Seligenstadt

In front of you rises the red sandstone west front of the Einhard Basilica, with its two towers. This front is the youngest part of the church. The old west end was pulled down in 1865, and the architect Ernst Braden built the neo-Romanesque front you see from 1868. Behind it, the nave and the transept are, in substance, the church Einhard had built here in the 830s. Einhard was a scholar at Charlemagne's court and wrote the emperor's biography. In 815 Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious, gave him an estate called Obermulinheim, which is this town. Einhard sent Ratleic, a man from his household, to Rome to find relics for his first church at Steinbach in the Odenwald. Ratleic came back with the bones of two early Christian martyrs, Marcellinus and Peter, taken from a catacomb. Einhard moved them here in 828 and built a bigger church for them. Because of these saints, the place came to be called Seligenstadt, the town of the blessed. Their Baroque statues stand on the tall pedestals by the steps. Look up at the crossing tower behind the front. The gilded copper figure on top is the Archangel Gabriel, made in 1743, standing on a bell-shaped Baroque cap from 1722. Einhard died in 840. He lies inside the church with his wife Imma, in a Baroque marble sarcophagus. When the grave was opened in 2005, scientists found that the bones match the couple's lifetimes. In 1925 Pope Pius XI raised the church to a basilica minor. Cross to the south side of Freihofplatz. A sandstone Archangel Gabriel from 1729 stands in a corner niche of the abbey wall there. Follow the wall to the gateway and walk through into the abbey courtyard.

You are standing in the Klosterhof, the working yard of the Benedictine abbey Einhard founded. Monks lived, worked and prayed here until 1802, when troops of the Landgrave of Hessen-Darmstadt occupied the abbey and dissolved it. The contents were auctioned, and the 42,000 litres of wine in the cellars brought in more money than anything else. The large building that closes the courtyard is the Prälatur, the new abbey of 1699. It was the abbot's residence and guest house, and travelling emperors and kings stayed at the abbey. Today it holds a museum, and the hall upstairs is called the Kaisersaal, the Emperor's Hall. The stone building with the stepped gable is the abbey mill from the 16th century, a grain and oil mill. In the middle of the yard is the Engelsgärtchen, a small Baroque garden laid out in 1995 around a statue of the Virgin Mary with angels and saints. Most of what you see dates from the abbey's last great period, around 1700, when the abbots rebuilt it in Baroque style. The Hessian palaces and gardens administration has restored the complex since the 1980s to look as it did then. On the east side lies the Konventgarten, about 10,000 square metres. The monks grew fruit, vegetables and herbs there, and from 1986 it was replanted on the evidence of old sources and excavations, with a fountain of about 1720 in the centre and an orangery, probably from 1757, with a sloping glass wall. A statue group from the church's old Baroque front now stands in the garden, with Einhard holding his basilica in his arm. The apothecary garden next to the old abbey building was reconstructed in 1999. The abbey garden is free to enter. Go back out to Freihofplatz and take the lane along the north side of the basilica down to the Main, to the ferry landing.

The car ferry in front of you crosses the Main to the Bavarian bank, to Karlstein and Kahl am Main. A ferry has crossed here since the ninth century, because the abbey held the right to carry people and goods to the other side. The abbey passed that right on for money or goods, and ferry families often held it for generations. In 1868 the town bought all the ferry rights for 4,000 guilders. Today's boat is a free-running car ferry at river kilometre 69.6, in service since 1971. It is one of twelve ferries still crossing the Main. The river also brought trade. In the Middle Ages, merchants from Augsburg and Nuremberg travelling to the Frankfurt fair came along the Main or over the Spessart to their resting place in Seligenstadt. The roads were dangerous, so in 1240 Emperor Frederick II put the merchants under imperial protection with an escort letter. Every lord along the way had to provide armed guards, for a fee. Near Seligenstadt the escort changed: soldiers of the Archbishop of Mainz handed the convoy over to Frankfurt's guards. The merchants had their own initiation. A newcomer had to empty a wine spoon holding one litre in a single draught. Anyone who failed had to pay for the company's food and drink. In Jakobstraße, just west of Freihofplatz, a statue of a man lifting such a spoon stands, the Löffeltrinker. The custom lives on at the Geleitsfest, which the town's Heimatbund holds every four years, and since 2003 a historic merchants' convoy has been re-enacted every four years as well. Turn left and walk a few steps downstream along the riverside path. The red sandstone wall with arched windows above the path is the Palatium.

