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Aachen Cathedral stands at the heart of Aachen, in the far west of Germany near the Belgian and Dutch borders, on a site whose hot springs had drawn the Romans, who called the place Aquae Granni. Around 796 CE the Frankish king Charlemagne chose Aachen as the principal residence of his revived Western empire and ordered the construction of a grand palace complex. Its centrepiece, and the only major part to survive, is the Palatine Chapel, designed by Odo of Metz and consecrated around 805.
The chapel is the supreme architectural achievement of the Carolingian Renaissance. Its core is a domed octagon ringed by a sixteen-sided ambulatory and two-storey galleries, deliberately echoing the great imperial churches of the Mediterranean — above all San Vitale in Ravenna and the churches of Byzantine Constantinople — as a statement that Charlemagne's empire was the legitimate heir of Rome. Bronze railings and doors cast in Aachen, marble columns brought from Italy, and glittering mosaics made it, in its day, the most ambitious vaulted structure north of the Alps in centuries. In the upper gallery sits the simple marble throne of Charlemagne.
Charlemagne died in 814 and was buried in the chapel; his remains now rest in the golden Shrine of Charlemagne. After his canonisation in 1165 Aachen became a major pilgrimage destination, and from 936 to 1531 the chapel served as the coronation church of the kings of the Holy Roman Empire — more than thirty German kings were crowned on or beside Charlemagne's throne. To accommodate the crowds of pilgrims, a soaring Gothic choir hall, often called the "glass house of Aachen" for its vast stained-glass windows, was added between 1355 and 1414, and further chapels accreted around the Carolingian octagon over the centuries.
The cathedral treasury is among the most important church treasuries in the world, holding Carolingian, Ottonian, and medieval masterpieces including the Cross of Lothair, the bust reliquary of Charlemagne, and the Shrine of the Virgin Mary. In 1978 Aachen Cathedral became the first site in Germany, and one of the first twelve sites anywhere, to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
