Municipal core and noble estates: The once Free Imperial Village’s old downtown core is made up of the triad of marketplace, manorial estate and temple estate that Saint Martin’s Evangelical Church, surrounded by a defensive wall, borders, and on whose lands once stood the Frankish administrative centre, the Carolingian royal palace and the Ottonian royal court. Baroque noble estates define the streetscape and recall a mediaeval epoch in Nierstein’s local history when some two dozen noble families lived here as Imperially immediate fiefholders who shaped events by holding the office of "Vogt", "Schultheiß" or "Burgmannen", as "Schöffen" (roughly “lay jurists”) at the knightly court or the ecclesiastical court. The estates were and still are mostly linked together and with the royal court through a branching underground system of defence works. To be stressed from among these are the former noble houses of the Barons of Knebel or Hundt von Saulheim (oldest timber-frame house) as well as those of the families Knebel von Katzenelnbogen and Waldbott von Bassenheim, the "Metternich’sche Hof" (oldest estate complex), the "Haxthäuser Hof" (a Baroque manor belonging to the family Haxthausen), the gateway arch and wing of the "Schloss von der Leyen" and the "Dalberg-Herding’sche Schloss" (in the house chapel there are wall and ceiling paintings by Jakob Götzenberger in Nazarene style worth seeing).