The Valley of the Lower Mosel and the Hunsrück Plateau were a domain dominated by the ancient ecclesiastical authority of the Prince-Archbishops of Trier. As Electors of the Holy Roman Empire they enjoyed significant prestige though little actual power, as most of their realm was sparsely inhabited mountainous highlands. The region today is know for its dramatic and sweeping vistas of the Mosel, its fantastic wine, and its countless castles and villages in the remote highlands.
The Moselle (German: Mosel) rises in the Vosges of France, flows through Luxembourg, and enters Germany at Perl before making its 245 km serpentine journey to the Rhine at Koblenz. The German stretch is defined by one of Europe's most distinctive wine landscapes: slate hillsides angled at up to 65 degrees, planted almost exclusively with Riesling, producing wines of extraordinary minerality and age-worthiness. Roman soldiers planted the first vines on these slopes, and the trade that followed helped build the first great city north of the Alps.
That city is Trier — Augusta Treverorum — founded around 16 BC and grown by the 4th century into the western capital of the Roman Empire. Under Constantine the Great, who resided here from 306–316 AD, Trier rivaled Rome itself in scale and ambition. Its surviving monuments are extraordinary and unique in Germany: the Porta Nigra, the best-preserved Roman city gate north of the Alps; the Konstantin-Basilika, an intact imperial throne room still standing to its original height; the Imperial Baths and Barbarian Baths; the Roman Bridge; and the Amphitheatre — the densest concentration of Roman structures in Germany, collectively recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The adjacent Rheinisches Landesmuseum holds the finest collection of Gallo-Roman art in the country, including the famous Trier gold mosaic and elaborate funerary monuments from the surrounding villas.
The oldest visible human layer is Celtic. The Hunsrück was the territory of the Treveri, the Belgic Celtic tribe whose name gave the Roman city its name — Civitas Treverorum, city of the Treveri. Hundreds of Iron Age burial mounds (Hügelgräber) are distributed across the forest floor, many still unexcavated, while the network of Roman roads connecting Trier to the Rhine fortifications crossed the plateau in traceable straight lines still visible in the modern road pattern. The Donnersberg to the east, just beyond the Nahe, is one of the largest Celtic hillforts in central Europe, commanding views across the Rhine plain that made it a natural stronghold.
In the Holy Roman Empire, the Hunsrück was divided between the Electorate of Trier, the County of Sponheim, and the Wildgraviate — one of the most unusual and obscure lordships in the Empire, whose counts styled themselves "Wild Counts" in reference to the untamed forest land they ruled. This fragmentation produced the same density of small hilltop ruins, fortified church towers, and isolated market towns that characterizes the Eifel to the north, but in a landscape so forested and undisturbed that many of the medieval sites remain unknown to all but local hikers.
