Hanseatic League

Abby Charlson

GER 110

Hanseatic League

            While researching the Hanseatic League, I had found many interesting facts that I’ve never read or heard about before. One of them being what the Hanseatic League actually is. I had found out that the League is in fact a group of associations that appeared in the mid-thirteenth century. The associations within the Northern Germany cities and Baltic gather together and trade. Because trading in the middle ages was a dangerous task, traveling together helped protect themselves. The trades occurred was along the Kiel or the “salt road.” The salt road ran between Hamburg and Luebeck.

            When founded in the twelfth century, trade was important for merchants and finding items to trade was crucial. One item in Hamburg that was popular to trade was salt. Salt was easy to access from salt producers in Kiel and was convenient because Hamburg needed the salt to dry and salt fish to distribute.

            Hansa’s power had over sixty cities involved and the power of the Hansa had risen. Each city had its own merchant and each alliance made their own common policies and planned to govern their inter-city trade. The league all together had shared common all their economic interests. Today, the Hanseatic League had revived itself from losing its significance during the mid-seventeenth century. In 1980, Zwolle had improved the alliance both socially and culturally. The goals of this League is to keep the spirit of the alive and encourage a vibrant exchange between its members. The League also tries to bring about a closer economic, cultural, social, and national ties across Europe.  

http://members.bellatlantic.net/~baronfum/hansa.html

http://www.hanse.org/en/

Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia

Saxony info

Abigail Charlson GER 110 Saxony

While searching on the internet, I came across a Germany facts page written by William Berentsen, who happens to write and document a lot of information on Germany. I found that the state of Saxony is made up of a lot of mountains and hill. The Ore Mountains stretch about 100 miles through the southern border of Saxony. About half the land of Saxony is actually used for agriculture.

The next set of information I simply found on Wikipedia. The kingdom of Saxony lasted from 1806-1918 and became a free state after the end of WWll. During October 1990, Saxony was “recreated” when East and West Germany reunited after being under Communist rule. Now Germany is ruled by Stanislaw Tillich since May of 2008. Tillich is the minister-president which is the head of Germany’s government today.

The last set of information I found was on the UN Data page on the internet. I had found that Germany’s capitol, Dresden is populated at about 525,105 people, which is about the same population of people as Wyoming. Dresden is about the size of Hawaii, but a little bigger. Leipzig is the second most population city of Saxony, having about 520,838 people. Both Dresden and Leipzig make up about 25% of Saxony’s population alone. Saxony holds about 4.3 million people today, but the numbers have been declining since 1950 by 1.5 million people. Dresden and Leipzig have been increasing in population though, by about 100,000 since the year 2000.

I also did find out from Wikipedia, that most people speak “Upper Saxon German.” I also learned that since WWll, most of the population is non-religious. For the civilians that do practice a religion, the two popular religions are protestant and Roman Catholic.