Historical Archive of the City of Cologne included copies of the protocols of the diets of the Hanseatic League. With the 1594 transfer, the Cologne archive became the most important repository of historical material concerning the Hanseatic League and thus concerning the history of Northern Germany in general, only matched by the municipal archives of Lübeck. On 27 February 1602, the city council ordered that books on jurisdiction and administration were to be systematically bought at the regularly held Frankfurt Book Fair. These were subsequently stored in the municipal archive and became the basis of the Cologne municipal library. The "Ratsbibliothek" was one of the few Cologne
Historical Archive of the City of Cologne libraries that did not suffer major losses during the French occupation in the early years of the 19th century. After the secularization of abbeys and colleges of canons in Cologne in the early years of the 19th century, the French government ordered their archives to be stored in the state archives in Düsseldorf. It was not until 1949 that a mayor of Cologne succeeded in recovering 19,000 charters and many other records for the Cologne municipal archives. In 1818, the city of Cologne was bequeathed Ferdinand Franz Wallraf's major collection of art, books and manuscripts. After Wallraf's death in 1824,