Segeberg

Segeberg grew beneath the Kalkberg, a prominent gypsum hill on the old frontier between Saxons and Slavs. Emperor Lothair III ordered a castle, the Siegesburg, built on its summit in 1134. The settlement and its church followed below, and in the 1230s Segeberg received Lübeck town law. The castle later became a Danish royal possession and the town a seat of royal administration.

Lübeck's commander Marx Meyer devastated Segeberg during the Count's Feud in 1534. Under the royal official Heinrich Rantzau the town was rebuilt, and new buildings marked its recovery in the later sixteenth century. Swedish troops destroyed the castle in 1644 during the Thirty Years' War. Afterwards the hill itself was quarried for gypsum, gradually changing the appearance of the former castle site.