Breisach

Breisach (formerly Altbreisach; Low Alemannic: Alt-Brisach) is a town with approximately 16,500 inhabitants, situated along the Rhine in the Rhine Valley, in the district Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, about halfway between Freiburg and Colmar — 20 kilometres away from each — and about 60 kilometres north of Basel near the Kaiserstuhl. A bridge leads over the Rhine to Neuf-Brisach, Alsace. Its name is Celtic and means breakwater. The root Breis can also be found in the French word briser meaning to break. The hill on which Breisach came into existence was — at least when there was a flood — in the middle of the Rhine, until the Rhine was straightened by the engineer Johann Gottfried Tulla in the 19th century, thus breaking its surge. The seat of a Celtic prince was at the hill on which Breisach is built. The Romans maintained an auxiliary castle on Mons Brisiacus (which came from the Celtic word Brisger, which means waterbreak). The Staufer dynasty founded Breisach as a city in the modern sense, but there had already been a settlement with a church at the time. An 11th-century coin from Breisach was found in the Sandur hoard. In the early 13th century, construction on the St. Stephansmünster, Breisach's cathedral, started. In the early 16th century, Breisach was a significant stronghold of the Holy Roman Empire. On December 7, 1638, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, who was subsidized by France, conquered the city, which Ferdinand II and General Hans Heinrich IX. von Reinach had defended well, and tried to make it the centre of a new territory. After Bernard's death in 1639, his general gave the territory to France, which saw it as its own conquest. In the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Breisach was de jure given to France. From 1670, Breisach was integrated into the French state in the course of the "Politique des Réunions" followed by Louis XIV. In the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Breisach was returned to the Holy Roman Empire, but then reconquered on September 7, 1703 by Marshal Tallard at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession.