Hanseatic places and participation phases

What you are looking at

Sixty phases across the cities, markets and Kontore of the Hanseatic world, from the late thirteenth century to the League’s long afterlife in the eighteenth.

How to read this layer

Symbol size follows role: how a place participated, not how large it was. Lübeck is large here because it convened the League, not because of its population.

Participation was phased and reversible. A city that was active in 1360 and merely represented by 1450 appears as two features, and the year slider shows which arrangement was in force.

Both names travel with each place. Historical and modern names are carried together and both are searchable, because a map that silently substitutes Tallinn for Reval has rewritten its sources.

Why there is no territory here

Because the League had none. See why the Hanseatic League has no territory on this map.

Historical scope

1295 to 1761, phased per feature.

Sources and evidence

Compiled from the HSE gazetteer, after Marczinek, Maurer and Rauch; UNESCO’s Hanseatic documentation; Henn; and GeoNames for modern positions. Each claim carries its source key into the corpus’s evidence table.

Reconstruction and uncertainty

Positions are modern locations of the historical places and are secure. What is uncertain is classification and date: the League kept no membership roll, so whether a town counts as active_city or represented_city in a given decade is a reading of what the sources show it doing.

Where the evidence is thin the phase says so rather than promoting the place.

Data fields

role drives the symbol; every feature carries names, validity range and source keys. See the Hanseatic data fields.

Data and downloads

GeoJSON under CC BY 4.0. Attribution: Terra Chartarum; Marczinek, Maurer & Rauch; UNESCO; Henn; GeoNames.