of the Hanseatic League", being by far the largest and most powerful member of this mediaeval trade organization. In 1375, Emperor Charles IV named L�beck one of the five "Glories of the Empire", a title shared with Venice, Rome, Pisa and Florence. Several conflicts about trade privileges were fought by L�beck and the Hanseatic League against Denmark and Norway with varying outcomes. While L�beck and the Hanseatic League prevailed in conflicts in 1435 and 1512, L�beck lost when it became involved in the Count's Feud, a civil war that raged in Denmark from 1534 to 1536. L�beck also joined the Schmalkaldic League.
After its defeat in the Count's Feud, L�beck's power slowly declined. The city managed to remain neutral in the Thirty Years' War, but with the devastation caused by the decades-long war and the new transatlantic orientation of European trade, the Hanseatic League and thus L�beck lost importance. However, after the Hanseatic League was de facto disbanded in 1669, L�beck still remained an important trading town on the Baltic Sea.
The great Danish-German composer Dieterich Buxtehude (born in what is present-day Sweden) became organist at the Marienkirche in L�beck in 1668 and remained at the post until at least 1703.
In the course of the war of the Fourth Coalition against Napoleon, troops under Bernadotte occupied the neutral L�beck after a battle against Bl�cher on November 6, 1806. Under the Continental System, the bank went into bankruptcy and from 1811 to 1813 L�beck was formally annexed as part of France until the Vienna Congress of 1815.
In 1937 the Nazis passed the so-called Greater Hamburg Act, whereby the nearby Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg was expanded, to encompass towns that had formally belonged to the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein. To compensate Prussia for these losses (and partly because Hitler had a personal dislike for L�beck after it had refused to allow him to campaign there in 1932), the
