Pass by German Aachen Cathedral September 16, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Cars, Destination, Dubai, Europe, France, Germany, Hotels, Museum, Netherlands, Rail Pass, Sightseeing, Travel Gear, Trip , trackbackThe location now was occupied by Aachen, adjacent to the modern borders of France and Holland, was resorted to even in prehistory because hot springs occur there. Exactly how far back into antiquity the place had importance is unknown, but the Celts were certainly established in the area by the time the Romans discovered the springs. The waters were sacred to the Celts and dedicated by them to the healing god, Granus. The Romans called the site Aquis Grani. They built bath complexes and shrines. Some houses edging the Hof, a triangular space a stone’s throw northeast of the cathedral, were built on first and second century AD Roman masonry, and part of a well sanctuary was uncovered.
King Pippin, father of Charlemagne, had his court at Aachen and is said to have bathed in a former Roman bath there in the eighth century. Charlemagne decided to build his imperial palace in the city, creating a ’second Rome’, where he resided in his later years and where he was buried. The palace chapel is the core of the present cathedral, and in the nineteenth century the remains of Roman baths, their spring dried out, were found beneath it.
Charlemagne regarded himself as the successor of the Roman emperors, and he had visited Ravenna and Rome with an alert eye. The palace he set up occupied the whole area immediately to the north of the present cathedral. His great royal hall was where the town hall (Rathaus) now stands. In front of that location stood a triangular stone which was called `schildgen’ because of its shield-like shape. This was a ‘Blue Stone‘, a medieval geomantic marker, which survived to at least the eighteenth century. Researcher John Palmer found a tapestry in the cathedral’s treasury which depicted Charlemagne, staff in hand and seated, with one foot on a triangular stone.
The Great Hall stood at the north end of a rectangular courtyard area approximately defined by the present-day city square, the Katschhof, around which other buildings and passageways were grouped. At the southern end, opposite the royal hall, was the palace chapel, an octagonal building now embedded in the cathedral. The whole complex was therefore set to the cardinal (north—south, east—west) directions, which cut across the northeast— southwest orientation of the Roman street grid and is the cause of the several odd-shaped or triangular plazas that are characteristic features of the ancient city centre. The Holy Roman Emperors were crowned at Aachen between 813 and 1531. The church was also a key European pilgrimage centre.
The foundations of the Carolingian palace chapel were laid in about 768, its massive columns were erected on an octagonal ground plan in 798, and the chapel was inaugrated in 805. The contemporary monk Notker Balbulus wrote that Charlemagne summoned master craftsmen from many countries to work on his church. It seems its octagonal plan was taken from the design of the sixth-century S Vitale in Ravenna, but Charlemagne’s chapel had more height and spaciousness in its upper gallery, among other differences. The internal octagon was surrounded by a 16-cornered structure, and there was a square, two-storey eastern altar extension, but the exact architectural form of this is unknown, as the surviving Gothic choir with enormous windows replaced it. Indeed, the original octagonal chapel is today only barely visible from the outside, because of several Gothic and later additions. The orientation is due east—west.
Charlemagne gathered a cosmopolitan court dedicated to the revival of the arts and sciences of antiquity (although, ironically, he was responsible for the suppression of numerous pagan traditions). Because Alcuin, a Briton, had acquired such a reputation for his knowledge . . . the emperor invited him to Aachen and entrusted to him the task of reviving art and the sciences. His role in the organization of the schools, the Academy and the palace chapel, where manuscripts were copied, was of crucial importance. . . . There were goldsmiths and builders — and all the different traditions had to merge together.’
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