Description : Bremen (Low German also: Breem or Bräm), officially the City Municipality of Bremen (German: Stadtgemeinde Bremen, IPA: (About this soundlisten)), is the capital of the German state Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (Freie Hansestadt Bremen), a two-city-state consisting of the cities of Bremen and Bremerhaven. With around 570,000 inhabitants, the Hanseatic city is the 11th largest city of Germany as well as the second largest city in Northern Germany after Hamburg. Bremen is the largest city on the River Weser, the longest river flowi The German city of Bremen has a very long history. The area was settled in since 12,000 BC, and the modern city was developed in 1032, and it has since then gone through the hands of many countries and alliances, like the Hanseatic League, the Holy Roman Empire, the French Empire, the North German Confederation, the German Empire, and other German states, as well as being independent. The marshes and moraines near Bremen have been settled since about 12,000 BC. Burial places and settlements in Bremen-Mahndorf and Bremen-Osterholz date back to the 7th century AD. Since the Renaissance, some scientists have believed that the entry Fabiranum or Phabiranon in Ptolemy's Fourth Map of Europe, written in AD 150, refers to Bremen. But Ptolemy gives geographic coordinates, and these refer to a site northeast of the mouth of the river Visurgis (Weser). In Ptolemy's 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. During the Saxon Wars (772–804) the Saxons, led by Widukind, fought against the West Germanic Franks, the founders of the Carolingian Empire, and lost the war. Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, made a new law, the Lex Saxonum, which forbade the Saxons from worshipping Odin (the god of the Saxons); instead they had to convert to Christianity on pain of death. In 787 Willehad of Bremen became the first Bishop of Bremen. In 848 the archdiocese of Hamburg merged with the diocese of Bremen to become Hamburg-Bremen Archdiocese, with its seat in Bremen, and in the following centuries the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen were the driving force behind the Christianisation of Northern Germany. In 888, at the behest of Archbishop Rimbert, Kaiser Arnulf of Carinthia, the Carolingian King of East Francia, granted Bremen the rights to hold its own markets, mint its own coins and make its own customs laws. The city's first stone walls were built in 1032. Around that time trade with Norway, England and the northern Netherlands began to grow, thus increasing the importance of the city.
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