BOPPARD  , a

town of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine province, on the left bank of the Rhine, 12 M . S. of Coblenz on the main line to Cologne . Pop . (1900) 58o6 . It is an old town still partly surrounded by medieval walls, and its most noteworthy buildings are the Roman Catholic parish church (12th and 13th centuries); the Carmelite church (1318), the former castle, now used for administrative offices; the Evangelical church (1851, enlarged in 1887); and the former Benedictine monastery of the Marienberg, founded 1123 and since 1839 a hydropathic establishment, crowning a hill loo ft. above the Rhine . Boppard is a favourite tourist centre, and being less pent in by hills than many other places in this part of the picturesque gorge of the Rhine, has in modern times become a residential town . It has some comparatively insignificant industries, such as tanning and tobacco manufacture; its direct trade is in wine and fruit . Boppard (Baudobriga) was founded by the Romans; under the Merovingian dynasty it became a royal residence . During the middle ages it was a considerable centre of commerce and shipping, and under the Hohenstaufen emperors was raised to the rank of a free imperial city . In 1312, however, the emperor Henry VII. pledged the town to his brother Baldwin, archbishop-elector of Trier, and it remained in the possession of the electors until it was absorbed by France during the Revolutionary epoch . It was assigned by the congress of Vienna in 1815 to Prussia .