Murbach

Murbach was an imperial Benedictine prince-abbey in an Alsatian valley below the Vosges. Founded in 727, it still contended with the bishops of Basel and the Habsburg counts in 1337.

Murbach was a possible source of the copy of Lucretius's De rerum natura recovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417. The Peace of Westphalia left Murbach to the Empire in 1648, but Louis XIV's Chambers of Reunion brought it under French control in 1680. Peasants looted the old abbey in 1789, and the French Revolution dissolved it.