Lüneburg

Lüneburg stands on the Ilmenau beside a salt dome, where brine from the Sülze was boiled into the salt that cured the herring of the Baltic and Norway. Its long monopoly over salt in northern Germany made it an early Hanse member, and with Visby for the fish and Lübeck as the hub it became one of the richest Hanseatic towns. Salt went to Lübeck first overland on the Old Salt Road, and from 1398 by barge on the Stecknitz Canal.

The town was the residence of a Guelph principality created between 1267 and 1269. In the War of the Lüneburg Succession, rebel burghers threw the princes out in 1371 and destroyed their castle on the Kalkberg and the nearby monastery. In 1392 the town obtained the staple right, which obliged travelling merchants to stop in Lüneburg and offer their wares, and about 1397 a barrier of hedges and ditches to the west, the Landwehr, was laid out to keep them from bypassing it; another on the east followed about 1479. The dispute of the prelates, who owned the saltworks and paid no taxes, divided the town from 1446 to 1462, until the King of Denmark and the bishops of Schwerin and Lübeck mediated, and in 1454 the burghers' committee of sixty demanded a larger share in government.

The town turned Protestant in 1529 and 1530, driven by Duke Ernest the Confessor, and Urbanus Rhegius drew up a school and church order in 1531. The decline of the Hanse and the failure of the herring off Scania around 1560 cost it its great customers, and as the salt trade shrank, the town grew poor and built few new houses. Plague killed some 6,000 people, nearly half its population, in 1624 to 1626.