Rostock

Rostock lies on the Warnow a few miles above its mouth into the Baltic, a Slavic settlement whose name means a place where waters flow apart. It received Lübeck law in 1218, joined the Wendish cities of Lübeck, Stralsund, Wismar and Kiel in an alliance in 1259, and signed the Rostock Land Peace of 1283 that strengthened the league and helped form the Hanse. In rivalry with Stralsund it was a leading Baltic port, with merchants trading to Riga and Visby and herring as one of its goods. The four parish churches and the town hall are among the brick Gothic works of this wealth.

The fourteenth century was the town's flowering. When the line of the lords of Rostock died out in 1323 the council had already survived several craftsmen's uprisings. In the same year it bought the fishing village of Warnemünde at the river's mouth, in 1325 it received the right to mint coins, and in 1358 full jurisdiction. In 1419 the dukes and the council together founded a university, the oldest in northern Europe, which led German and Baltic scholarship for two centuries.

The late Middle Ages brought class conflict between the patrician families and the rest of the town, ending in 1491 with the Cathedral Feud, in which the burghers had to bow to the duke. In 1531, after eight years of resistance to the preaching of Joachim Slüter, the council suddenly allowed Luther's teaching in all four main churches. In 1565 the town refused homage to Duke John Albert I, who entered it by force and dissolved the council of sixty. The decline of the Hanse, the Thirty Years' War and the town fire of 1677 later cut its population to a third.