Summary: This paper shows that the notion of cotype is closely related to the theory of absolutely summing multilinear mappings and homogeneous polynomials. For example, we prove a characterization of all Banach spaces having cotype \(n>2\) \((n\in\mathbb{N})\) by means of \((1,1)\)-summing \(n\)-homogeneous polynomials. Cotype is also used to prove interesting results about absolutely summing multilinear mappings on \(C(K)\)-spaces.