Erbach

Long before the ivory came, the counts of Erbach ruled their corner of the Odenwald from a moated castle on the Mümling, raised around 1180. The town that grew up inside its walls received a charter, arms and seal only in 1560, and it stayed small: the Thirty Years' War and the plagues that followed it left the place so poor that a new town church replaced the old chapel of 1370 only in 1750. The counts meanwhile served the Electors Palatine as their hereditary cup-bearers, and when the family divided its lands in 1717, Erbach became the seat of the Erbach-Erbach line. Its last reigning count was Francis I himself, who lost his sovereignty in 1806, when the county passed to the Grand Duchy of Hesse.