Other divisions · History
The Hanseatic north
158 towns in today's Germany are recorded as members of the medieval Hanseatic League, 126 in the former West, 31 in the former East and 1 in Berlin. The Hanse had no border: 17% of western and 27% of eastern districts have a Hanseatic town.
| Zone | Districts | People | Share | Area |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| District with a Hanseatic town Value: number of medieval Hanseatic towns in the district | 76 | 26 m | 31.2% | 84,435 km² |
| None | 325 | 57.4 m | 68.8% | 273,154 km² |
From the 12th century, long-distance merchants from northern German towns banded together for protection and trade, and from the second half of the 14th century their home towns met at the Hansetag, the first of them held in Lübeck in 1358. At its height the Hanse linked more than 200 towns, mostly around the Baltic and inland roughly as far as a line from Cologne via Erfurt to Kraków, with great offices in Novgorod, Bruges, London and Bergen.
The map shows every district with at least one of the 158 Hanseatic towns. They lie on both sides of the later inner-German border: Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Lüneburg, Cologne, Dortmund, Münster and Soest in the West, Rostock, Wismar, Stralsund, Greifswald, Magdeburg, Halle, Stendal and Salzwedel in the East, and Berlin with its twin town Cölln. North Rhine-Westphalia alone has 92, many of them small towns in Westphalia and the Sauerland: Hochsauerlandkreis has 14, more than any other district.
What the Hanse map shows is a north–south divide, not an East–West one: Saarland, Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria have no Hanseatic town at all. The districts with a Hanseatic town are home to 31% of Germany's people today; those with the most are Hochsauerlandkreis (14), Soest (9) and Höxter (7).
The Hanse never kept a membership list, and smaller towns were often represented at the Hansetag by larger neighbours, so the number of members is uncertain. It lost its influence in the 16th and early 17th centuries, and the Thirty Years' War destroyed its trading area; the last Hansetag met in Lübeck in 1669 with only six towns present. Today 93 of the 158 towns belong to the Städtebund DIE HANSE, a network of nearly 200 towns in 16 countries.
How we drew the line
A town counts as Hanseatic if Wikidata classes it as a "Hanseatic city" (instance of Q707813) or as a member of the Hanseatic League (P463 Q42908): 226 items, of which 159 lie in today's Germany. Items for the same place closer than 2 km apart are counted once (Berlin and its twin town Cölln), which leaves 157 towns; former towns now part of a larger one but further apart (e.g. Hörde in Dortmund, Neheim and Hüsten in Arnsberg) count separately, as Wikidata records them as Hanseatic towns in their own right. Each town is placed in its present-day district by its Wikidata coordinates and the official BKG district boundaries (VG2500). As a cross-check we compared them with the 93 German members of today's Städtebund DIE HANSE, which admits a town when its archive documents a link to the historic Hanse: 92 towns are on both lists, 64 only in Wikidata (among them Berlin, Erfurt, Osnabrück, Hildesheim and Bielefeld), and Marienmünster, a Städtebund member that Wikidata does not class as Hanseatic, is added (placed by municipality in the BKG gazetteer GN250). The total is the union of both lists.
- There is no official list of Hanseatic towns: the Hanse kept none, and many small towns took part only through larger neighbours. Wikidata's classification is maintained by volunteers and may include or omit towns that historians would judge differently; entries found only in Wikidata (e.g. Neustadt in Hesse, Sontra, Neuenkirchen-Vörden) could not be confirmed against the Städtebund list.
- Membership changed over four centuries; a town counts here if it belonged at any time.
- The map shows whether a district has a Hanseatic town, not how important it was: Lübeck and a small Sauerland town count the same.