164. As was typical in medieval warfare in the Christian world, Frederick took a lot of plunder from Milan back to Germany, much of it religious in nature. He made off with the bones of the "three wise men" of Biblical legend, and after returning to Germany, commissioned a great artist to create a beautiful reliquary in which to house them. This wasn't all just religious devotion. It was good business too. A relic as important as the bones of the Magi would attract thousands of Christian pilgrims to wherever they were housed, which meant an economic boom for the cities concerned. Cologne was chosen as the site of the reliquary, and master goldsmith Nicholas of Verdun began building the magnificent golden shrine for the Magi remains in 1180. The shrine, completed about 1220, became the Shrine of the Three Kings. By now Frederick was dead, but the succeeding Holy Roman Emperors decided a grand cathedral was needed to house it. On August 15, 1248, Konrad von Hochstaden, Archbishop of Cologne, laid the cornerstone of Cologne Cathedral.
Building a cathedral as grand as Cologne's was no small task. A huge amount of the surplus resources of German society went into it, and tens of thousands of people, from stonemasons to carpenters to bricklayers and water-carriers, labored for decades to build it. No one had any illusion that it would be finished quickly. Indeed work continued apace over the next 100 years, but a series of calamities in the disastrous 14th century—such as the famines of 1315-17 (caused by volcanic climate change) and the Black Death—slowed the work. By the mid-1300s the builders were just getting started on the west-side front of the cathedral. In 1473, for some reason that is unclear to me—perhaps economics—work on Cologne Cathedral halted. One belfry was complete, and the building was functional as a working church, but it hung gaping and unfinished for hundreds of years. The workmen from the 15th century even left a crane hanging over the site. It remained largely untouched for 400 years. The picture you see at the top of this article, taken in 1856, was how the cathedral looked to the people of Cologne for much of those four centuries.
Why did the Germans leave the cathedral unfinished for so long? The Protestant Reformation, which began in 1517 with Martin Luther, seems to have had something to do with it. As the German provinces became hotbeds of religious reform in the 16th and 17th centuries, Catholicism fell out of favor, and the state would not have been motivated to spend large amounts of money to finish what was, after all, a Catholic church. This changed in 1815, after the Napoleonic Wars, when one of the many reorganizations of the German states suddenly resulted in a lot of German-speaking Catholics coming under the domination of the King of Prussia. Germany was also going through a phase of intense nationalism. Finishing Cologne Cathedral was a way to placate German Catholics, and also a means of demonstrating to the world that Germany was a rising power with both engineering and cultural cachet. With an infusion of money from the Prussian state, construction on the cathedral recommenced in 1842.
The completion of the cathedral in 1880 fulfilled the original medieval plans, and they were extremely ambitious. When done, Cologne Cathedral's 515-foot spires made it the tallest building in Europe—and the world, in fact—for the next 10 years, when it was finally surpassed by another long-suffering German church, Ulm Minster, begun in 1377 and finally completed in 1890. It's pretty amazing that a building whose cornerstone was laid in 1248 could be the tallest in the world in the industrial age of the late 19th century, but that was the fact. Of course by 1880 Cologne Cathedral had been storing the bones of the Magi, and serving as Germany's most important site of Christian pilgrimage, for centuries. But the completion of it certainly was a stroke of pride.
Cologne Cathedral survived some of the most tumultuous years of German history that were soon to come. Though it suffered bomb damage during World War II, Allied commanders decided not to level it; the tall spires were a useful navigational fix for bombers. Repaired after the war, the cathedral continued to occupy an important place in the cultural and spiritual life of Cologne. Today it's the most-visited landmark in all of Germany. It was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.
Although the world has changed immeasurably around them, the great cathedrals of Europe that were begun in the Middle Ages remain every bit as impressive—more, in my opinion—than the flimsy steel-and-glass showpiece stunt buildings that humans have been putting up in large cities in the last 100 years. I can't imagine the Burj Khalifa in Dubai will still be standing 600 years from now; perhaps the Empire State Building will, but I can almost guarantee that Cologne Cathedral will still be there, looking much as it does today. A building that takes six centuries to complete is definitely one that earns a state of permanence in the human historical record. History is not just found in dusty old books. It's often found in the very bricks and stones of the world around us, and which will still tell their stories long after we're gone.
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