In 1248 the Dominicans established a general house of studies at Cologne and put Albert the Great in charge of it. Albert's project was to make the whole of Aristotle available and intelligible to Latin readers, natural science included, at a time when much of that corpus was suspect. He wrote on minerals, plants and animals from observation as well as from texts, and he taught that the study of nature and the study of God were not rivals. Thomas Aquinas was among his students in the city, and Albert is buried in the crypt of St Andreas beside the cathedral, where his tomb is still visited.
Seven centuries later the university acquired an object of a different kind. The Cologne Mani Codex is a Greek parchment book of the fourth or fifth century, remarkable first for its size: the written page is smaller than a matchbox, among the smallest codices known. Its text is an account of the youth of Mani, the third century prophet whose religion spread from Mesopotamia to China, assembled from the testimony of his early disciples.
Its importance is that it describes the community Mani grew up in, a Jewish Christian baptist sect practising repeated ritual washing, and his break with it over the claim that purity is a matter of what enters the body. Before the codex was read, Manichaeism was known mainly through the polemics of its enemies, Augustine among them. The codex let it be studied from the inside, and it sits in a university library in a city best known for a cathedral.