On Tuesday 3 March 2009, at 1:58 p.m., the Cologne city archive suddenly collapsed into a watery crater where its foundation had previously stood. The six-story edifice had been undermined by slipshod excavation work for a new U-Bahn metro line, resulting in the shocking pile of rubble that once functioned as the largest municipal archive in Germany and as one of the few to have survived the bombings of World War II completely intact. As former archivist Eberhard Illner told the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper, “It's a catastrophe, not just for the city of Cologne but for the history of Europe.” Though all staff members and visitors miraculously escaped the shuddering building before its downfall, two men living in the adjacent apartment buildings were tragically drawn into the massive rubble pit by the collapsing earth and lost their lives. Many of the 65,000 archival documents (dating from the year 922) were damaged beyond repair, and the subsequent restoration and reconstitution of the surviving yet now widely scattered holdings will be the work of a generation while the completion of a costly new facility in which to house them has been burdened by the city’s fiscal constraints. Digitizing fuzzy and often unreadable microfilms from the 1960s remains the only viable option for the interim period, which has brought medieval manuscript research in particular to a virtual standstill for the time being.

This human, historical, and cultural tragedy served as the motivation to produce the present volume. As the shock of it all settled into a sad realization that new archival research on premodern Cologne would likely prove unfeasible for the remainder of my own professional career, it also gradually dawned on me that a signal contribution to the ongoing historical preservation of Cologne's history could still be made. Although the premodern histories of major European cities in England, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain have been written in English, Cologne has yet to have a comprehensive history produced either in English, let alone in German, though it was by far the largest medieval German city. .