The town hall as a building type has a history going back to ancient Greece and Rome. During the Middle Ages, however, construction of such buildings was largely unknown in Europe until the rise of the European communes in the 12th and 13th centuries. This volume examines the development of town halls in three key north German cities of the Hanseatic League, Lubeck, Bremen and Luneburg, from their beginnings up to the outbreak of the Thirty-Years War. It will show that, though buildings of this kind represented important symbols of communal civic pride, the town halls of these German communities, and many others like them, were relatively modest structures at first, developing gradually over a period of centuries, through enlargement or rebuilding, into grand palatial monuments. Their architectural transformation reflects not only the increased wealth and social pretension of the urban middle classes, but the evolution of civic pride itself, what the citizenry of the Hanseatic communes considered worthy of pride, and how these people viewed themselves in relation to their aristocratic erstwhile rulers.

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