Cologne Cathedral

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Cologne Cathedral is the Gothic cathedral church of the Archdiocese of Cologne, standing on the west bank of the Rhine — a vast building begun in 1248 and left unfinished for centuries, its medieval crane perched on the half-raised south tower until completion in 1880 to the original plans. For a time after that it was the tallest structure in the world. It remains the seat of the city’s archbishop and a working place of worship.

What made the cathedral matters as much as its architecture. In 1164 the imperial chancellor Rainald of Dassel carried to Cologne, from conquered Milan, relics held to be the bones of the Three Magi — the wise men of the Gospel of Matthew, who followed a star to the infant Christ. To house them the goldsmith Nicholas of Verdun and his workshop made, over several decades around 1200, the Shrine of the Three Kings: a great gilded reliquary in the form of a basilica, among the largest to survive from the Middle Ages. The relics drew pilgrims in such number that the existing church proved too small, and the decision to build the present cathedral followed. The shrine still stands behind the high altar.

The historical claim and the cult claim sit at different levels. That medieval Christians venerated these bones as the Magi’s is well attested; that the bones are in fact those of the men in Matthew’s narrative — figures the Gospel does not name, number, or call kings — is not something history can establish, and the later traditions that gave them names and a count of three are themselves medieval elaborations. The three crowns that became the arms of the city of Cologne descend from this devotion.

The Magi held a particular fascination for later esoteric readers. The Greek magoi of Matthew were, on the most natural reading, Persian or Babylonian astrologers — practitioners of exactly the star-craft the early Church elsewhere condemned — and their appearance at the Nativity was taken, in Renaissance and later thought, as a scriptural warrant for the dignity of astrology and for the idea that pagan wisdom had recognised Christ. The figure of the magus as wise seeker draws part of its charge from this scene. Cologne, holding the relics, became the western anchor of that association, though the cathedral’s own liturgy framed the Magi simply as the first gentiles to worship.

Damaged but not destroyed in the bombing of the Second World War, the cathedral was repaired and reconsecrated, and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996. Pilgrims still come to the shrine; the building, six centuries in the making, is again whole.

→ Related: Sistine Chapel · Western Wall · Canonization · Middle Ages