The area around what is now the town of Sankt Goar was already settled in Roman times. The name in the Early Middle Ages was Wochara, after a short brook emptying into the Rhine here.
The name by which the town goes today is from Goar of Aquitaine, who came to live on the site where the town now stands during Frankish, Merovingian King Childebert I�s reign (511-538). Goar came as a young clergyman (actually, a monk) from Aquitaine in the southwest of France and at first lived as a hermit in a cave on the Rhine. With leave from the Bishop of Trier, he worked as a missionary to the local people. He was well known for his great hospitality, particularly towards the Rhine boatmen. Later, he built on the site where the town now stands a hospice and a chapel. Many legends gathered about him. After his death, about 575, Goar�s grave became a pilgrimage site and the place was named after him. Frankish King Pepin the Younger transferred the hospice and chapel in 765 to the Abbot of the Benedictine Pr�m Abbey as a personal benefice. From this grew the Sankt Goar Canonical Foundation, witnessed as early as the late 11th century.
The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that �a small church� was dedicated to Goar of Aquitaine in 1768 �in the little town on the banks of the Rhine which bears his name (St. Goar).� It is also reported that Charlemagne built a church over the site of Goar�s hermitage. It is around this church that the town of Sankt Goar grew on the left bank of the Rhine between Wesel and Boppard.
Beginning in 1190, the town was under military protection and the jurisdiction of the Counts of Katzenelnbogen, the monastery V�gte, who had taken ownership. In 1245, Count Diether V of Katzenelnbogen built the castle, Burg Rheinfels. When the last of the Counts of Katzenelnbogen died in 1479, Sankt Goar passed to the Landgraviate of Hesse. On 1 November 1527, Adam Krafft, who would later be a professor of theology, began to introduce the Reformation on a
