Rheinböllen is a town in the Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis (district) in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde Simmern-Rheinböllen, whose seat is in Simmern. It was the seat of the former Verbandsgemeinde Rheinböllen.
Geography
Location
Rheinböllen lies some 10 km as the crow flies southwest of the Middle Rhine at Bacharach in the southeast Hunsrück. The town is found in the transitional zone between (to the east) the Binger Wald (Bingen Forest) and (to the south) the Soonwald, a heavily wooded section of the west-central Hunsrück that since 2005 has belonged to the Naturpark Soonwald-Nahe.
Constituent communities
Rheinböllen has two outlying Stadtteile: Kleinweidelbach and Rheinböllerhütte.
Climate
Yearly precipitation in Rheinböllen amounts to 695 mm. This falls into the middle third of the precipitation chart for all Germany. Only at 39% of the German Weather Service's weather stations are lower figures recorded. The driest month is February. The most rainfall comes in June. In that month, precipitation is 1.6 times what it is in February. Precipitation varies only slightly. Only at 2% of the weather stations are lower seasonal swings recorded.
Name
The prefix Rhein— suggests some kind of historical dependence on Bacharach, to whose Vogtei Rheinböllen may well once have belonged, before it passed to the Counts Palatine. The past teacher and local historian Junges traced Bollen to an old word meaning "hill" or "height", leading to the interpretation of the name as meaning “Rhine Heights" (an apt description of the location, up on the Hunsrück). Through the ages, the name for Rheinböllen has taken many spellings: Rinbul, Rinbulle, Rynbuhel, Reynbullen, Rymbul, Rymbulen, Rynbule, Rinbelle, Bollen, Bullen, Rinbulde, Rheinbullen.
History
The Rheinböllen region was settled as early as the Stone Age. Shortly after 1900, workmen digging near the railway station found a sharpened, polished stone axe, the earliest evidence of human habitation in what is now the town. Archaeological finds in the area of the Altdorf ("Old Village", a triangle formed by the streets Simmerner Straße, Poststraße and Bahnhofstraße) point to Celtic beginnings. The Romans later drove a road through the settlement.
Street names used today, such as Wehr ("Defence") and Hinterster Graben ("Hindmost Moat") bear witness to a girding wall that once stood around the village. Rheinböllen was secured with two wall moats. An illustration from 1620 shows palisades on the wall, which itself had a defensive tower built into it.
Rheinböllen was the main centre in the so-called "Old Court" (Altes Gericht), the ancient core of Comital-Palatine lordship on the Hundisrück. Ellern, Erbach (in part), Dichtelbach and Kleinweidelbach, too, might also have been part of it. This "Old Court" likely had arisen by 1142, when Hermann von Stahleck was awarded the County Palatine by his brother-in-law, King Conrad III. The places within this landholding all lay in the archdeaconry of the Mainz Cathedral Provost's office, and thereby likely in the Nahegau. In the east, it bordered on Saint Peter's Parish, Bacharach, to which Rheinböllen definitely belonged, at least ecclesiastically.
After Hermann von Stahleck's death, Emperor Barbarossa transferred the County Palatine in 1156 to his stepbrother Konrad, who also held rights to estates in the Nahegau, to which Rheinböllen also almost certainly belonged.
The oldest known document about the town is a lease, dated 1 May 1309, concluded by Johann von dem Stein, serving as the Burgrave at Böckelheim, and the Schultheiß of Rheinböllen. The Burgrave held two fields in the Bischofsfeld as a Palatine fief, and transferred them to the municipality.
Rheinböllen was apparently a town once before. In 1316, the settlement was recorded as being an oppidum, the Latin word used in Roman times for any centre resembling a town, and in historical records made as late as the 13th and 14th centuries, it was still appearing in this meaning, describing mediaeval towns.