Mecklenburg

Mecklenburg, historic region of northeastern Germany, located along the Baltic Sea coastal plain, from the Bight of Lübeck about 100 miles (160 km) eastward. It is now included in the German Land (state) of Mecklenburg–West Pomerania (q.v.).

By the 7th century ad the Slavic Obodrites and the Lutycy (Lyutichi) in the west and east, respectively, had replaced the area’s earlier Germanic inhabitants. In 1160, under Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, Christianity and German domination were introduced. Przybysław (Přibislav), son of the vanquished Obodrite ruler Niklot, became Henry’s vassal and founded the Mecklenburg dynasty. In a series of partitions, four separate lines were established by Przybysław’s great-grandsons in the 13th century: Mecklenburg (named from the family castle, Mikilinborg, south of Wismar), Rostock, Güstrow (or Werle), and Parchim. In 1436 the Mecklenburg line reabsorbed the whole inheritance. Meanwhile, it had acquired the lordship of Stargard in 1292 and the countship of Schwerin in 1358. The German king Charles IV in 1348 made the Mecklenburgs dukes and princes of the empire.

Mecklenburg became Lutheran during the Protestant Reformation, and in the 16th and early 17th centuries the region was recurrently divided into two duchies, Mecklenburg-Schwerin (the west) and Mecklenburg-Güstrow (the east). During the Thirty Years’ War, Albrecht von Wallenstein in 1627–31 ousted the dukes who had sided with Christian IV of Denmark, but the dukes were restored by the Swedes. By the Peace of Westphalia (1648) Sweden acquired Wismar and its environs, which it held until 1803.

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With the extinction of the Güstrow line in 1695, Mecklenburg was again reunited but then was permanently divided by the Treaty of Hamburg (1701). Most of the territory went to Mecklenburg-Schwerin, while Mecklenburg-Strelitz comprised the principality of Ratzeburg in the northwest and the lordship of Stargard in the southeast. In 1808 both duchies joined the Confederation of the Rhine set up by Napoleon I; the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 recognized them as grand duchies and members of the German Confederation. They sided with Prussia in the Seven Weeks’ War (1866) and joined the North German Confederation in 1867 and the German Reich in 1871. After World War I, under the Weimar Constitution, the grand ducal regimes were abolished in favour of elected governments. The Nazi government in 1934 merged the two states into one Land (state) of Mecklenburg, which, after World War II, with some territorial adjustments, was briefly (1949–52) a Land of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) before it was dissolved into the Bezirke (districts) of Rostock, Schwerin, and Neubrandenburg. Before the unification of East and West Germany in 1990, the former Land was reconstituted from these districts as Mecklenburg–West Pomerania.