The red sandstone wall above the path, with its rows of small arched windows and two upper doorways, is the river front of an imperial palace, the Palatium. Only this front and the ground-floor outer walls survive. Behind it stood a rectangular two-storey building about 46 metres long, roofed with slate, probably with a hall below and rooms for feasts and living above. Who built it is still debated. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa held a court day in Seligenstadt in 1188. On 23 April that year he agreed the marriage contract between his son Conrad and Berengaria, daughter of King Alfonso VIII of Castile. Some researchers date the palace to Barbarossa's time, because the columns of the windows resemble those of the Romanesque House in town, built in 1186 and 1187. Others place it in the first half of the 13th century, under Frederick II, as a hunting residence for the imperial forest of the Spessart. It is documented securely as a palace under Frederick II. The palace stood on a bend of the Main and could be reached easily by ship from Frankfurt or Mainz. In the 14th century people called it the "keysirhus", the emperor's house, or the red castle. Fire destroyed the palace in 1460. Two years later, during the Mainz diocesan feud, the town built the ruined river front into its new town wall, which is why it still stands. The front was uncovered and restored in 1883 and again in 1938. Columns from the palace, with traces of an earlier fire, are kept in the abbey's lapidarium. Keep walking downstream along the river. The round tower with the pointed stone roof at the corner of the old town wall is the Mulaul.

This round tower with its pointed stone roof marks the northern corner of the medieval town wall. It was built in 1462, during the feud over the archbishopric of Mainz, together with a matching tower at the southern corner by the old cemetery. A document of 1598 calls it the Mulaul, after the town mill that stood next to it. The tower also served as a prison. Look for the walkway ring on its arched brackets, the square windows and the gun loops. From here the wall followed the river south to the other corner tower, and stretches of it in red sandstone survive along the bank. Inside it lay the whole medieval town: the abbey, the parish church and the cemetery, the upper and the lower town. The fortifications were laid out in the 12th century and strengthened in the 15th. There were four gate towers and six towers on the wall. Most of the circuit was pulled down in the 19th century. Three of the towers and one gate survive. On the west side of the old town stands the third tower, a squat one called the Stumpfaul after a drinking vessel. It held prisoners in the 16th and 17th centuries. From the ferry and from the far bank you see this tower and the palace front together on the riverside. Turn your back to the river and walk inland along Stadtmühlgasse, then turn right into Steinheimer Straße. The gate tower at the end of the street is the Steinheimer Tor.

The Steinheimer Tor is the only one of the town's four gates that survives in full. It was also called the Niederpforte, the lower gate. Local craftsmen built it in 1603 and 1604, probably to a design by Georg Ridinger. It is a four-storey Renaissance tower on an almost square plan, with a stair turret on one side. Once an outwork, bridges and ditches protected it. On the side facing you, the town side, there are two coats of arms. One belongs to the Mainz elector Johann Schweikard von Kronberg, with the date 1605, and the other belongs to the town of Seligenstadt. Above the outer arch, on the far side of the gate, are the arms of the elector Johann Adam von Bicken with the date 1603. The Archbishop of Mainz ruled Seligenstadt until 1803, so his arms went on the town gate. Look up to the top. Above the stone parapet sits a tiered cap, and on it a small copper man turns with the wind, the Turmmännchen, the little tower man. The tower is tall enough to stand above the roofs of the old town, and it closes the view up Steinheimer Straße. The other three gates have gone. Most of the walls, ramparts and ditches were pulled down in the 19th century, and this is the only gate left. Walk back down Steinheimer Straße a few steps and turn right into Rosengasse.

