Carolingian Empire & High Medieval Christendom

Frankish/Carolingian power and the Holy Roman imperial order in Central Europe.

1 chapter

-50 - 800

The Roman Empire established the Rhine as a fortified frontier and introduced urban life, viticulture, and eventually Christianity to the Rhineland. Trier (Augusta Treverorum) became an imperial capital; Cologne (Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium) became the capital of Lower Germania with a governor's praetorium whose foundations you can still walk through. Roman garrisons introduced viticulture along the Mosel and Rhine to supply their troops—an agricultural rhythm that still underpins the region's wine festivals two millennia later. The Matronae cult (Roman-Celtic mother goddesses) produced over 1,000 inscriptions in the Rhineland, concentrated between Köln, Aachen, and Neuss—though scholarship finds direct continuity to Christian traditions 'quite thin.' Early Christian communities appeared in Roman cities like Cologne and Trier; Saturnalia and other Roman festivals were celebrated here, but current research strongly doubts these as the origin of later Fastnacht customs. The popular claim that Rhenish Karneval descends from Roman or Germanic pagan rites relies on 'Germanic continuity theories' promoted during the Nazi era and rejected by post-1945 scholarship.

1300 - 1517

Late medieval guild culture created the festival forms whose traces still shape Rhenish and Westphalian celebrations today. In Cologne, the Richerzeche (the patrician council) and later the craft guilds (Zünfte) organized the annual Fastnacht—a pre-Lenten revel within the Christian framework of the civitas diaboli (the 'city of the devil'), where the world was temporarily inverted before the austerity of Lent. German-language scholarship locates Rhenish Karneval's origins in this medieval Christian practice, not in documented pagan continuity. In Bad Dürkheim, a pilgrimage to St. Michael's Chapel on Michaelsberg generated a market (Michaelismarkt) first documented in 1417—this evolved into the Wurstmarkt, now the world's largest wine festival. In Westphalia, the Lügde Osterräderlauf—a tradition where burning oak wheels are rolled down the Osterberg at Easter—has custodians (the Dechenverein, documented since 1410) who state that pagan origins are 'leider nicht nachweisbar' (unfortunately unverifiable). Cologne's Gothic cathedral, begun in 1248 and funded by guild wealth, stands as the material expression of this era's civic-religious fusion.

1517 - 1648

The Protestant Reformation shattered the religious unity of the Rhineland and Westphalia, creating a confessional divide that still structures the region's festival landscape. Cologne alone of all the imperial cities 'never experienced a crisis of faith, nor deviated from the path of Catholic orthodoxy' (Scribner, 1976)—its cathedral remained Catholic and its Fastnacht continued uninterrupted. But in Münster, Anabaptists seized the city in 1534–35; their leaders' bodies were displayed in iron cages that still hang from St. Lambert's church tower. The Thirty Years' War (1618–48) devastated the region; the Peace of Westphalia, concluded in Münster's Rathaus Friedenssaal in 1648, established the principle that rulers could determine their territory's religion—freezing a confessional map where the Rhineland remained predominantly Catholic while Westphalia became confessionally mixed. This divide still shapes festival calendars: Catholic areas celebrate Karneval before Lent, while Protestant areas developed different traditions like Schützenfeste and parish Kirmes.

1648 - 1815

The Peace of Westphalia established a confessional landscape governed by ecclesiastical states and absolutist principalities—until Revolutionary France conquered the Rhineland and dissolved the old order. The prince-archbishops of Cologne ruled from their Rococo palace at Brühl (Schloss Augustusburg, now UNESCO-listed), embodying the fusion of spiritual and temporal power that shaped the Catholic festival calendar. In Westphalia, the Schützenbruderschaften—medieval shooting guilds that had served civic defense—evolved into parish festival organizers; the Münster Schützenfest tradition dates to approximately 1731. Then, in 1794, Revolutionary France conquered the Rhineland left bank, dissolving the guilds (Zünfte) that had organized Fastnacht and banning Cologne's carnival entirely in 1795. The French re-permitted carnival in 1804 but the guild structure was gone. The Napoleonic Code introduced French legal norms that survived in the Prussian Rheinprovinz until 1900. When Prussia took over in 1815, the Rhineland had lost both its ecclesiastical rulers and its guild-organized festival traditions—a rupture that set the stage for the 1823 bourgeois carnival reform.