page_title: Bremen
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Bremen / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Ancient Germania From A Classical Atlas of Ancient Geography by Alexander G. Findlay. New York, Harper and Brothers, 1849.
context_page_description: The City Municipality of Bremen is the capital of the German federal state Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, a two-city-state consisting of the cities of Bremen and Bremerhaven. With around 570,000 inhabitants, the Hanseatic city is the 11th largest city of Germany as well as the second largest city in Northern Germany after Hamburg.
  Bremen is the largest city on the River Weser, the longest river flowing entirely in Germany, lying some 60 km upstream from its mouth into the North Sea, and is surrounded by the state of Lower Saxony. A commercial and industrial city, Bremen is, together with Oldenburg and Bremerhaven, part of the Bremen/Oldenburg Metropolitan Region, with 2.5 million people. Bremen is contiguous with the Lower Saxon towns of Delmenhorst, Stuhr, Achim, Weyhe, Schwanewede and Lilienthal. There is an exclave of Bremen in Bremerhaven, the "Citybremian Overseas Port Area Bremerhaven". Bremen is the fourth largest city in the Low German dialect area after Hamburg, Dortmund and Essen.
  Bremen's port, together with the port of Bremerhaven at the mouth of the Weser, is the second largest port in Germany after the Port of Hamburg.
context_section_description: The marshes and moraines near Bremen have been settled since about 12,000 BC. Burial places and settlements in Bremen-Mahndorf and Bremen-Osterholz date back to the 7th century AD. Since the Renaissance, some scientists have believed that the entry Fabiranum or Phabiranon in Ptolemy's Fourth Map of Europe, written in AD 150, refers to Bremen. But Ptolemy gives geographic coordinates, and these refer to a site northeast of the mouth of the river Visurgis (Weser). In Ptolemy's time the Chauci lived in the area now called north-western Germany or Lower Saxony. By the end of the 3rd century, they had merged with the Saxons. During the Saxon Wars (772–804) the Saxons, led by Widukind, fought against the West Germanic Franks, the founders of the Carolingian Empire, and lost the war.
  Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, made a new law, the Lex Saxonum, which forbade the Saxons from worshipping Odin (the god of the Saxons); instead they had to convert to Christianity on pain of death. In 787 Willehad of Bremen became the first Bishop of Bremen. In 848 the archdiocese of Hamburg merged with the diocese of Bremen to become Hamburg-Bremen Archdiocese, with its seat in Bremen, and in the following centuries the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen were the driving force behind the Christianisation of Northern Germany. In 888, at the behest of Archbishop Rimbert, Kaiser Arnulf of Carinthia, the Carolingian King of East Francia, granted Bremen the rights to hold its own markets, mint its own coins and make its own customs laws.
  The city's first stone walls were built in 1032. Around that time trade with Norway, England and the northern Netherlands began to grow, thus increasing the importance of the city.
  In 1186 the Bremian Prince-Archbishop Hartwig of Uthlede and his bailiff in Bremen confirmed – without generally waiving the prince-archbishop's overlordship over the city – the Gelnhausen Privilege, by which Frederick I Barbarossa granted the city considerable privileges. The city was recognised as a political entity with its own laws. Property within the municipal boundaries could not be subjected to feudal overlordship; this also applied to serfs who acquired property, if they lived in the city for a year and a day, after which they were to be regarded as free persons. Property was to be freely inherited without feudal claims for reversion to its original owner. This privilege laid the foundation for Bremen's later status of imperial immediacy (Free Imperial City).
  The tax obligations of city to the prince-archbishopric were both a burden and a lever of influence. The city participated in the Diets of the neighbouring Prince-Archbishopric of Bremen as part of the Bremian Estates; in the context of the Landtag the city could offer or withhold its consent on tax levies proposed by the prince-archbishop in his governance of the region. Since the city was the principal taxpayer, its consent for taxes was generally sought. In this way the city wielded fiscal and political power within the Prince-Archbishopric, while not allowing the Prince-Archbishopric to rule in the city against its consent. In 1260 Bremen joined the Hanseatic League.
caption: Germania, in the early 2nd century (Harper and Brothers, 1849)
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