page_title: Grünstadt
section_title: 1500 to 1700
hierarchical_section_title: Grünstadt / History / 1500 to 1700
caption_attribution_description: Grünstadter Gesangbuch, Titelblatt 1757
context_page_description: Grünstadt is a town in the Bad Dürkheim district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany with roughly 13,200 inhabitants. It does not belong to any Verbandsgemeinde – a kind of collective municipality – but is nonetheless the administrative seat of the Verbandsgemeinde of Leiningerland.
context_section_description: From 1481 to 1505, Grünstadt belonged to the Palatinate, and then once again to the Leiningens, who in 1549 were also enfeoffed with the Glandern Monastery's holdings there (the southern part around Saint Martin's). It was not until 1735 that the Leiningens managed to acquire this property formerly belonging to the Glandern or Lungenfeld Monastery as their own.
  In 1556, Emperor Karl V granted the municipality market rights, raising it from village to market town. The year before this one, Count Philipp I of Leiningen had introduced the obligatory practice of the Lutheran faith in his county and forbidden the other Christian denominations, namely Roman Catholicism and Reformed.
  In 1573, Henry III of France, then King of Poland, spent the night in Grünstadt.
  In 1596 and 1597, the Plague raged in Grünstadt, killing more than 250 inhabitants in a short time.
  Beginning in 1610, the Counts were having coins struck in Grünstadt, and established a mint.
  In the time of the Thirty Years' War, the town was spared any major destruction; however, the Plague once again beset the townsfolk between 1625 and 1629. Many of them died or left the area. For a time, Spanish soldiers were quartered in Grünstadt.
  In 1673, Count Ludwig Eberhardt of Leiningen converted to the Catholic faith and thereafter granted Catholics tolerance in his county. He had the Capuchins come there, who soon founded a monastery from which arose today's Catholic parish church and the monastery building.
  In 1689, in the Nine Years' War (known in Germany as the Pfälzischer Erbfolgekrieg, or War of the Palatine Succession), the French burnt the town down, which is why there are only a few traces of pre-Baroque architecture in town.
  It was only in 1689 that the long overdue reform to the Gregorian Calendar was implemented in Grünstadt and the rest of the county, heretofore having been boycotted for religious reasons because it was instituted by Pope Gregory XIII.
caption: Lutheran songbook, Grünstadt 1757
exif: {}