If only it hadn't been so cold and the Rhine hadn't frozen over on New Year's Eve 407: who knows whether the Romans wouldn't have been able to hold out longer in the city then called Mogontiacum.

As it was, the provincial metropolis fell into the hands of the Vandals, Suevi, Burgundians and Alans, who were advancing together in this case.

After that, the river was no longer the outer border of the Western Roman Empire, which was already falling apart more and more, but above all a fairly long waterway with numerous tributaries, which all together allowed trade - either with Italy or with the people of England and today's Scandinavia - to flourish .

Markus Schug

Correspondent Rhein-Main-Süd.

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Even the Frisians, expanding upriver as industrious businessmen, came to the place where the Main and Rhine meet in the seventh century to form a small community that knew how to buy and sell.

The special exhibition of the same name in the City History Museum in the Mainz Citadel shows how much the Rhine has shaped the “City on the River” for more than two millennia.

Previously only ship bridges

Right at the beginning of the show, which, according to curator Hedwig Brüchert, was conceived from both a thematic and a chronological perspective, the visitor encounters the Roman period – with particular reference to the Mainz Roman ships discovered in 1981/82 during excavation work for a new hotel on Löhrstrasse and Rheinstrasse .

A staff dagger blade from the Bronze Age, which roughly speaking shaped life between 2300 and 750 BC, makes it clear that history did not just begin with the Romans, who set up a first legionary camp under their general Drusus in Mogontiacum around 12 BC: this on the high ground of today's Kästrich.

And because it was customary early on to entrust a sinking sacrifice to the river god,

However, some things that gave the Golden City its splendor in long-gone eras, such as the Middle Ages, have disappeared forever.

The old and once unusually large department store on Brand, for example, where all traders who passed Mainz by ship had to display their goods for at least three days.

The names of the former city gates, such as the wine and fish gates, are also evidence that business on the banks of the river must have been booming for a long time.

Until the invention of steam navigation, which conquered the river in the 19th century, the rafting harbors of Mombach, Kastel and Kostheim were still regularly moored by huge convoys, which, with their wooden landscapes up to 600 meters long and crews of up to 500, made their way to the sawmills they headed for.

Because the waterway should be kept free as far as possible, since Roman times and until the construction of one of the most beautiful bridges on the Rhine, which was completed in 1885, there were only ship bridges for centuries, which always had to be opened when a boat or barge wanted to pass.

Although there are two railway and two motorway bridges in addition to the central Rhine crossing near Mainz, which was restored in 1950 and has since been called Theodor-Heuss-Bridge, the connection to Wiesbaden could be better.

Even if in the end it would only be enough for a comparatively narrow additional bridge that would only be available to pedestrians, cyclists and maybe even local buses.

The river has always had something separating it to this day.

Nevertheless, the exhibition, for which there is an extensively illustrated catalogue, conveys the image of a city that has benefited greatly from its proximity to the Rhine.

Or as the writer Carl Zuckmayer had his General Harras fervently say in "Des Teufels General": As a hub, transit area and trade route, the Rhine is "the great people's mill, the winepress of Europe".

More information about the special exhibition “Mainz – Stadt am Strom”, which can be visited for three euros on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in the citadel, building D, can be found on the Internet at www.stadtmuseum-mainz.de.