History of Cologne City Archive, which was the largest in Germany. Its building collapsed during the construction of an extension to the underground railway system on 3 March 2009. History of Cologne The German city of Cologne was founded in the 1st century as the Roman Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium. It was taken by the Franks in the 5th century and became an important city of Medieval Germany, the seat of an Archbishop and a Prince-Elector. As the Free Imperial City of Cologne it was one of the centers of the Hanseatic League in the early modern period. Most of the city was
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,