Page:EB1911 - Volume 06.djvu/720

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COLOMAN—COLOMB
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ambitions; but the expulsion of the Jews in 1414, and still more the exclusion, under Jesuit influence, of Protestants from the right to acquire citizenship, and from the magistracy, dealt severe blows at the prosperity of the place. A variety of other causes contributed to its decay: the opening up of new trade routes, the gradual ossification of the gilds into close and corrupt corporations, above all the wars in the Netherlands, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Wars of the Spanish and Austrian Succession. When in 1794 Cologne was occupied by the French, it was a poor and decayed city of some 40,000 inhabitants, of whom only 6000 possessed civic rights. When, in 1801, by the treaty of Lunéville, it was incorporated in France, it was not important enough to be more than the chief town of an arrondissement. On the death of the last elector in 1801 the archiepiscopal see was left vacant. With the assignment of the city to Prussia by the congress of Vienna in 1815 a new era of prosperity began. The university, indeed, was definitively established at Bonn, but the archbishopric was restored (1821) as part of the new ecclesiastical organization of Prussia, and the city became the seat of the president of a governmental district. Its prosperity now rapidly increased; when railways were introduced it became the meeting-place of several lines, and in 1881 its growth necessitated the pushing outward of the circle of fortifications.

See L. Ennen, Gesch. der Stadt Köln (5 vols., Cologne, 1863–1880) to 1648, and Frankreich und der Niederrhein (2 vols., ib., 1855, 1856), a history of the city and electorate of Cologne since the Thirty Years’ War; R. Schultze and C. Steuernagel, Colonia Agrippinensis (Bonn, 1895); K. Heldmann, Der Kölngau und die Civitas Köln (Halle, 1900); L. Korth, Köln im Mittelalter (Cologne, 1890); F. Lau, Entwickelung der kommunalen Verfassung der Stadt Köln bis zum Jahre 1396 (Bonn, 1898); K. Hegel, Städte und Gilden der germanischen Völker im Mittelalter (2 vols., Leipzig, 1891), ii. p. 323; H. Keussen, Historische Topographie der Stadt Köln im Mittelalter (Bonn, 1906); W. Behnke, Aus Kölns Franzosenzeit (Cologne, 1901); Helmken, Köln und seine Sehenswürdigkeiten (20th ed., Cologne, 1903). For sources see L. Ennen and G. Eckertz, Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Köln (6 vols., Cologne, 1860–1879); later sources will be found in U. Chevalier, Répertoire des sources hist. Topo-bibliographie (Montbéliard, 1894–1899), s.v. Cologne, which gives also a full list of works on everything connected with the city; also in Dahlmann-Waitz, Quellenkunde (ed. Leipzig, 1906), p. 17, Nos. 252, 253. For the archdiocese and electorate of Cologne see Binterim and Mooren, Die Erzdiözese Köln bis zur französischen Staatsumwälzung, new ed. by A. Mooren in 2 vols. (Düsseldorf, 1892, 1893).


COLOMAN (1070–1116), king of Hungary, was the son of King Geza of Hungary by a Greek concubine. King Ladislaus would have made the book-loving youth a monk, and even designated him for the see of Eger; but Coloman had no inclination for an ecclesiastical career, and, with the assistance of his friends, succeeded in escaping to Poland. On the death of Ladislaus (1095), he returned to Hungary and seized the crown, passing over his legitimately born younger brother Almos, the son of the Greek princess Sinadene. Almos did not submit to this usurpation, and was more or less of an active rebel till 1108, when the emperor Henry V. espoused his cause and invaded Hungary. The Germans were unsuccessful; but Coloman thought fit to be reconciled with his kinsman and restored to him his estates. Five years later, however, fearing lest his brother might stand in the way of his heir, the infant prince Stephen, Coloman imprisoned Almos and his son Béla in a monastery and had them blinded. Despite his adoption of these barbarous Byzantine methods, Coloman was a good king and a wise ruler. In foreign affairs he preserved the policy of St Ladislaus by endeavouring to provide Hungary with her greatest need, a suitable seaboard. In 1097 he overthrew Peter, king of Croatia, and acquired the greater part of Dalmatia, though here he encountered formidable rivals in the Greek and German emperors, Venice, the pope and the Norman-Italian dukes, all equally interested in the fate of that province, so that Coloman had to proceed cautiously in his expansive policy. By 1102, however, Zara, Traú, Spalato and all the islands as far as the Cetina were in his hands. But it was as a legislator and administrator that Coloman was greatest (see Hungary: History). He was not only one of the most learned, but also one of the most statesmanlike sovereigns of the earlier middle ages. Coloman was twice married, (1) in 1097 to Buzella, daughter of Roger, duke of Calabria, the chief supporter of the pope, and (2) in 1112 to the Russian princess, Euphemia, who played him false and was sent back in disgrace to her kinsfolk the following year. Coloman died on the 3rd of February 1116.


