Franco of Cologne (active ca. 1250-1260), or Franco of Paris, was the outstanding music theorist of his century.

Thirteenth-century Paris was a cultural and political center that attracted numerous foreign artists and scholars. It was there that for longer or shorter periods of time men from many countries taught during the midcentury at the great new university: the German St. Albertus Magnus, the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas and an outstanding philosopher, who in 1248 retired to Cologne; St. Thomas himself and his Italian compatriot St. Bonaventura; the English humanist John of Garland; and others. One of these scholars was Franco of Cologne, who received the honorary title of papal chaplain and became the preceptor, that is, head, of the Cologne branch house of the Order of St. John, probably in the early 1260s. These positions indicate that he was of noble birth, but no more is known of...