Lake Constance
Lake Constance refers to three bodies of water on the Rhine at the northern foot of the Alps: Upper Lake Constance, Lower Lake Constance, and a connecting stretch of the Rhine, called the Seerhein. These waterbodies lie within the Lake Constance Basin in the Alpine Foreland through which the Rhine flows. The nearby Mindelsee is not considered part of Lake Constance.
The lake is situated where Germany, Switzerland, and Austria meet. Its shorelines lie in the German states of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria; the Swiss cantons of St. Gallen, Thurgau, and Schaffhausen; and the Austrian state of Vorarlberg. The actual locations of the country borders within the lake are disputed, with Austria, Germany and Switzerland all holding different opinions on the matter.
The Alpine Rhine forms, in its original course, the Austro-Swiss border and flows into the lake from the south. The High Rhine flows westbound out of the lake and forms the German-Swiss border as far as to the city of Basel. The Leiblach forms the Austria–Germany border east of the lake.
The most populous towns on the Upper Lake are Constance, Friedrichshafen, Bregenz, Lindau, Überlingen and Kreuzlingen. The largest town on the Lower Lake is Radolfzell. The largest islands are Reichenau in the Lower Lake, and Lindau and Mainau in the Upper Lake. Bodanrück, a large peninsula, separates the Upper and Lower Lake.
While in English and in the Romance languages, the lake is named after the city of Constance, the German name derives from the village of Bodman, in the northwesternmost corner of the lake.
Description
Lake Constance is located along the Rhine between the Alpine Rhine, its main tributary, and the High Rhine, its outflow. It is the third largest freshwater lake by surface area in Central and Western Europe, after Lake Geneva and Lake Balaton.It is long, and, nearly at its widest point. It covers about, and is above sea level. Its greatest depth is, exactly in the middle of the Upper Lake. Its volume is about.
The lake has two parts. The main east section, called Obersee or "Upper Lake", covers about, including its northwestern arm, the Überlinger See, and the smaller west section, called Untersee or "Lower Lake", with an area of about.
The connection between these two lakes is the Seerhein. Geographically, usually it is not considered to be part of the lake, but a very short river.
The Lower Lake Constance is loosely divided into three sections around the Island of Reichenau. The two German parts, the Gnadensee north of the island and north of the peninsula of Mettnau, and the Zeller See, south of Radolfzell and to the northwest of the Reichenau island, and the mainly Swiss Rheinsee – not to be mistaken for the Seerhein at its start – to the south of the island and with its southwestern arm leading to its effluent in Stein am Rhein.
The water of the regulated Alpine Rhine flows into the lake in the southeast near Bregenz, Austria, then through the Upper Lake Constance hardly targeting the Überlinger See, into the Seerhein in the town of Konstanz, then through the Rheinsee virtually without feeding both German parts of the Lower Lake, and finally feeds the start of the High Rhine in Swiss town Stein am Rhein.
The lake itself is an important source of drinking water for southwestern Germany.
The culminating point of the lake's drainage basin is the Swiss peak Piz Russein of the Tödi massif of the Glarus Alps at above sea level. It starts with the creek Aua da Russein.
History
Lake Constance was formed by the Rhine Glacier during the Quaternary glaciation ice age and is a Zungenbecken or Tongue lake. After the end of the last glacial period, about 10,000 years ago, the Obersee and Untersee still formed a single lake. The downward erosion of the High Rhine caused the lake level to gradually sink and a sill, the Konstanzer Schwelle, to emerge.The Rhine, the Bregenzer Ach, and the Dornbirner Ach carry sediments from the Alps to the lake, thus gradually decreasing the depth and reducing the extension of the lake in the southeast.
In antiquity, the two lakes had different names; later, for reasons which are unknown, they came to have the same name.
In the 19th century, there were five different local time zones around Lake Constance. Constance, belonging to the Grand Duchy of Baden, adhered to Karlsruhe time, Friedrichshafen used the time of the Duchy of Württemberg, in Lindau, the Bavarian Munich time was observed, and Bregenz used Prague time, while the Swiss shore used Berne time. One would have needed to travel only to visit five time zones. Given the amount of trade and traffic over Lake Constance, this led to serious confusion. Public clocks in harbors used three different clock faces, depending on the destinations offered by the boat companies. In 1892, all German territories used CET, the Austrian railways had already introduced CET the previous year and Switzerland followed in 1894. Because traffic timetables had not been yet updated, CET became the sole valid time around and on Lake Constance in 1895.
Name
The earliest recorded reference to the lakes is by Roman geographer Pomponius Mela around AD 43, calling the upper lake Lacus Venetus and the lower lake Lacus Acronius, the Rhine passing through both. Around AD 75, the naturalist Pliny the Elder called them both Lacus Raetiae Brigantinus after the main Roman town on the lake, Brigantium. This name is associated with the Celtic Brigantii who lived here, although it is not clear whether the place was named after the tribe or the inhabitants of the region were named after their main settlement. Ammianus Marcellinus later used the form Lacus Brigantiae.The current German name of Bodensee derives from the place name Bodman, which probably originally derived from the Old High German bodamon which meant "on the soils", indicating a place on level terrain by the lake. This place, situated at the west end of Lake Überlingen, had a more supraregional character for a certain period in the early Middle Ages as a Frankish imperial palace, Alamannian ducal seat and mint, which is why the name may have been transferred to the lake. From 833 or 834, in Latin sources, the name appears in its Latinised form lacus potamicus. Therefore, the name actually derived from the Bodman Pfalz was wrongly assumed by monastic scholars like Walahfrid Strabo to be derived from the Greek word potamos for "river" and meant "river lake". They may also have been influenced by the fact that the Rhine flowed through the lake.
