Pfaffen-Schwabenheim

Coat of arms

Location of Pfaffen-Schwabenheim within Bad Kreuznach district

Coordinates: 49°51′06″N 07°57′10″E / 49.85167°N 7.95278°ECoordinates: 49°51′06″N 07°57′10″E / 49.85167°N 7.95278°E

Country

Government

• Mayor

Hans-Peter Haas (CDU)

Area

• Total

5.18 km² (2.00 sq mi)

Elevation

144 m (472 ft)

Population (2015-12-31)

• Total

1,312

• Density

250/km² (660/sq mi)

CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2)

55546

06701

Website

pfaffen-schwabenheim.de

Pfaffen-Schwabenheim is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Bad Kreuznach district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Bad Kreuznach, whose seat is in the like-named town, although this lies outside the Verbandsgemeinde. Pfaffen-Schwabenheim is a winegrowing village.

Pfaffen-Schwabenheim lies on the Appelbach in the district’s easternmost corner, just east of the district seat of Bad Kreuznach (and thus east of the Nahe) and 14 km directly south of the Rhine at Bingen’s outlying centre of Kempten.

Clockwise from the north, Pfaffen-Schwabenheim’s neighbours are the municipalities of Biebelsheim, Zotzenheim, Sprendlingen, Badenheim, Pleitersheim and Volxheim and the town of Bad Kreuznach. Zotzenheim, Sprendlingen and Badenheim all lie in the neighbouring Mainz-Bingen district, whereas all the others likewise lie within the Bad Kreuznach district.

Also belonging to Pfaffen-Schwabenheim is the outlying homestead of Schleifmühle.