COLOMB, PHILIP HOWARD (1831–1899), British vice-admiral, historian, critic and inventor, the son of General G. T. Colomb, was born in Scotland, on the 29th of May 1831. He entered the navy in 1846, and served first at sea off Portugal in 1847; afterwards, in 1848, in the Mediterranean, and from 1848 to 1851 as midshipman of the “Reynard” in operations against piracy in Chinese waters; as midshipman and mate of the “Serpent” during the Burmese War of 1852–53; as mate of the “Phoenix” in the Arctic Expedition of 1854; as lieutenant of the “Hastings” in the Baltic during the Russian War, taking part in the attack on Sveaborg. He became what was known at that time as a “gunner’s lieutenant” in 1857, and from 1859 to 1863 he served as flag-lieutenant to rear-admiral Sir Thomas Pasley at Devonport. Between 1858 and 1868 he was employed in home waters on a variety of special services, chiefly connected with gunnery, signalling and the tactical characteristics and capacities of steam warships. From 1868 to 1870 he commanded the “Dryad,” and was engaged in the suppression of the slave trade. In 1874, while captain of the “Audacious,” he served for three years as flag-captain to vice-admiral Ryder in China; and finally he was appointed, in 1880, to command the “Thunderer” in the Mediterranean. Next year he was appointed captain of the steam reserve at Portsmouth; and after serving three years in that capacity, he remained at Portsmouth as flag-captain to the commander-in-chief until 1886, when he was retired by superannuation before he had attained flag rank. Subsequently he became rear-admiral, and finally vice-admiral on the retired list.

Few men of his day had seen more active and more varied service than Colomb. But the real work on which his title to remembrance rests is the influence he exercised on the thought and practice of the navy. He was one of the first to perceive the vast changes which must ensue from the introduction of steam into the navy, which would necessitate a new system of signals and a new method of tactics. He set himself to devise the former as far back as 1858, but his system of signals was not adopted by the navy until 1867.

What he had done for signals Colomb next did for tactics. Having first determined by experiment—for which he was given special facilities by the admiralty—what are the manœuvring powers of ships propelled by steam under varying conditions of speed and helm, he proceeded to devise a system of tactics based on these data. In the sequel he prepared a new evolutionary signal-book, which was adopted by the royal navy, and still remains in substance the foundation of the existing system of tactical evolutions at sea. The same series of experimental studies led him to conclusions concerning the chief causes of collisions at sea; and these conclusions, though stoutly combated in many quarters at the outset, have since been generally accepted, and were ultimately embodied in the international code of regulations adopted by the leading maritime nations on the recommendation of a conference at Washington in 1889.

After his retirement Colomb devoted himself rather to the history of naval warfare, and to the large principles disclosed by its intelligent study, than to experimental inquiries having an immediate practical aim. As in his active career he had wrought organic changes in the ordering, direction and control of fleets, so by his historic studies, pursued after his retirement, he helped greatly to effect, if he did not exclusively initiate, an equally momentous change in the popular, and even the professional, way of regarding sea-power and its conditions. He did not invent the term “sea-power,”—it is, as is shown elsewhere (see Sea-Power), of very ancient origin,—nor did he employ it until Captain Mahan had made it a household word with all. But he thoroughly grasped its conditions, and in his great work on naval warfare (first published in 1891) he enunciated its principles with great cogency and with keen historic insight. The central