granted him a lifelong annual payment of 100 marks.
Hirschhorn was endowed with the right to have a weekly market in 1404. The oldest town seal dates from 25 July 1406. It was in that year that Hans V, together with his brothers, founded the Carmelite monastery with its Church of the Annunciation on the slope below the castle. A first enlargement of the town (Vorstadt) is mentioned as early as in 1413. The inhabitants of the neighbouring villages sought protection within the precincts of the fortified town, so Ersheim, Ramsau, Krautlach and Weidenau were soon abandoned. Ersheim only consisted of the Ziegelh�tte ("brick plant", built in 1553) and the church compound for centuries.
Between 1522 and 1529, the Knights of Hirschhorn converted to Protestantism. They quarrelled with the Carmelites and closed their monastery down in 1543. In 1555 the town was hit by the Plague, and in 1556 a devastating fire destroyed nearly the whole of the oldest part of the town (Hinterst�dtchen). Extensive flooding aggravated by thawing ice occurred in 1565.
While Hirschhorn was not involved in the German Peasants' War, major changes were brought about by the Thirty Years' War. After the Lords of Hirschhorn had died out with the demise of Frederic III in September 1632 - he had fled to Heilbronn in order to escape the turmoil of the war - the castle and the town passed to the archdiocese of Mainz. The Plague of 1635 decimated the population. After the end of Swedish occupation in 1636, Hirschhorn was mortgaged to an official at the court of the Elector of Cologne, Rudolf Raitz von Frentz. The population, which had already been afflicted by the war, had to suffer exploitation and impoverishment. The Carmelites moved back into their monastery. Around the middle of the seventeenth century Hirschhorn's population only amounted to a fifth (c. 200) of what it had been at the beginning of that century. Following the Peace of Westphalia (1648), new inhabitants from
