Aachen Cathedral

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Around 796 Charlemagne began a chapel for his palace at Aachen, an octagon designed by Odo of Metz on the model of Ravenna's Byzantine churches, consecrated in 805 by Pope Leo III in honor of the Virgin. The emperor was buried here in 814, and in 1215 Frederick II with his own hands sealed Charlemagne's bones into the golden shrine that still gleams in the Gothic glass choir. On the gallery above stands the plain marble throne from Charlemagne's own time, unmoved in twelve centuries, on which German kings were crowned from 936 to 1531, thirty rulers climbing these steps to sit where the great emperor sat. Streams of medieval pilgrims came for the relics of the Shrine of Mary, and in 1978 the chapel of Charlemagne was among the first twelve sites in the world inscribed by UNESCO, the oldest cathedral of the North still gathered around its octagon of light.