Mention of my research in the Cologne city archive during a recent conversation with a prominent historian of medieval France elicited the following response “Cologne my, but that is so far east!” Such is the common mentalité among most medievalists who concentrate their attention on the traditional Anglo-French historiographical paradigm. This book is my response to that conversation.

For the majority of English-speaking historians of medieval Europe, whose education and research have been centered on Anglo-French concerns, medieval Germany evokes images of life more akin to earlymodern Germany after the Thirty Years War: an economically backward region of Europe devastated by warfare, constantly harassed by famine and disease, where the middle class lagged far behind their Anglo-French counterparts, and where political polycentrism and the lack of a strong centralized government assured this curious collage of principalities a status of underdevelopment and cultural sterility. In this vision, Cologne is more conceptually “east” in the mind of my colleague than the geography of Europe even allows, and thus not part of western Europe properly understood.

Happily, this was not the Germany of the Central Middle Ages. Indeed, Alfred Haverkamp has rightly argued that Germany was the most affected and transformed of all the regions of medieval Europe by the rapid changes occurring in European society during this period. Germany not only constantly received the cultural and economic impulses from the western European and Mediterranean regions, but also came to serve a mediating role between these regions and the north and east of Europe.