Bretzenheim 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 Langenlonsheim-Stromberg, whose seat is in Langenlonsheim. Bretzenheim is a state-recognized tourism community and a winegrowing centre. It is also one of the district's ten biggest municipalities. It was people of the Linear Pottery culture of the New Stone Age who, about 5000 BC, founded the first settlement of any great size at what is now Bretzenheim. A wealth of archaeological finds establish that even in the later epochs of this level of civilization as well as in the time of the Urnfield culture (Bronze Age) and Hallstatt or La Tène times (Iron Age), this place was prized as a good place for a settlement. Later, the Romans came to settle here, bearing witness to whose presence are remnants of several buildings as well as finds of coins and various other things. The Franks might first have appeared here beginning in the 6th century. They introduced a lasting phase of settlement and gave the place its name, meaning “Brezzo’s Home” or “Brizzo’s Home” (although nobody now knows who he was). About the mid 7th century, as historians have assumed, the Archbishop of Cologne acquired Bretzenheim as a royal donation, which he and his successors kept until 1790, although it remained a Free Imperial Domain. The first authoritative documentary mention of Bretzenheim goes back to 1057, when the village was temporarily awarded to the Polish queen Richeza as a “precaria”. Bretzenheim might have taken on its current village structure sometime about the year 1000, to which time the building of the village fortifications with their wall, moats and three gates can be dated. The lordship over the village was exercised by those whom the Archbishop of Cologne enfeoffed, the Electorate of Cologne having been the landholder in the Free Imperial Domain of Bretzenheim until 1789. The fiefholders were at first the Counts Palatine of the Rhine, followed by the Counts of Falkenstein in various lines before Count Alexander II of Velen bought the lordship in 1642. After his descendant Count Alexander IV of Velen died in 1733 without an heir, the Imperial lordship passed in 1734 to Ambrosius Franz von Virmont, who in 1744 likewise died without an heir, whereupon Baron Ignaz Felix von Roll zu Bernau was enfeoffed with Bretzenheim, selling it in 1772 to Count Karl August ... More information...
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