#42 A Day in Court at Cologne Cathedral in the 11th century – An Ugly Archbishop and the Beauty of the Cologne Penny

Cologne in the 11th century: We look around a bit in the area of Cologne Cathedral, where the Archbishop’s palace is located, the monastery and on the square itself, where court hearings took place.

Domhof (Cathedral Courtyard) & Domkloster (Cathedral Convent)

Yes, this maps is a few centuries later, the 16th century so to speak, but the medieval structure of the city was still there and would be way into the 1700s. Here you can still see the elements of the surroundings of Cologne Cathedral mentioned in the episode. This enclosed area that is nowadays totally gone.

Where once the big palace of the Archbishop of Cologne once stood, is now a big open space since the middle of the 20th century.

This is actual a road and for many centuries it marked one of the few narrow entrances to the Cologne courtyard. It is one of the few remains that give you a feeling from that time when the Cathedral was surrounded by buildings right up front.

Archbishopric of Mainz and its suffragan bishoprics (Church province of Mainz)

Von own work – own work; Droysen Allgemeiner Historischer Atlas (1886), CC BY-SA 3.0.

The mighty Archbishopric of Mainz, stretching from Chur in today’s Switzerland up until the Elbe river in the North. The southern Rhineland with Mainz, Worms and Speyer in the West and in the East covering all of Bohemia. But remember, this is a map of the spiritual jurisdiction of the Archbishopric of Mainz together with its suffragan bishoprics. This does not mean that the archbishop had secular power everywhere as well. Not in the slightest. Directly west of it is the Archdiocese of Cologne (Köln).