During some clearing work not very many years ago, workers happened upon some roof tiles and ceramic shards. Dr. Rupprecht from the directorate of the Kulturelles Erbe (“Cultural Heritage”) in Mainz, recognized at first glance the typical piece scored with a metal comb, a technique employed to give opus caementicium a stronger grip. The shards, too, could quickly be classified as roofing from a Roman villa rustica. It is believed that there is much more in the way of remnants hidden in the earth, and there is to be a dig at the villa someday. In many writings about Pfaffen-Schwabenheim, the year 765 is given as the date of the village’s first documentary mention. Invoked here is a document issued by Count Cancro as endower of a vineyard for Lorsch Abbey. The municipality also used it to justify holding their 1,200th anniversary in 1965. Whether this vineyard actually lay within Pfaffen-Schwabenheim’s limits, though, is by no means certain. The document in question only names a place called Suaboheim im Wormsgau, which could just as easily mean Schwabenheim an der Selz. There being two places with the same name in the same region, it is of course impossible to make a clear determination in favour of either place, even though the name crops up in four further donation documents from the abbey from the 8th century. Because there were so many donations in the neighbouring municipalities to the abbey in the same time period, and because Suaboheim was mentioned in documents so many times, it is at least likely, though, that one document or another actually refers to Pfaffen-Schwabenheim. However, the first certain mention came in 1130. Archbishop Adalbert of Mainz (d. 1137) then documented that Count Meginhard of Sponheim “in villa que vocatur Suaboheim” (“in the village that is called Schwabenheim”) had transferred the abbey to Archiepiscopal ownership for it to be occupied by Augustinian canons. The abbey itself had been founded about 1040, with Eberhard VI of Nellenburg as one of its cofounders. It is from this document that something first comes to light about the abbey with whose fate the village’s is so tightly bound. Among other things, the village has the abbey to thank for the inclusion of the element “Pfaffen-” in its name (Pfaffe is an old German word for “priest”, nowadays considered somewhat derogatory; it thus roughly corresponds with the English “parson”; the form with the —n suffix is genitive, making the name’s meaning “Parson’s Schwabenheim”). The “Pfaffen-” tag first cropped up in a 1248 document, and it has served to distinguish Pfaffen-Schwabenheim from the otherwise like-named village on the River Selz, already mentioned above. The reason for this choice of a tag, of course, was the Augustinian canons themselves. The name “Schwabenheim” itself might go back to Alemannic settlers. This tribe’s original homeland was Swabia (called Schwaben in German), but they eventually spread to what is now Rhenish Hesse. It is possible, if not altogether likely, that the composition of the name is typical of that seen in Frankish villages’ names. According to that point of view, the name could be interpreted as “Suabo’s Home”. Whatever might actually be so, there is no doubt that the decisive impetus for founding the village can be traced to the Frankish taking of the land. Even today, the church with the adjoining mighty convent buildings characterizes Pfaffen-Schwabenheim’s appearance. The buildings that stand now, however, date only from the abbey’s last phase in the mid 18th century. Only the church’s chancel, which as an Early Gothic work is of interest to architectural historians, is older. It cannot be reliably determined when building work on this quire began, but it is highly likely that this happened in the earlier half of the 13th century. The abbey and its monks strongly characterized the village’s past. The Pfaffen-Schwabenheim villagers were wholly subject to the provost: they had to do unfree labour, such as working three days to bring in the fruit and vegetable harvest for the lord or helping with the vineyard harvest for one day, among other services that were required. The greater part of Pfaffen-Schwabenheim’s municipal area belonged to the abbey, although right from the beginning, there must have been others with landholds here, for according to the Pfaffen-Schwabenheim Weistum (cognate with English wisdom, this was a legal pronouncement issued by men learned in law in the Middle Ages and early modern times), a self-administering municipality existed alongside the provost’s estate. About 1120, the village passed as a dowry for the Nellenburg heiress Mechtild of Mörsberg to the County of Sponheim. After the Sponheims split their county into two entities in 1220, Pfaffen-Schwabenheim became part of the County of Sponheim-Kreuznach, which – at least because when viewed from Mainz it seemed this way – was also known as the “Further” County of Sponheim. From the time when the abbey was transferred to Archiepiscopal ownership in 1130, the abbey Vogtei was held by the Counts of Sponheim. After the Sponheim-Kreuznach line of counts died out in 1414, Pfaffen-Schwabenheim passed to the Counts of Sponheim-Starkenburg. When that line then died out only 23 years later in 1437, their joint successors were Electoral Palatinate, the Margraviate of Baden and the Counts of Veldenz-Zweibrücken. This last lordship succeeded in 1444 upon the last count’s death to the House of Palatinate-Simmern, who also inherited the rank of Elector in 1559 and eventually died out in 1685. The monastery experienced an upswing in the 15th and 16th centuries. The abbey’s heyday in the time when it was subject to the Congregation of Windesheim (named after a place of that name near Zwolle in the Netherlands where this branch of the Augustinians established its first monastery) lasted almost one hundred years and ended with the 16th century’s religious wars. In 1566, the Sponheims’ heirs decided to forsake the monastery. After the devastating Nine Years' War (known in Germany as the Pfälzischer Erbfolgekrieg, or War of the Palatine Succession) ended in 1697, the new Electoral line of Palatinate-Neuburg, in the course of its policy of Recatholicization, had a Baroque monastery complex built in Pfaffen-Schwabenheim, which is today the biggest such complex that has been preserved unaltered in Rhineland-Palatinate. This same year, the Augustinian canons under Prior Ignaz Antonius Martels came back to the abbey. Under the prior’s leadership, the monastery experienced another upswing. After the partition of the condominium between Baden and Electoral Palatinate in 1707, Pfaffen-Schwabenheim belonged wholly, as part of the Oberamt of Kreuznach, to the latter of those states. The incorporation of the village into the French state in 1797/1798 put an end to centuries-old ruling structures. Pfaffen-Schwabenheim found itself in the Department of Mont-Tonnerre (or Donnersberg in German). In the course of Secularization, the abbey was dissolved in 1802. The abbey’s wealth of holdings was declared “national property” by the French and was auctioned off. Pfaffen-Schwabenheim was then a small place. In 1815, at the time of the Congress of Vienna, the village had 404 inhabitants. In the course of general development, the figure had risen to almost one and a half times that by 1846, to 601; by 1905 there were 660 inhabitants. In 1870, several villagers from Pfaffen-Schwabenheim took part in the campaign against France (in the Franco-Prussian War), and one did not come back. The fallen soldiers’ names can be found on a plaque at the warriors’ memorial in the village centre. Modernity began to arrive in Pfaffen-Schwabenheim with the onset of the 20th century. In 1903, the water supply was ensured with the laying of a watermain, and in 1912, electricity came to Pfaffen-Schwabenheim. Not long thereafter, Pfaffen-Schwabenheim was linked to the Bad Kreuznach tramway, which ran from the spa town by way of Bosenheim (now amalgamated with Bad Kreuznach) to Pfaffen-Schwabenheim, and thence onwards to Sprendlingen and Sankt Johann. Service ended in 1952. The warriors’ memorial at the municipal graveyard memorializes the fallen from both world wars. Twenty-two soldiers from Pfaffen-Schwabenheim fell in the First World War, while 53 fell in the Second World War. On 17 March 1945, the Americans were advancing on the village, laying down artillery fire while fighter pilots bombed it. Some houses sustained damage, and two villagers were killed. In the 1960s and 1970s, Pfaffen-Schwabenheim, along with other municipalities near the district seat, profited from its real estate potential, which drew many people from nearby Bad Kreuznach to the village who built houses and settled. Beginning in 1955, when 774 people lived in Pfaffen-Schwabenheim, the municipality was able to increase its population steadily. In the early 1980s, it had reached 915, and by 2011 this had risen to 1,350. In the course of administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate, Pfaffen-Schwabenheim was grouped along with eight other municipalities into the Verbandsgemeinde of Bad Kreuznach.

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Wikipedia