Who ruled Hamburg?

Hamburg lies on the River Elbe in northern Germany, about 100 kilometres upstream from the North Sea, where the smaller Alster flows in. Far enough inland to be sheltered yet open to ocean-going ships, it grew into Germany's largest port. Its defining trait is self-government: for most of its history Hamburg was a city-state ruled by its merchants rather than by a prince, and it remains one of Germany's federal states today. The maps on this site sometimes assign it to neighbouring territories such as Hanover or Sweden, but the city itself stayed independent.

The name comes from the Hammaburg, a fortress built in the early 9th century as the Carolingian Empire pushed into Saxon lands. In the 830s it became the seat of the missionary Ansgar, whose task was to convert Scandinavia, but Vikings burned the settlement in 845 and the archbishopric moved to Bremen. The town recovered slowly. A charter of trading privileges dated 1189 and attributed to Frederick Barbarossa, though actually forged some decades later, gave Hamburg's ships toll-free passage on the lower Elbe, and the city still treats 1189 as the founding date of its port.

In 1241 Hamburg made an alliance with Lübeck that grew into the Hanseatic League, the network of trading towns that dominated commerce in the Baltic and North Sea. Within the Holy Roman Empire the city acted largely as a free republic, and its status as an imperial city was formally recognised in the 16th and 17th centuries. Hamburg adopted the Lutheran faith in 1529 during the Protestant Reformation, opened one of Europe's first stock exchanges in 1558, and, protected by strong new walls, avoided the destruction of the Thirty Years' War. It became a refuge for Dutch, Portuguese Jewish and other merchants, and a centre of banking, printing and opera.

Napoleon's troops occupied Hamburg in 1806 and annexed it to France in 1810, bringing ruin to its trade, and French forces held it through a hard siege until 1814. In May 1842 the Great Fire destroyed about a third of the old city, which was rebuilt with wider streets and new public buildings. Hamburg joined the German Empire in 1871 and entered the German customs union in 1888, building the Speicherstadt warehouse district for its free port. It became the main departure point for millions of emigrants to the Americas. A cholera epidemic in 1892, caused by unfiltered river water, killed more than 8,000 people.

The Greater Hamburg Act of 1937 merged neighbouring towns such as Altona, Wandsbek and Harburg into the city. During the Second World War, Allied bombing in July 1943, codenamed Operation Gomorrah, created a firestorm that killed more than 30,000 people and destroyed much of the eastern districts.

After 1945 Hamburg lay in the British occupation zone and became a city-state of West Germany, rebuilding its port and media industry. A North Sea storm flood in 1962 killed more than 300 people. With about 1.9 million inhabitants, Hamburg is now the second-largest city in Germany and one of Europe's busiest container ports.