1,600 victims), 1364, 1501/1502, 1608, 1635 (beginning in September) and 1666 (reportedly 1,300 victims). During the 1501 epidemic, the humanist and Palatine prince-raiser Adam Werner von Themar, one of Abbot Trithemius's friends, wrote a poem in Kreuznach about the plague saint, Sebastian. Outside the town, a sickhouse for lepers, the so-called Gutleuthof, was founded on the Gräfenbach down from the village of Hargesheim and had its first documentary mention in 1487. Modern times In the War of the Succession of Landshut against Elector Palatine Philip of the Rhine, both the town and the castle were unsuccessfully besieged for six days by Alexander, Count Palatine of Zweibrücken and William I, Landgrave of Lower Hesse, who then laid the surrounding countryside waste. The Sponheim abbot Johannes Trithemius had brought the monasterial belongings, the library and the archive to safety in Kreuznach. The besieged town was relieved by Electoral Palatinate Captain Hans III, Landschad of Steinach. In 1507, Master Faust assumed the rector's post at the Kreuznach Latin school, which had been secured for him by Franz von Sickingen. On the grounds of allegations of fornication, he fled the town only a short time afterwards, as witnessed by a letter from Johannes Trithemius to Johannes Virdung, in which Virdung was warned about Faust. Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, who spent Whitsun 1508 in Boppard, stayed in Kreuznach in June 1508 and wrote from there to his daughter Duchess Margaret of Savoy. In 1557, the Reformation was introduced into Kreuznach. According to the 1601 Verzeichnis aller Herrlich- und Gerechtigkeiten der Stätt und Dörffer der vorderen Grafschaft Sponheim im Ampt Creutznach ("Directory of All Lordships and Justices of the Towns and Villages of the Further County of Sponheim in the Amt of Kreuznach"), compiled by Electoral Palatinate Oberamtmann Johann von Eltz-Blieskastel-Wecklingen, the town had 807 estates and was the seat of a Hofgericht (lordly court) to which the "free villages" of Waldböckelheim, Wöllstein, Volxheim, Braunweiler, Mandel and Roxheim, which were thus freed from the toll at Kreuznach, had to send Schöffen (roughly "lay jurists"). Thirty Years' War During the Thirty Years' War, Kreuznach was overrun and captured many times by various factions fighting in that war: - In the Siege of Bad Kreuznach the town was taken by the Imperial-Spanish troops of General Marquis Ambrogio Spinola under Wilhelm Ferdinand von Effern. In 1621 Countess Catharina Belgica of Nassau travelled to Kreuznach to see Spinola to