The Thirty Years' War almost erased the place. As the war wound to its long, exhausted close, Swedish and Hessian troops besieged imperial soldiers who had dug in inside Rheine. On the nights of 20 and 21 September 1647, and again on 19 October, glowing cannonballs arced over the town walls and set the wooden houses alight. By the time the embers cooled, 365 houses were gone and almost the entire city had burned. Rheine rebuilt because the road and the ford had not moved. In 1803 it briefly enjoyed a strange political status as the capital of the tiny Sovereign Principality of Rheina-Wolbeck, all 556 square kilometres of it, ruled by the House of Looz-Corswarem. The principality was swallowed by the Grand Duchy of Berg, then by the Kingdom of Prussia.

What changed Rheine permanently was the Industrial Revolution. The textile industry took root along the Ems and grew into the city's economic backbone, sustaining it through most of the 19th and 20th centuries. The town stretched outward; on 1 April 1927, about ten thousand inhabitants of surrounding villages - Bentlage, Wadelheim, Dutum and others - were folded into Rheine, nearly tripling the city area in a single administrative stroke. Today the textile dynasties have given way to engineering firms and services, but their mark survives in the grand neo-Romanesque churches their donations built, and in district names that still chart the old industrial geography. Eschendorf, Dorenkamp and Schotthock are the biggest districts now; tiny Catenhorn is the smallest.

The same geography that made Rheine valuable to Frankish soldiers made it valuable, twelve centuries later, to Allied bomber crews. The Dortmund-Ems Canal passed through; major rail lines converged. During the Second World War, large-scale raids on 5 October 1944 and again on 21 March 1945 each killed more than two hundred people and tore through whole districts of the city. Before that, the Jewish community of Rheine had been deported, as in countless other German towns - a loss the city's modern memorials still mark. The fighting reached the streets on 2 April 1945, when units of the 157th British Infantry Brigade - the 5th Battalion of the King's Own Scottish Borderers and the 7th Battalion of the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) - took Rheine after sharp resistance. Less than a year later, on 10 February 1946, the Ems delivered its own postscript: the highest flood ever recorded on the river drowned wide stretches of the still-shattered town.

Today Rheine is the largest city in the district of Steinfurt - a place of about seventy-five thousand people, served by its own railway stations on the Münster-Rheine line and by Münster Osnabrück Airport thirty kilometres to the northwest. The city celebrated the 675th anniversary of its town charter in 2002 with the kind of measured pride that long-suffering places allow themselves. Among the names Rheine has sent into the wider world are the philosopher Josef Pieper, born in nearby Elte in 1904 (now a district of Rheine) and one of the most respected Catholic thinkers of the 20th century; the architect Josef Paul Kleihues, the equestrian Bettina Hoy, and the beach volleyball Olympic champion Jonas Reckermann. The Ems still curls past Eschendorf. The neo-Romanesque tower of St Anthony's Basilica - 102.5 metres of late-historicist ambition - still presides over the right bank, the tallest church tower in the Münsterland, exactly as the old textile barons intended.