Bad Kreuznach is also officially a große kreisangehörige Stadt ("large town belonging to a district"), meaning that it does not have the district-level powers that kreisfreie Städte ("district-free towns/cities") enjoy.

Bad Kreuznach lies between the Hunsrück, Rhenish Hesse and the North Palatine Uplands, some 14 kilometres (8.7 mi) as the crow flies south-southwest of Bingen am Rhein.

Kreuznach lay on the Roman road that led from Metz (Divodurum), by way of the Saar crossing near Dillingen-Pachten (Contiomagus) and the Vicus Wareswald, near Tholey to Bingen am Rhein (Bingium).

In the course of measures to shore up the Imperial border against the Germanic Alemannic tribes who kept making incursions across the limes into the Empire, an auxiliary castrum was built in 370 under Emperor Valentinian I.

[10] On the other hand, the Crucinaha in Emperor Otto III's documents from 1000 (which granted the rights to hold a yearly market and to strike coins)[11] is today thought to refer to Christnach, an outlying centre of Waldbillig, a town nowadays in Luxembourg.

About 1017, Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor enfeoffed his wife Cunigunde's grandnephew, Count Eberhard V of Nellenburg, with the noble estate of Kreuznach and the Villa Schwabenheim belonging thereto.

After his death, King Henry IV supposedly donated the settlement of Kreuznach to the High Foundation of Speyer in 1065,[14] who then transferred it shortly after 1105 – presumably as a fief – to the Counts of Sponheim.

Early knowledge of the town of Kreuznach is documented in one line of a song by the minstrel Tannhäuser from the 13th century, which is preserved in handwriting by Hans Sachs: "vur creűczenach rint aűch die na".

In 1418, King Sigismund of Luxembourg enfeoffed Count Johann V of Sponheim-Starkenburg (about 1359–1437) with the yearly market, the mint, the Jews at Kreuznach and the right of escort, as far as Gensingen on the Trier-Mainz highway.

In that same year, Elector Palatine Philip bestowed ownership of the saltz- und badbronnen ("salty and bathing springs") upon his cooks Conrad Brunn and Matthes von Nevendorf.

On 24 August 1495,[18] there was another uprising of the townsfolk, but this one was directed at Kreuznach's Palatine Amtmann, Albrecht V Göler von Ravensburg, who had refused to release a prisoner against the posting of a bond.

[21] On 31 March 1283 (2 Nisan 5043) in Kreuznach (קרויצנאך), Rabbi Ephraim bar Elieser ha-Levi – apparently as a result of a judicial sentence – was broken on the wheel.

In 1336, Emperor Louis the Bavarian allowed Count Johann II of Sponheim-Kreuznach to permanently keep 60 house-owning freed Jews at Kreuznach or elsewhere on his lands ("… daß er zu Creützenach oder anderstwoh in seinen landen 60 haußgesäsß gefreyter juden ewiglich halten möge …").

By 1382 at the latest, the Jew Gottschalk (who died sometime between 1409 and 1421)[25] from Katzenelnbogen was living in Kreuznach and owned the house at the corner of Lämmergasse and Mannheimerstraße 12 (later: Löwensteiner Hof) near the Eiermarkt ("Egg Market").

In 1525, Louis V, Elector Palatine allowed Meïr Levi[28] to settle for, at first, twelve years in Kreuznach, to organise the money market there, to receive visits, to lay out his own burial plot and to deal in medicines.

[31] The Yiddish name for Kreuznach was צלם־מקום (abbreviated צ״מ), variously rendered in Latin script as Zelem-Mochum or Celemochum (with the initial Z or C intended to transliterate the letter "צ", as they would be pronounced /ts/ in German), which literally meant "Image Place", for pious Jews wished to avoid the term Kreuz ("cross").

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.

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,[41] 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").

On 13 May 1725, after a cloudburst and hailstorm, Kreuznach was stricken by an extreme flood in which 31 people lost their lives, some 300 or 400 head of cattle drowned, two houses were utterly destroyed and many damaged and remaining parts of the town wall fell in.

[48] Taking part at the founding of the Masonic Lodge Zum wiedererbauten Tempel der Bruderliebe ("To the Rebuilt Temple of Brotherly Love") in Worms in 1781 were also Freemasons from Kreuznach.

In October 1792, French Revolutionary troops under General Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine occupied the land around Kreuznach, remaining there until 28 March 1793.

On the occasion of Napoleon's victory in the Battle of Austerlitz a celebratory Te Deum was held at the Catholic churches in January 1806 on Bishop of Aachen Marc-Antoine Berdolet's orders (Kreuznach was part of his diocese from 1801 to 1821).

In 1809, the Kreuznach Masonic Lodge "Les amis réunis de la Nahe et du Rhin" was founded by van Reccum, which at first lasted only until 1814.

In Kreuznach, Marx set down considerable portions of his manuscript Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie) in 1843.

At the spa house on 19 December 1917, General Mustafa Kemal Pasha – better known as Atatürk ("Father of the Turks") and later president of a strictly secular Turkey – the Kaiser, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff all met for talks.

In 1958, President of France Charles de Gaulle and Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer agreed in Bad Kreuznach to an institutionalisation of the special relations between the two countries, which in 1963 resulted in the Élysée Treaty.

In the course of administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate, the hitherto self-administering municipalities of Bosenheim, Planig, Ippesheim (all three of which had belonged until then to the Bingen district) and Winzenheim were amalgamated on 7 June 1969 with Bad Kreuznach.

The Sport Badge is conferred upon sportsmen or sportswomen at three levels: A promoter or person working in a sport-related field must be active in an unpaid capacity for at least 25 years to receive this award.

The economic structure is thus characterised mainly by small and medium enterprises, but also some big businesses like the tire manufacturer Michelin, the machine builder KHS, the Meffert Farbwerke (dyes, lacquers, plasters, protective coatings) and the Jos.

Since it moved away to Bingen, Bad Kreuznach has been offering collegelike training for aspirant winemakers and agricultural technologists with the DLR (Dienstleistungszentrum Ländlicher Raum).