Dynastic History | Aachen Town Hall — The Burghers Rebuilt the King's Hall

At the northern edge of Charlemagne's palace complex stood the Aula Regia, the King's Hall, where the court held its assembly, received embassies, and had its capitularies drawn up by the palace chancery. Ermold the Black, writing verse about the crowning of Charlemagne's son Louis there in 813, has the old emperor speaking down from a golden seat. Five centuries later the hall was derelict.

In the first half of the fourteenth century the city began building on its foundation walls, under its mayor Gerhard Chorus, and finished around 1349. The burghers, not the court, were now the builders. The Carolingian tower on the south side went into the new fabric: its lower four storeys, some twenty metres, are ninth-century work, with a fifth and sixth level added in the fourteenth. The result was a hall of forty-five metres by eighteen and a half, described by the city today as the largest secular room in the Empire of its time. The coronation banquet, until then held at the Grashaus nearby, moved into it.

Three coats of arms hang above the dais: the Staufer eagle, the free imperial city's emblem from 1351; the double eagle, the emperor's from 1433; and an invented one for Charlemagne joining the French lily to the German eagle. The last banquet was held for Ferdinand of Habsburg in 1531.

What stands has been through a great deal. Fire took the roof and towers in 1656 and again in 1883. Bombing in 1943 and 1944 burned the roof and pushed the north wall out of true, and the tower caps were not finished again until 1978. The building is still the seat of the mayor and council; the Charlemagne Prize has been awarded in the hall since 1950. The Granus Tower itself stands empty and closed for conservation.

📸 Cover: Aachen Town Hall from the Markt — Armin Kleiner, 2026, CC BY-SA 4.0.