The Hanseatic League was a medieval commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe. Growing from a few North German towns in the late 12th century, the League between the 13th and 15th centuries ultimately encompassed nearly 200 settlements across seven modern-day countries, ranging from Estonia in the north and east to the Netherlands in the west and Kraków, Poland, in the south.
Year 1462 (MCDLXII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar.
Darłowo, in full The Royal City of Darłowo, is a seaside town in the West Pomeranian Region, at the south coast of the Baltic Sea, north-western Poland, with 13,324 inhabitants as of December 2021. It is located in Sławno County in West Pomeranian Voivodeship on the Slovincian Coast.
Danzig law was the official set of records of the laws of city of Danzig (Gdańsk).
La Niña was one of the three Spanish ships used by Italian explorer Christopher Columbus in his first voyage to the West Indies in 1492. As was tradition for Spanish ships of the day, she bore a female saint's name, Santa Clara. However, she was commonly referred to by her nickname, La Niña, which was probably a pun on the name of her owner, Juan Niño of Moguer. She was a standard caravel-type vessel.
La Pinta was the fastest of the three Spanish ships used by Christopher Columbus in his first transatlantic voyage in 1492. The New World was first sighted by Rodrigo de Triana aboard La Pinta on 12 October 1492. The owner of La Pinta was Cristóbal Quintero. The Quintero brothers were ship owners from Palos. The owner of the ship allowed Martín Alonso Pinzón to take over the ship so he could keep an eye on the ship.
The Steelyard, from the Middle Low German Stâlhof, was the kontor of the Hanseatic League in London, and their main trading base in England, from the 13th and 16th centuries. The main goods that the League exported from London were wool and from the 14th century woollen cloths. An important import good was beeswax. The kontor tended to be dominated by Rhenish and Westphalian traders, especially from Cologne.
Paul Beneke, also Paul Benecke, was a German town councillor of Danzig and a privateer.
Santa Anna was an early 16th-century carrack of the navy of the Knights Hospitaller. The war ship was celebrated for her many modern features. While some authors view her lead sheathed hull as an early form of ironclad, others regard it primarily as a means to improve her watertightness.
There are recorded incidents of armour having been employed in naval warfare in Europe and in East Asia prior to the introduction of the ironclad warship. Contemporary or later reports describe the use of metal plates on hulls or the superstructure of a limited number of wooden sailing ships, some of which were equipped with naval artillery. However, in every single case of both European and Far Eastern vessels the evidence for this is either unclear, ambiguous or disputed.
Kurt "Kuddel" Ubben was a German Luftwaffe wing commander and military aviator during World War II, a fighter ace listed with 110 aerial victories—that is, 111 aerial combat encounters resulting in the destruction of the enemy aircraft—claimed in approximately 500 combat missions.
The city of Danzig (Gdańsk) was captured by the State of the Teutonic Order on 13 November 1308, resulting in a massacre of its inhabitants and marking the beginning of tensions between Poland and the Teutonic Order. Originally the knights moved into the fortress as an ally of Poland against the Margraviate of Brandenburg. However, after disputes over the control of the city between the Order and the King of Poland arose, the knights murdered a number of citizens within the city and took it as their own. Thus the event is also known as Gdańsk massacre or Gdańsk slaughter. Though in the past a matter of debate among historians, a consensus has been established that many people were murdered and a considerable part of the town was destroyed in the context of the takeover.
The Anglo-Hanseatic War was a conflict fought between England and the Hanseatic League, led by the cities of Gdańsk and Lübeck, that lasted from 1469 to 1474. Causes of the war include increasing English pressure against the trade of the Hanseatic cities on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea.
Adler von Lübeck, also called Der Große Adler or Lübscher Adler, was a 16th-century warship of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, Germany. Adler von Lübeck was one of the largest ships in the world at her time, being 78.30 m long overall and displacing 2–3,000 tons.
The siege of Kolberg took place from March to 2 July 1807 during the War of the Fourth Coalition, part of the Napoleonic Wars. An army of the First French Empire and several foreign auxiliaries of France besieged the fortified town of Kolberg, the only remaining Prussian-held fortress in the Province of Pomerania. The siege was not successful and was lifted upon the announcement of the Peace of Tilsit.
The Bremen class was a group of seven light cruisers built for the Imperial German Navy in the early 1900s. The seven ships, Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin, Lübeck, München, Leipzig, and Danzig, were an improvement upon the previous Gazelle class. They were significantly larger than the earlier class, and were faster and better armored. Like the Gazelles, they were armed with a main battery of ten 10.5 cm SK L/40 guns and a pair of torpedo tubes.
SMS Danzig was a paddle corvette of the Prussian Navy. She was the lead warship during the Battle of Tres Forcas in 1856, one of the first examples of Prussian gunboat diplomacy. She was later decommissioned from the Prussian Navy and served in the navy of the Japanese Tokugawa shogunate as the Kaiten from 1864 until 1869, and then briefly with the breakaway Ezo Republic until her destruction later the same year.
Günter Kochan was a German composer. He studied with Boris Blacher and was a master student for composition with Hanns Eisler. From 1967 until his retirement in 1991, he worked as professor for musical composition at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler". He taught master classes in composition at the Academy of Music and the Academy of Arts, Berlin. He was also secretary of the Music Section of the Academy of Arts from 1972 to 1974 and vice-president of the Association of Composers and Musicologists of the GDR from 1977 to 1982. Kochan is one of eleven laureates to have been awarded the National Prize of the GDR four times. In addition, he received composition prizes in the US and Eastern Europe. He became internationally known in particular for his Symphonies as well as the cantata Die Asche von Birkenau (1965) and his Music for Orchestra No. 2 (1987). His versatile oeuvre included orchestral works, chamber music, choral works, mass songs and film music and is situated between socialist realism and avant-garde.
Berend Jacobsen Karpfanger was a German admiral of the Hamburg Admiralty known for fighting pirates. He was the captain of the convoy ships Leopold I and Wapen von Hamburg, which defended merchant ships from the pirates of the North African Barbary Coast.
The flag of Gdańsk features a golden five-point crown and two square white crosses, all arranged vertically on the hoist side of the flag. It uses a 5:8 proportion. The flag, in various forms, has represented the Polish city of Gdańsk since the 13th century. It was formally adopted by the Gdańsk City Council in its current form for the first time on 1 August 1996.
