Hamelin

Hamelin grew on the Weser around a monastery founded in the ninth century. By the twelfth century the surrounding settlement had become a town; its best-known story tells of a piper who led away its children in 1284. Hamelin also traded as a minor member of the Hanseatic League in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

During the Thirty Years' War Swedish forces besieged the town, and an imperial army attempting to relieve it was defeated at Oldendorf in 1633. From 1664 Hamelin developed as a fortified frontier town of Calenberg and later Hanover. New forts rose around it in the eighteenth century, giving it a formidable reputation among the fortified towns of the region. In 1806 the garrison surrendered to the French, who subsequently dismantled much of its defences.