A methodical approach to the comparative study of planted towns in 13th century Meklenburg

Abstract

The eastwards expansion of German speaking settlers in the 13th century planted about 40 towns in the territory which would become the duchies of Mecklenburg, an area formerly settled by early feudal Slavic tribes. This history is well documented in written sources and archaeological findings, but not yet studied as urban form. This paper describes a method of analysing the urban morphology of towns planted in the 13th century. The method is developed based on an encyclopaedic approach to collecting historical data. The means of this methodology intertwines known historical data with a systematic analysis of the urban form and its elements, based on definitions introduced by Conzen and Kropf. The article briefly introduces the history of the planted towns in 13th century Mecklenburg. The second part of the paper defines a method, how knowledge from both written historical sources, archaeological findings, and results of morphological analysis can be collected and systematised to enable a comparative analysis of the findings based on these 40 towns. Finally, the practicability of the method is put to the test with a brief analysis of the town of Malchin, planted in 1242 by the dukes of Mecklenburg. The presented work is part of a current research undertaken by the author. It was presented as a keynote lecture during the 1st ISAR Castelvecchio Calvisio Summer School in July 2020.