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Rh carving, the entrance hall of which is a 13th-century chapel, restored in 1866 and decorated in 1898. The museum preserves the most remarkable municipal archives in existence as well as valuable collections of historical documents.

The poet, Emanuel Geibel (1889), and the painter, Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789–1869), were natives of Lübeck. This city is famous for the number and wealth of its charitable institutions. Its position as the first German emporium of the west end of the Baltic has been to some extent impaired by Hamburg and Bremen since the construction of the North Sea and Baltic Canal, and by the rapid growth and enterprise of Stettin. In order to counterbalance their rivalry, the quays have been extended, a canal was opened in 1900 between the Trave and the Elbe, the river up to the wharves has been deepened to 23 ft. or more. The river is kept open in winter by ice-breakers. A harbour was made in 1899–1900 on the Wakenitz Canal for boats engaged in inland traffic, especially on the Elbe and Elbe-Trave Canal. Lübeck trades principally with Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the eastern provinces of Prussia, Great Britain and the United States. The imports amounted in value to about £4,850,000 in 1906 and the exports to over £10,000,000. The chief articles of import are coal, grain, timber, copper, steel and wine, and the exports are manufactured goods principally to Russia and Scandivania. The industries are growing, the chief being breweries and distilleries, saw-mills and planing-mills, shipbuilding, fish-curing, the manufacture of machinery, engines, bricks, resin, preserves, enamelled and tin goods, cigars, furniture, soap and leather. Pop. (1885) 55,399; (1905) 91,541.

History.—Old Lübeck stood on the left bank of the Trave, where it is joined by the river Schwartau, and was destroyed in 1138. Five years later Count Adolphus II. of Holstein founded new Lübeck, a few miles farther up, on the peninsula Buku, where the Trave is joined on the right by the Wakenitz, the emissary of the lake of Ratzeburg. An excellent harbour, sheltered against pirates, it became almost at once a competitor for the commerce of the Baltic. Its foundation coincided with the beginning of the advance of the Low German tribes of Flanders, Friesland and Westphalia along the southern shores of the Baltic—the second great emigration of the colonizing Saxon element. In 1140 Wagria, in 1142 the country of the Polabes (Ratzeburg and Lauenburg), had been annexed by the Holtsaetas (the Transalbingian Saxons). From 1166 onwards there was a Saxon count at Schwerin. Frisian and Saxon merchants from Soest, Bardowiek and other localities in Lower Germany, who already navigated the Baltic and had their factory in Gotland, settled in the new town, where Wendish speech and customs never entered. About 1157 Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, forced his vassal, the count of Holstein, to give up Lübeck to him; and in 1163 he removed thither the episcopal see of Oldenburg (Stargard), founding at the same time the dioceses of Ratzeburg and Schwerin. He issued the first charter to the citizens, and constituted them a free Saxon community having their own magistrate, an advantage over all other towns of his dominions. He invited traders of the north to visit his new market free of toll and custom, providing his subjects were promised similar privileges in return. From the beginning the king of Denmark granted them a settlement for their herring fishery on the coast of Schoonen. Adopting the statutes of Soest in Westphalia as their code, Saxon merchants exclusively ruled the city. In concurrence with the duke’s Vogt (advocatus) they recognized only one right of judicature within the town, to which nobles as well as artisans had to submit. Under these circumstances the population grew rapidly in wealth and influence by land and sea, so that, when Henry was attainted by the emperor, Frederick I., who came in person to besiege Lübeck in 1181, this potentate, “in consideration of its revenues and its situation on the frontier of the Empire,” fixed by charter, dated the 19th of September 1188, the limits, and enlarged the liberties, of the free town. In the year 1201 Lübeck was conquered by Waldemar II. of Denmark. But in 1223 it regained its liberty, after the king had been taken captive by the count of Schwerin. In 1226 it was made a free city of the Empire by Frederick II., and its inhabitants took part with the enemies of the Danish king in the victory of Bornhövede in July 1227. The citizens repelled the encroachments of their neighbours in Holstein and in Mecklenburg. On the other hand their town, being the principal emporium of the Baltic by the middle of the 13th century, acted as the firm ally of the Teutonic knights in Livonia. Emigrants founded new cities and new sees of Low German speech among alien and pagan races; and thus in the course of a century the commerce of Lübeck had supplanted that of Westphalia. In connexion with the Germans at Visby, the capital of Gotland, and at Riga, where they had a house from 1231, the people of Lübeck with their armed vessels scoured the sea between the Trave and the Neva. They were encouraged by papal bulls in their contest for the rights of property in wrecks and for the protection of shipping against pirates and slave-hunters. Before the close of the century the statutes of Lübeck were adopted by most Baltic towns having a German population, and Visby protested in vain against the city on the Trave having become the court of appeal for nearly all these cities, and even for the German settlement in Russian Novgorod. In course of time more than a hundred places were embraced in this relation, the last vestiges of which did not disappear until the beginning of the 18th century. From about 1299 Lübeck presided over a league of cities, Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, Greifswald and some smaller ones, and this Hansa of towns became heir to a Hansa of traders simultaneously on the eastern and the western sea, after Lübeck and her confederates had been admitted to the same privileges with Cologne, Dortmund and Soest at Bruges and in the steelyards of London, Lynn and Boston. The union held its own, chiefly along the maritime outskirts of the Empire, rather against the will of king and emperor, but nevertheless Rudolph of Habsburg and several of his successors issued new charters to Lübeck. As early as 1241 Lübeck, Hamburg and Soest had combined to secure their highways against robber knights. Treaties to enforce the public peace were concluded in 1291 and 1338 with the dukes of Brunswick, Mecklenburg and Pomerania, and the count of Holstein. Though the great federal armament against Waldemar IV., the destroyer of Visby, was decreed by the city representatives assembled at Cologne in 1367, Lübeck was the leading spirit in the war which ended with the surrender of Copenhagen and the peace concluded at Stralsund on the 24th of May 1370. Her burgomaster, Brun Warendorp, who commanded the combined naval and land forces, died on the field of battle. In 1368 the seal of the city, a double-headed eagle, which in the 14th century took the place of the more ancient ship, was adopted as the common seal of the confederated towns (civitates maritimae), some seventy in number. Towards the end of the 15th century the power of the Hanseatic League began to decline, owing to the rise of Burgundy in the west, of Poland and Russia in the east and the emancipation of the Scandinavian kingdom from the union of Calmar. Still Lübeck, even when nearly isolated, strove to preserve its predominance in a war with Denmark (1501–12), supporting Gustavus Vasa in Sweden, lording it over the north of Europe during the years 1534 and 1535 in the person of Jürgen Wullenweber, the democratic burgomaster, who professed the most advanced principles of the Reformation, and engaging with Sweden in a severe naval war (1536–70).

But the prestige and prosperity of the town were beginning to decline. Before the end of the 16th century the privileges of the London Steelyard were suppressed by Elizabeth. As early as 1425 the herring, a constant source of early wealth, began to forsake the Baltic waters. Later on, by the discovery of a new continent, commerce was diverted into new directions. Finally, with the Thirty Years’ War, misfortunes came thick. The last Hanseatic diet met at Lübeck in 1630, shortly after Wallenstein’s unsuccessful attack on Stralsund; and from that time merciless sovereign powers stopped free intercourse on all sides. Danes and Swedes battled for the possession of the Sound and for its heavy dues. The often changing masters of Holstein and Lauenburg abstracted much of the valuable landed property of the city and of the chapter of Lübeck. Towards the end of