Mosbach

Mosbach grew around a Benedictine monastery on the southern edge of the Odenwald, near the Neckar. Mentioned as a settlement in 976, it later became an imperial town with walls and towers. The plague of 1348–49 brought persecution of its Jewish community. Like many imperial possessions, Mosbach was repeatedly pledged to nobles before the Count Palatine acquired it in 1362.

In 1410 Count Palatine Otto I made Mosbach his residence, creating a branch of the Palatine dynasty whose lands stretched from the Neckar to the Upper Palatinate. When that line died out in 1499, its territories returned to the main electoral branch. Prosperous craftsmen left their mark in timber-framed houses, but the Thirty Years' War brought armies, plunder, hunger and plague. The town escaped the destruction inflicted on Heidelberg and Mannheim in the later War of the Palatine Succession, and Jewish families fleeing Mannheim settled there.