Rhineland, Texas
Rhineland is located within the physiographic region known as the Texas Rolling Plains approximately south of the Brazos River at the intersection of farm-to-market roads 267 and 2534 in southeastern Knox County. It is situated to the southeast of the county seat of Benjamin, north of Munday and north of Abilene.
Rhine
By the 6th century, the Rhine was within the borders of Francia.
In the 9th, it formed part of the border between Middle and Western Francia,
but in the 10th century, it was fully within the Holy Roman Empire, flowing through Swabia, Franconia and Lower Lorraine. The mouths of the Rhine, in the county of Holland, fell to the Burgundian Netherlands in the 15th century; Holland remained contentious territory throughout the European wars of religion and the eventual collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, when the length of the Rhine fell to the First French Empire and its client states. The Alsace on the left banks of the Upper Rhine was sold to Burgundy by Archduke Sigismund of Austria in 1469 and eventually fell to France in the Thirty Years' War. The numerous historic castles in Rhineland-Palatinate attest to the importance of the river as a commercial route.
Since the Peace of Westphalia, the Upper Rhine formed a contentious border between France and Germany. Establishing "natural borders" on the Rhine was a long-term goal of French foreign policy, since the Middle Ages, though the language border was – and is – far more to the west. French leaders, such as Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte, tried with varying degrees of success to annex lands west of the Rhine. The Confederation of the Rhine was established by Napoleon, as a French client state, in 1806 and lasted until 1814, during which time it served as a significant source of resources and military manpower for the First French Empire. In 1840, the Rhine crisis, prompted by French prime minister Adolphe Thiers desire to reinstate the Rhine as a natural border, led to a diplomatic crisis and a wave of nationalism in Germany.