Bremen , Bremen ,. The City Municipality of Bremen German: A commercial and industrial city with a major port on the river Weser, Bremen is part of the Bremen-Oldenburg metropolitan area 2. Bremen is the second most populous city in North Germany and tenth in Germany. Bremen is some 60 km 37 mi south from the Weser mouth on the North Sea. With Bremerhaven right on the mouth the two comprise the state of Bremen official name: History The marshes and moraines near Bremen have been settled since about BC.
At that time the Chauci lived in the area now called north-western Germany or Lower Saxony. By the end of the 3rd century, they had merged with the Saxons. Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, made a new law, the Lex Saxonum. This law stated that Saxons were not allowed to worship Odin the god of the Saxons , but rather that they had to convert to Christianity on pain of death.
This period was called the Christianisation. In Willehad of Bremen was the first Bishop of Bremen. In the diocese of Hamburg merged with the diocese of Bremen, and in the following centuries the bishops of Bremen were the driving force behind the Christianisation of north Germany. In Archbishop Rimbert, managed to get Kaiser Arnulf of Carinthia, the Carolingian King of East Francia, to grant Bremen the right to hold its own markets, to mint its own coins and make its own customs laws.
The first stone city walls were built in Around this time trade with Norway, England and the northern Netherlands began to grow, thus increasing the importance of the city. Germania, in the early 2nd century Harper and Brothers, In the Bremian Prince-Archbishop Hartwig of Uthlede and his bailiff in Bremen confirmed — without generally waiving the prince-archiepiscopal overlordship over the city — the Gelnhausen Privilege, by which Frederick I Barbarossa granted the city considerable privileges.
The city was recognised as a political entity with its own laws. Property within the municipal boundaries could not be subjected to feudal overlordship; this also applied to serfs who acquired property, if they managed to live in the city for a year and a day, after which they were to be regarded as free persons.
