Seligenstadt

Seligenstadt is a town in the Offenbach district in the Regierungsbezirk of Darmstadt in Hesse, Germany. Seligenstadt is one of Germany's oldest towns and was already of great importance in Carolingian times. Seligenstadt is one of 13 towns and communities in the Offenbach district. The town lies on the river Main’s left bank roughly 25 km southeast of Frankfurt am Main, directly neighbouring Bavaria. Seligenstadt borders in the north on the community of Hainburg, in the east on the community of Karlstein (Aschaffenburg district in Bavaria), in the southeast on the community of Mainhausen, in the south on the town of Babenhausen (Darmstadt-Dieburg) and in the west on the town of Rodgau. Seligenstadt's Stadtteile are Seligenstadt, Klein-Welzheim and Froschhausen. Seligenstadt is located in the Hanau-Seligenstadt Basin, a Cenozoic subsidence basin between the local highlands of Spessart and Odenwald. Quaternary fluvial deposits of the river Main overlying Pliocene, lignite bearing sequences and Miocene sands and marls form the subsurface of the town. Sometime about AD 100, during the reign of Roman Emperor Trajan, a cohort castrum was built on what is now Seligenstadt's marketplace and parts of its old town. Since the 16th century, this castrum has been referred to by the name Selgum. The 500 legionaries and auxiliary forces stationed there belonged to the Legio XXII Primigenia (or Roman 22nd Legion), based in Mogontiacum (Mainz). The cohort was known by the name Cohors I Civium Romanorum equitata and was responsible for security along the stretch of the Limes Germanicus running along the Main. With the fall of the Limes as a result of raids by the Alamanni in about AD 260, the castrum was abandoned, and the Romans withdrew farther behind the Rhine line. On the former castrum's rubble and on what is now the monastery area in a section of the Breitenbach valley arose the early mediaeval settlement of Mulinheim superior, or Obermühlheim. Seligenstadt had its first documentary mention on 11 January 815 in a donation document, under its then current name of Obermühlheim.