Seligenstadt Abbey

The monastery's foundation dates back to Einhard, Charlemagne's biographer, who received the Frankish settlement of Obermulinheim in 815 from Louis the Pious. In 834, he established a Benedictine monastery there and built a pilgrimage church where the relics of the early Christian martyrs Marcellinus and Petrus were interred. The originally three-aisled pillar basilica saw the addition of its western towers around 1050 and an extension with a new choir in the 13th century. After damage during the Thirty Years' War, the monastery underwent extensive renovation and Baroque transformation from 1690 onwards. Abbot Petrus IV had a portal structure built between the Romanesque towers in 1722. With secularization in 1803, the monastery was dissolved, and the abbey church was handed over to the Catholic parish as a parish church in 1812. Further structural changes occurred in the 19th century. Between 1936 and 1953, a phased restoration aimed to highlight the architectural forms of the 9th and 13th centuries once again.