INGELHEIM (Ober-Ingelheim and Nieder-Ingelheim), the name of two contiguous market-towns of Germany, in the grand-duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, on the Selz, near its confluence with the Rhine, 9 m. W.N.W. of Mainz on the railway to Coblenz. Ober-Ingelheim, formerly an imperial town, is still surrounded by walls. It has an Evangelical church with painted windows representing scenes in the life of Charlemagne, a Roman Catholic church and a synagogue. Its chief industry is the manufacture of red wine. Pop. (1900) 3402. Nieder-Ingelheim has an Evangelical and a Roman Catholic church, and, in addition to wine, manufactories of paper, chemicals, cement and malt. Pop. 3435.
Nieder-Ingelheim is, according to one tradition, the birthplace of Charlemagne, and it possesses the ruins of an old palace built by that emperor between 768 and 774. The building contained one hundred marble pillars, and was also adorned with sculptures and mosaics sent from Ravenna by Pope Adrian I. It was extended by Frederick Barbarossa, and was burned down in 1270, being restored by the emperor Charles IV. in 1354. Having passed into the possession of the elector palatine of the Rhine, the building suffered much damage during a war in 1462, the Thirty Years’ War, and the French invasion in 1689. Only few remains of it are now standing; but of the pillars, several are in Paris, one is in the museum at Wiesbaden and another on the Schillerplatz in Mainz. Inside its boundaries there is the restored Remigius Kirche, apparently dating from the time of Frederick I.
See Hilz, Der Reichspalast zu Ingelheim (Ober-Ingelheim, 1868); and Clemen, “Der Karolingische Kaiserpalast zu Ingelheim,” in Westdeutsche Zeitschrift, Band ix. (Trier, 1890).