History
Finds from the New Stone Age show that the Sulzbach valley was settled as early as 3500 BC. A circular rampart (Altenburg) on the Schlossberg (mountain) between the outlying centre of Soden and Ebersbach served in Roman times (about the 2nd century AD) as a refuge fort – for the protection of civilians in time of war – and in the Early Middle Ages it was fortified with a masonry castle.
During Roman times, the Main and the Limes Germanicus formed Germania’s border with the then Roman-occupied Odenwald area across the river. In the time that followed, several tribes lived in the Sulzbach valley: the Chatti, the Alamanni, the Burgundians and the Franks. It was likely in Charles Martel’s time (714–741) that the municipality of Ruchelnheim, which lay within what are now Sulzbach’s municipal limits and which was forsaken in the Thirty Years' War, was founded. As far back as Carolingian times, such places lying on the Sulzbach or Leidersbach as Sulzbach, Ebersbach, Leidersbach and Roßbach came into being; it is also likely that Soden’s founding goes back to late Carolingian times.
Sulzbach and Soden were assigned to the parish of Ruchelnheim, itself subordinate to Saints Peter’s and Alexander’s Collegiate Church in Aschaffenburg. Sulzbach had its first documentary mention in a document from Pope Lucius III, in which a curtem in Sulzibah (estate in Sulzbach) was listed among the Aschaffenburg Collegiate Church’s holdings.
From the mid 13th century, Sulzbach belonged to the Centena Ascaffinburg – the tithing area of Aschaffenburg – whose place was taken in the 15th century by the Cent vorm Spessart. Until the 1803 Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, Sulzbach stood under Electoral Mainz’s lordship. Thereafter, it was part of Prince Primate von Dalberg’s newly formed Principality of Aschaffenburg, with which it passed in 1814, after the War of the Sixth Coalition and the Congress of Vienna (by this time it had become a department of the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt), to Bavaria, of which it has been part ever since.
As in all other areas in the Spessart, farmland was splintered by Mainz inheritance law in the 18th and 19th centuries pulling Sulzbach, too, into an economic downswing with its attendant consequences for living conditions. Only with the onset of industrialization in Aschaffenburg and the opening of the Aschaffenburg-Miltenberg railway line in 1876 did things begin to get better.
The formerly self-administering municipalities of Dornau and Soden were amalgamated with Sulzbach on 1 July 1971 and 1972 respectively. The municipality was raised to market on 15 May 1973.
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Old Parish Church
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Spessartstraße
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Church in Soden
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Soden
Read more about this topic: Sulzbach Am Main
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