History
Rottenburg was originally founded as a Roman town, Sumelocenna, probably around the year 98, and was one of the most important Roman towns in the southwest of Germany. It had a line of walls built to defend it from the attacks of the Alamanni, who nevertheless destroyed it in 259-260.
The name Rottenburg is thought to derive from a Germanic root that is also present in the English word 'rotten', in an older meaning of 'destroyed'. According to this hypothesis, the town would have received its name when, in the early Middle Ages, Alemannic people founded their settlement in the vicinity of the ruins of Roman Sumelocenna. An alternative etymology of Rottenburg as "red borough" is also considered possible, however.
In the Middle Ages, the town was first governed by the counts of Hohenberg, who, however, were forced to sell it to the Habsburg dynasty in 1381. Rottenburg remained a part of Further Austria until 1805, when it was assigned to Württemberg in the Peace of Pressburg.
Rottenburg became the seat of a Catholic bishop as late as 1821-28, when, after the secularization and the Napoleonic wars, a reorganisation of Catholic life in south west Germany had become necessary. It was then decided not to choose the more important nearby places of Stuttgart or Tübingen as a diocesan town, as these were firmly protestant.
Read more about this topic: Rottenburg Am Neckar
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“If you look at history you’ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)