When Melanchthon Became a Freemason: The So-Called 1535 Charter of Cologne and Its Long Aftermath

On 24 June 1535, nineteen men met in secret in the free imperial city of Cologne, each from a different place across Europe, both near, from the archbishopric of Cologne, and far, from Edinburgh to Madrid, London to Lyon, Danzig to Venice. Where exactly they met in Cologne is unknown, for they came and went by stealth as a precautionary measure against the dangers of their sensitive mission. Wherever it was, they assembled at the behest of Hermann von Wied (1477–1552), Cologne’s archbishop-elector, in order to refute allegations that the Order of Masonic Brothers derived from the Knights Templar and now conspired: to regain once glorious former possessions; to take revenge on the papacy, princes, and other powers whose ancestors had executed the Templars’s last Grand Master; to incite riots; and to proselytize for new members, testing candidates with bodily torture and requiring them to pledge under oath that they, too, would carry out the same ends under strict rules of secrecy. Seeking peace, not blood, the delegates to this clandestine congress produced a document that countered the charges and encouraged their beleaguered brothers. Written on ancient parchment in Latin with use of a cipher, the document described the real history, objective, and constitution of Freemasonry in clearly Christian terms. The delegates, of special importance to the Reformation, made nineteen identical versions of the document to be delivered to their nineteen cities; each delegate, the master of a lodge, signed his own name in ordinary letters at the end – including Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560). This describes briefly the making of the document known as the Charter of Cologne (Kölner Urkunde).1 The story is an explosive one. For historians, the