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The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, also known as Hamburg, is the second-largest city in Germany after Berlin. The city is located on the River Elbe, River Alster and River Bille. Schleswig-Holstein is to the north and Lower Saxony is to south of Hamburg. Hamburg’s official name is a reflection of the city’s historical membership in the medieval Hanseatic League and as a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire. In the 2nd century, Claudius Ptolemy reported the area of Hamburg as Treva. In 808, Charlemagne constructed a castle, the first permanent building on the site, which was named “Hammaburg”, where the name Hamburg is derived from. Hamburg was designated as the seat of a bishopric in 834. Just two years later, Hamburg was united with Bremen as the Bishopric of Hamburg-Bremen. In 845, 600 Viking ships sailed the River Elbe and destroyed Hamburg. In 1030, Hamburg was destroyed again by King Mieszko II Lambert of Poland. In 1201 and 1214, Valdemar II of Denmark raided and occupied Hamburg. In 1350, the Black Death killed approximately 60% of the population of Hamburg. Throughout the medieval period, Hamburg experienced several great fires. Frederick I “Barbarossa” granted Hamburg the status of a Free Imperial City in 1189. Hamburg’s proximity to the North and Baltic Seas quickly made it a major port in Northern Europe. In 1241, Hamburg joined in a trade alliance with Lübeck which marked the origin of the Hanseatic League of trading cities. In 1270, Jordan von Boitzenburg, the solicitor of the senate of Hamburg, wrote the first description of civil, criminal and procedural law for a city in Germany in the German language, the Ordeelbook.

Hamburg embraced Lutheranism in 1529 and received refugees from France and the Netherlands. In the seventeenth century, Jan van Valckenborgh introduced a second layer of fortifications to protect the city during the Thirty Years War. He also extended the city and created a “New Town”. The Free Imperial City was not incorporated into a larger administrative area upon the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and retained special privileges and became a sovereign state. The official title of the city became the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. Napoleon I briefly annexed Hamburg to the First French Empire, but in 1814 Russian forces freed the city. The city re-assumed its pre-1811 status as a city state. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna confirmed Hamburg’s independence and it became one of 39 sovereign states of the German Confederation (1815–1866). In 1842, a quarter of the inner city of Hamburg was destroyed in the “Great Fire”. The fire started on the night of May 4 and waged on until May 8 when it was finally extinguished. The fire destroyed the town hall, three churches and several other buildings. It killed 51 people and left approximately 20,000 citizens homeless. The reconstruction took more than 40 years to complete. In 1860, Hamburg adopted a semidemocratic constitution. The constitution also included the separation of Church and State, and freedom of the press, assembly and association. Hamburg became a member of the North German Confederation in 1866 and then the German Empire in 1871. In 1888, Hamburg joined the German Customs Union. During this time, the population of Hamburg quadrupled to 800,000 and the city’s Atlantic trade made it the second largest port in Europe. Trading companies from all over the world established themselves at Hamburg. During the Weimar Republic, Hamburg maintained its self-ruling status. In 1892, Hamburg suffered from a cholera outbreak and 8,600 people died. It was the last major cholera epidemic in a major city in Western Europe.

During the Third Reich, Hamburg became a Gau fro, 1934 to 1945. Hamburg suffered from a series of Allied air raids. On July 23, 1943, the Royal Air Force and United States Air Force firebombed Hamburg which destroyed entire boroughs. The raids killed approximately 42,600 civilians and a million civilians were evacuated in the aftermath. The Neuengamme concentration camp was located in the bergdorf district of Hamburg and at least 42,900 people were murdered in the camps. On May 3, 1945 Hamburg surrendered to the British Forces. It formed part of the British Zone of Occupation after World War II and then a state of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. In the early 1960s, the Beatles played in various clubs in the city. On February 16, 1962, the North Sea flooded which caused the River Elbe to rise and flooded a fifth of the city and killed more than 300 people.