KREUZNACH (CREUZNACH)  , a town and watering-place of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine province, situated on the Nahe, a tributary of the Rhine, 9 M. by rail S. of Bingerbriick . Pop . (1900), 21,321 . It consists of the old town on the right bank of the river, the new town on the left, and the Bade Insel (bath island), connected by a fine stone bridge . The town has two Evangelical and three Roman Catholic churches, a gymnasium, a commercial school and a hospital . There is a collection of Roman and medieval antiquities, among which is preserved a fine Roman mosaic discovered in 1893 . On the Bade Insel is the Kurhaus (1872) and also the chief spring, the Elisabethquelle, impregnated with iodine and bromine, and prescribed for scrofulous, bronchial and rheumatic disorders . The chief industries are marble-polishing and the manufacture of leather, glass and tobacco . Vines are cultivated on the neighbouring hills, and there is a trade in wine and corn . The earliest mention of the springs of Kreuznach occurs in 1478, but it was only in the early part of the 19th century that Dr Prieger, to whom there is a statue in the town, brought them into prominence . Now the annual number of visitors amounts to several thousands . Kreuznach was evidently a Roman town, as the ruins of a Roman fortification, the Heidenmauer, and various antiquities have been found in its immediate neighbour-hood .

In the gth century it was known as Cruciniacum, and it had a

palace of the Carolingian kings . In 1o65 the emperor Henry IV. presented it to the bishopric of Spires; in the 13th century it obtained civic privileges and passed to the counts of Sponheim; in 1416 it became part of the Palatinate . The town was ceded to Prussia in 1814 . In 1689 the French reduced the strong castle of Kauzenberg to the ruin which now stands on a hill above Kreuznach . See Schneegans, Historisch-topographische Beschreibung Kreuznachs and seiner Umgebung (7th ed., 1904) ; Engelmann, Kreuznach and seine Heilquellen (8th ed., 189o) ; and Stabel, Das Solbad Kreuznach file Arste dargestellt (Kreuznach, 1887) .