An excursion through Seligenstadt is a journey into history, an encounter with learned monks and honest craftsmen, with corpulent traders and poor fishermen, with Roman legionaries and with the mercenaries in the service of the Elector of Mainz, with emperors with a passion for hunting, and with art-loving abbots.

And with Einhard, the close confidant and later biographer of Charlemagne. This versatile and talented politician, artist and scholar left the bustling life of the court in Aachen for the place where Roman soldiers had settled eight hundred years before. This spot, where the

small Franconian settlement ‘Obermulinheim’ had been established amongst the ruins of a Roman castellum, was donated to him in the year 815 as a reward for his services. In 828, Einhard founded a Benedictine monastery here and built an imposing pilgrimage church over the graves of the early Christian martyrs, Petrus and Marcellinus, whose relics he had brought from Rome over tortuous roads to the Franconian empire. Pilgrims travelling to their place of worship coined a new name for Einhard's spot: ‘Saligunstat’ - the propitious and salutary place.

The Benedictine abbey remained the centre of the growing settlement which, according to the earliest available documents, was granted the rights of a city in 1175. Whilst no architectural remains of Einhard's monastery from the time around 830 survived, his abbey church was preserved for more than a thousand years . Through the neo-Romanic portal arches below the belfries to the west, dating from the nineteenth century, the visitor enters the Carolingian basilica , an architectural gem worthy of being ranked with the best of European art. A late Romanic choir with a mighty crossing tower was added to the simple nave in the thirteenth century. The silver reliquary holding the relics of the martyrs Petrus and Marcellinus is displayed in the main altar below its high octagonal vault, on the very spot where their tomb was located in a narrow circular crypt in Einhard's days.

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