The half-timbered houses along Rosengasse are known in town as Klaa-Frankreich, which means little France in the local dialect. After the Thirty Years' War, fighting, famine and plague had left Seligenstadt half empty. Abbot Leonhard Colchon came from Wallonia, and he brought settlers from his French-speaking homeland to live in the empty houses. Family names that are still common in Seligenstadt, such as Beike, Massoth, Bonifer, Dutine, Oger and Assion, go back to these newcomers. The whole old town inside the walls is a protected ensemble. It is made up mostly of timber-framed houses standing with their eaves to the street, and the irregular medieval street plan has survived, with its two traditional squares, the Marktplatz and the Freihof. Monument experts consider two houses in town to be probably the oldest half-timbered buildings in the district: Große Rathausgasse 8 and Aschaffenburger Straße 91. These lanes fill up once a year. Seligenstadt's carnival parade has wound through the old town on Rosenmontag since at least 1859. Today it has 99 floats and groups and draws about 40,000 visitors. During carnival the locals call themselves Schlumber and their town Schlumberland, and a prince and princess, and a children's prince and princess, rule it for the season. The day before, a separate children's parade goes through the town. Follow Kleine Salzgasse and Große Salzgasse back to Steinheimer Straße and walk south to the market square. Turn left into Große Rathausgasse; behind the town hall stands a stone house with a stepped gable.

This stone house with the stepped gable is the Romanisches Haus, the Romanesque House, and it is the oldest secular building in Seligenstadt. No written record of its building survives. During construction, a scaffolding pole was walled into the masonry and stayed there. Tree-ring dating shows that its oak was felled in the spring of 1187. Builders used their timber fresh, so the house went up in 1186 and 1187. That fits a visit by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa at Easter 1188, and the house probably served as the seat of the emperor's reeve, his local official. The ground floor opens towards the town hall courtyard through two big arches. Originally there was also a gate to Große Rathausgasse. Upstairs, paired arched windows are divided by small columns with carved capitals. The walls are of plastered pebble masonry, with dressed stone at the corners, arches and windows, and blind arches in brick. The house has been changed many times. After a fire in 1272 the ground-floor ceiling was renewed; its beams come from trees felled in the winter of 1271 to 1272. In the 18th century the inside was divided into small rooms, and it stayed that way until the town bought the house in 1978. The restoration kept as much of the Romanesque fabric as possible, although the upper floor remains lower than it was in the 12th century. The house reopened on 10 April 1984, and in 1986 it received the Hessian Monument Protection Prize. Today it is used for cultural events and civil weddings. Walk back along Große Rathausgasse to the market square.

Under this square lie the remains of a Roman fort. Around AD 100, under Emperor Trajan, the Romans built a fort here for an auxiliary unit, the First Cohort of Roman Citizens, which included mounted soldiers. It guarded the stretch of the frontier that ran along the Main. The fort was given up around 260. Nothing of it is visible today, but an inscription of that cohort is built into a wall inside the basilica. The building with the arcades and the tall tower is the town hall, built in 1823 to a design by G. Lerch. It replaced a half-timbered town hall from 1539, and two coats of arms from the older building are set into it. According to local history, the square tower came from the old parish church, demolished after the parish moved into the abbey church in 1812. The richly carved half-timbered house where the square narrows into Aschaffenburger Straße is the Einhardhaus. Its stone ground floor is dated 1596, and the timber upper floor was added around 1700. Look at the corner oriel and up into the gable: a carved man's head looks out of a hatch, and people say it shows Einhard. The house carries a legend about the town's name. Charlemagne is said to have banished his daughter Emma and Einhard from court because of their love. Years later he stopped at an inn here and was served pancakes. He recognised his daughter's cooking and called out: "Selig sei die Stadt genannt, da ich meine Tochter wiederfand", blessed be the town where I found my daughter again. The saying is written on the oriel. Historians think Einhard's real wife, Imma, was probably not Charlemagne's daughter. The tourist information is inside the Einhardhaus. The station is about ten minutes' walk west, via Wolfstraße and Eisenbahnstraße.