Kitzingen

Kitzingen lies on the River Main amid the vineyards of Franconia. A Benedictine monastery was founded here in the eighth century near a crossing of the river, and the town that grew beside it became closely tied to the prince-bishops of Würzburg. Wine and river traffic sustained its commerce, and Kitzingen became an important port on the Main.

In 1629 Prince-Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg reclaimed Kitzingen, suppressed Protestantism and forced more than a thousand inhabitants to leave. Swedish troops occupied the town during the Thirty Years' War. After the conflict, Johann Philipp von Schönborn's edict of toleration in 1650 encouraged the expelled Protestants to return. The port prospered in the eighteenth century, before the upheavals of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars ended the prince-bishops' rule. Kitzingen passed to Bavaria in 1814.