Qualla: Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium

Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steuernagel - Schultze, Public domain. Agrippina the Younger was born here in AD 15, in a Rhineland garrison town that called itself Oppidum Ubiorum, the settlement of the Ubii. Her father was Germanicus, the Roman general posted to Cologne to plan campaigns into unconquered Germania. Thirty-five years later, Agrippina had survived banishment, exile, and the murderous court of Caligula, married her uncle the Emperor Claudius, and somehow remembered the muddy frontier town of her birth. Around AD 50 she convinced Claudius to elevate it to a Roman colonia. The full name they gave it, Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, honored her husband's title, the sacred altar at the city center, and Agrippina herself. It is the only Roman colony in the empire named after a living woman.

Image: Steuernagel - Schultze | Public domain

Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium: Before the Romans Came

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit H005, CC BY-SA 3.0. The land where Cologne now stands had belonged to the Eburones, a Germanic tribe. Julius Caesar destroyed them in a war of reprisal during his Gallic campaigns. The Roman general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, in 38 BC, resettled a friendlier Germanic tribe called the Ubii onto the em...

Image: H005 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium: Agrippina's City

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Horsch, Willy, CC BY 2.5. Agrippina was the daughter of Germanicus, the sister of the emperor Caligula, the wife of the emperor Claudius, and the mother of the emperor Nero. Few women in Roman history wielded such direct political influence, and few paid for it more brutally. Her decision to promote her b...

Image: Horsch, Willy | CC BY 2.5

Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium: Walls, Streets, and the Praetorium

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit VollwertBIT, CC BY-SA 2.5. From AD 70 Cologne had a serious stone wall, eight meters high and two and a half meters thick. By the third century it had been rebuilt and now stretched almost four kilometers, punctuated by nineteen towers and nine gates. The northwest Roman Tower, dating to around AD 50, surv...

Image: VollwertBIT | CC BY-SA 2.5

Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium: Aqueduct, Library, Mosaic

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit de:Benutzer:Sansculotte, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around AD 80 the Romans built the Eifel Aqueduct, one of the longest in the empire, to deliver 20,000 cubic meters of water a day from springs roughly 95 kilometers to the southwest. By the late first century the city held about 20,000 people, comparable to Roman London and consi...

Image: de:Benutzer:Sansculotte | CC BY-SA 3.0

Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium: The Long Twilight

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit anonymous, Public domain. Cologne survived the chaos of the third century, briefly serving as capital of the breakaway Gallic Empire under Postumus from AD 260 to 269, and continuing under his successors until the empire was reunified in 274. In AD 310 Emperor Constantine I had a stone bridge built across...

Image: anonymous | Public domain