He was of noble Frankish parentage, and educated at the palace school in Aquae Grani ( Aachen ) under Alcuin.

Aachen was a favoured residence of Charlemagne, and later the place of coronation of the Kings of Germany.

In 2009, Aachen was ranked 8th among cities in Germany for innovation.

A quarry on the Lousberg, which was first used in Neolithic times, attests to the long occupation of the site of Aachen.

Even in the late 18th century the Abbess of Burtscheid was prevented from building a road linking her territory to the neighbouring estates of the duke of Jülich ; the city of Aachen even deployed its handful of soldiers to chase away the road-diggers.

Aachen became attractive as a spa by the middle of the 17th century, not so much because of the effects of the hot springs on the health of its visitors but because Aachen was then — and remained well into the 19th century — a place of high-level prostitution in Europe.

Traces of this hidden agenda of the city's history is found in the 18th century guidebooks to Aachen as well as to the other spas ; the main indication for visiting patients, ironically, was syphilis ; only by the end of the 19th century had rheuma become the most important object of cures at Aachen and Burtscheid.

Aachen was chosen as the site of several important congresses and peace treaties: the first congress of Aachen ( often referred to as Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in English ) in 1668, leading to the First Treaty of Aachen in the same year which ended the War of Devolution.

By the middle of the 19th century, industrialisation swept away most of the city's medieval rules of production and commerce, although the entirely corrupt remains of the city's mediæval constitution was kept in place ( compare the famous remarks of Georg Forster in his Ansichten vom Niederrhein ) until 1801, when Aachen became the " chef-lieu du département de la Roer " in Napoléon's First French Empire.

In 1880, the Aachen tramway network was opened, and in 1895 it was electrified.

Aachen was heavily damaged during World War II.

Damaged buildings included the medieval churches of St. Foillan, St. Paul and St. Nicholas, and the Rathaus ( city hall ), although Aachen Cathedral was largely unscathed.

Aachen Cathedral was erected on the orders of Charlemagne in AD 786 and was on completion the largest cathedral north of the Alps.

For 600 years, from 936 to 1531, Aachen Cathedral was the church of coronation for 30 German kings and 12 queens.

Aachen was the administrative centre for the coal-mining industries in neighbouring places to the northeast ; it never played any role in brown coal mining, however, neither in administrative or industrial terms.

The International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen was awarded in the year 2000 to the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, for his special personal contribution to cooperation with the states of Europe, for the preservation of peace, freedom, democracy and human rights in Europe, and for his support of the enlargement of the European Union.

The Scotch-Club in Aachen was the first discothèque since 19 October 1959.

King Ethelwulf of Wessex, father of Alfred the Great was born in Aachen.

In the year of his coronation as King of Franks, 768, Charlemagne came to spend Christmas at Aachen for the first time.

The local football team Alemannia Aachen had a short run-out in Germany's first division, after its promotion in 2006.

As a spa city, Aachen could use the title Bad Aachen, but as the town then would not appear in first place on alphabetically ordered lists, it declined to do so.

In 1372, Aachen became the first coin-minting city in the world to regularly place an Anno Domini date on a general circulation coin, a groschen.

Although Bismarck hoped to become a diplomat, he started his practical training as a lawyer in Aachen and Potsdam, and soon resigned, having first placed his career in jeopardy by taking unauthorized leave to pursue two English girls, first Laura Russell, niece of the Duke of Cleveland, and then Isabella Loraine-Smith, daughter of a wealthy clergyman.

* 1959 – The first discothèque opens, the Scotch-Club in Aachen, Germany.

He was the first King of the Romans not to be coronated in Aachen.

* The city of Aachen, Germany, begins adding a Roman numeral Anno Domini date to a few of its coins, the first city in the world to do so.

While telegraphy evolved, Reuter first founded the Reuters News Agency in Aachen, which transferred messages between Brussels and Aachen using carrier pigeons.

* Otto I is the first German king to be crowned in Aachen.

Eventually, in September 1818, Lawrence was able to make his postponed trip to the continent to paint the allied leaders, first at Aachen and then at the conference of Vienna, for what would become the Waterloo Chamber series, housed in Windsor Castle.

More importantly, the two-story palace chapel had obvious similarities to Charlemagne's palatine chapel at Aachen ( built 792-805 )-a parallel that Louis was keen to exploit in presenting himself as a worthy successor to the first Holy Roman Emperor.

Aachen first became a curative centre in Hallstatt times.

The logic of the division was that Lothair had the allegiance of Italy, which had been his sub-kingdom under Louis the Pious, and that, as emperor, he should rule in Aachen, the capital of the first Carolingian emperor, Charlemagne, and in Rome, the ancient capital of emperors.

He is believed to have founded the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in September 1922 by organizing its first conference in Innsbruck .< ref > He left RWTH Aachen in 1930.

The new minuscule was disseminated first from Aachen, of which the Ada Gospels provide classic models, and later from the influential scriptorium at Marmoutier Abbey ( Tours ), where Alcuin withdrew from court service as an abbot in 796 and restructured the scriptorium.

Since 1950, a committee of Aachen citizens annually awards the Karlspreis ( German for ‘ Charlemagne Award ’) to personalities of outstanding service to the unification of Europe.

Aachen is at the western end of the Benrath line that divides High German to the south from the rest of the West Germanic speech area to the north.

The German Army's Technical School ( Technische Schule des Heeres und Fachschule des Heeres für Technik ) is in Aachen.

* RWTH Aachen University ( in German and English )

HSL 3 continues this route from Liège to the German border near Aachen.

In 1954, he received the Karlspreis ( English: Charlemagne Award ), an Award by the German city of Aachen to people who contributed to the European idea, European cooperation and European peace.

* 1615 – Hans von Aachen, German painter ( b. 1552 )

* March 4 – Hans von Aachen, German painter ( b. 1552 )

Aachen was the place of coronation of the German emperors, and the ecclesiastical principalities of the Rhine bulked largely in German history.

** Hans von Aachen, German mannerist painter ( d. 1615 )

When the assembly was concluded, Otto III and his mother Theophanu travelled across the Alps in order for Otto III to receive his coronation at Aachen, the traditional site for the coronation of the German kings.

At Otto III's funeral on Easter, 1002, in Aachen, the German nobles repeated their opposition to Henry IV.

The U. S. commanders ' initial goal was to pin down German forces in the area to keep them from reinforcing the front lines further north in the Battle of Aachen, where the Allies were fighting a trench war between a network of fortified towns and villages connected with field fortifications, tank traps and minefields.

Thalidomide was developed by German pharmaceutical company Grünenthal in Stolberg near Aachen.

Aachen was the place of coronation of the German emperors, and the ecclesiastical principalities of the Rhine bulked largely in German history.

To the south, the U. S. 12th Army Group under Lieutenant General Omar Bradley was nearing the German border and had been ordered to orient on the Aachen gap with Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges ' U. S. First Army, in support of Montgomery's advance on the Ruhr.

This church, frequently referred to as the " Imperial Cathedral " ( in German: Kaiserdom ), is a Roman Catholic church in Aachen, Germany.

The German princes, supported by Innocent III, again elected Frederick king of Germany in 1215, and he was crowned king in Aachen on 23 July 1215 by one of the three German archbishops.

In 2003 he received the Charlemagne Award of the German city of Aachen.