The self-governing Baltic city-republic that led the Hanseatic League — 'Queen of the Hansa'. Frederick II made it a free city of the Empire in 1226; from about 1299 it presided over a league of Wendish towns (Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, Greifswald) and became the political and judicial head of the German Hansa, whose Lübeck law was exported to scores of Baltic towns. Governed by a co-opting patrician Rat (council) and Bürgermeister, it ruled the city plus Travemünde, its Baltic outport, and a ring of some 49 villages between Holstein and Mecklenburg.
Napoleon annexed it to the French Empire in December 1810; it rose against the French in March 1813 and was re-declared a free and Hanse town of the German Confederation by the Vienna act of 9 June 1815. It surrendered external sovereignty on joining the North German Confederation (1867) and the German Empire (1871), and lost statehood outright under the Greater Hamburg Act of 1937, when it was absorbed into Prussian Schleswig-Holstein — where it remains today.
The atlas holds 2 border frames for Free Imperial City of Lübeck — the shape you scrub through changes in 1226 · 1749.
The standard scholarly history of the Hansa, whose head city Lübeck was; verified on Open Library (/works/OL8094711W).