Wolfram von Eschenbach describes it in Middle High German as the Bodemensee or Bodemsee which has finally evolved into the present German name, Bodensee. The name may be linked to that of the Bodanrück, the hill range between Lake Überlingen and the Lower Lake, and the history of the House of Bodman.
The German name of the lake, Bodensee, has been adopted by many other languages, for example: Dutch: Bodenmeer, Danish: Bodensøen, Norwegian: Bodensjøen, Swedish: Bodensjön, Finnish: Bodenjärvi, Russian: Боденское озеро, Polish: Jezioro Bodeńskie, Czech: Bodamské jezero, Slovak: Bodamské jazero, Hungarian: Bodeni-tó, Serbo-Croatian: Bodensko jezero, Albanian: Liqeni i Bodenit.
After the Council of Constance in the 15th century, the alternative name Lacus Constantinus was used in the Romance language area. This name, which had been attested as early as 1187 in the form Lacus Constantiensis, came from the town of Konstanz at the outflow of the Rhine from the Obersee, whose original name, Constantia, was in turn derived from the Roman emperor, Constantius Chlorus. Hence the French: Lac de Constance, Italian: Lago di Costanza, Portuguese: Lago de Constança, Spanish: Lago de Constanza, Romanian: Lacul Constanța, Greek: Λίμνη της Κωνσταντίας – Limni tis Konstantias. The Arabic, بحيرة كونستانس buħaira Konstans and the Turkish, Konstanz gölü, probably go back to the French form of the name. Even in Romance-influenced English the name "Lake Constance" gained a foothold and was then exported into other languages such as Hebrew: ימת קונסטנץ yamat Konstanz and Swahili: Ziwa la Konstanz. In many languages both forms exist in parallel e.g. Romansh: Lai da Constanza and Lai Bodan, Esperanto: Konstanca Lago and Bodenlago.
The poetic name, "Swabian Sea", was adopted by authors of the early modern era and the Enlightenment from ancient authors, possibly Tacitus. However, this assumption was based on an error : the Romans sometimes used the name Mare Suebicum for the Baltic Sea, not Lake Constance. In times when the Romans had located the so-called "Suebi", then an Elbe Germanic tribe near a sea, this was understandable. The authors of the Early Modern Period overlooked this and adopted the name for the largest lake in the middle of the former Duchy of Swabia, which also included parts of today's Switzerland. Today the name Swabian Sea is only used jocularly as a hyperbolic term for Lake Constance.
Key facts
No Paleolithic finds have been made in the immediate vicinity of the lake, because the region of Lake Constance was long covered by the Rhine Glacier. The discovery of stone tools indicate that hunters and gatherers of the Mesolithic period frequented the area without settling, however. Only hunting camps have been confirmed. The earliest Neolithic farmers, who belonged to the Linear Pottery culture, also left no traces behind, because the Alpine foreland lay away from the routes along which they had spread during the 6th millennium BC. This changed only in the middle and late Neolithic when shore settlements were established, the so-called pile dwelling and wetland settlements, which have now been uncovered mainly on Lake Überlingen, the Constance Hopper and on the Obersee. At Unteruhldingen, a pile dwelling village has been reconstructed, and now forms an open air museum.In 2015, a 20 km line of about 170 man-made dated in the Neolithic period or early Bronze Age was discovered on the south-west shore of the lake between Bottighofen and Romanshorn.
Grave finds from Singen am Hohentwiel date to the beginning of the Early Bronze Age and shore settlements were repeatedly built during the Neolithic Period and the Bronze Age. During the following Iron Age the settlement history is interrupted. The settlement of the shore of Lake Constance during the Hallstatt period is attested by grave mounds, which today are usually found in forests where they have been protected from the destruction by agriculture. Since the late Hallstatt period, the peoples living on Lake Constance are referred to as the Celts. During the La Tène period from 450 BC, the population density decreases, as can be deduced partly due from the fact that no more grave mounds were built. For the first time, written reports on Lake Constance have survived. Thus, we learn that the Helvetians settled by the lake in the south, the Rhaetians in the area of the Alpine Rhine Valley and the Vindelici in the north-east. The most important places on the lake were Bregenz and today's Constance.
In the course of the Roman Alpine campaign of 16/15 BC, the Lake Constance region was integrated into the Roman Empire. During the campaign, there was also supposed to have been a battle on Lake Constance. The geographer, Pomponius Mela, makes the first mention in 43 AD of Lake Constance as two lakes – the Lacus Venetus and the Lacus Acronius – with the Rhine flowing through both. Pliny the Elder referred to Lake Constance as Lacus Brigantinus for the first time. The most important Roman site was Bregenz, which soon became subject to Roman municipal law and later became the seat of the Prefect of the Lake Constance fleet. The Romans were also in Lindau, but settled only on the hills around Lindau as the lakeshore was swampy. Other Roman towns were Constantia and Arbor Felix.
After the borders of the Roman Empire were drawn back to the Rhine boundary in the 3rd century BC, the Alemanni gradually settled on the north shore of Lake Constance and, later, on the south bank as well. After the introduction of Christianity, the cultural significance of the region grew as a result of the founding of Reichenau Abbey and the Bishopric of Constance. Under the rule of the Hohenstaufens, Imperial Diets were held by Lake Constance. In Constance, too, a treaty was drawn up between the Hohenstaufen emperor and the Lombard League. Lake Constance also played an important role as a trading post for goods being traded between German and Italian states.
During the Thirty Years' War, there were various conflicts over the control of the region during the Lake War.
After the War of the Second Coalition, which also affected the region and during which Austrian and French flotillas operated on Lake Constance, there was a reorganisation of state relationships.