hanse

A good algorithim would be to take a list of Hanse towns and subtract the ones you've heard of.

The Italian bankers did, the Hanse (North German economic and trade super power made of individual merchants) did not, for example.

For example irc the German Hanse started by creating attractive laws for merchants, which flocked to the participating cities and made them rich.

Reformation was most popular in the northern countries of the Hanse trade union.

Bremen is a free Hanse city and friendly to foreigners.

If you are ever in the Hamburg area, I highly recommend making a day trip with the Regional train up to Lübeck to visit the Hanse Museum.

I think Estonia's old Hanse town, Tallin (Reval) fits.

Lower saxon nowadays might have a gradual dialect continuum in the West into the Netherlands but in a days of Hanse it was a widespread language around the Baltic sea and had a huge influence on other languages and cultures.

While glorifying their own shortcomings in the past, the English view on Germany [0] is much more differentiated, acknowledging the good parts like the Hanse [1] or thousand year old organizations like the Teutonic Knights [2] without just thinking about 20th century Germany's imperialism.

So whenever you goto hamburg from the south, you recieve a ton of subtle signs about the superiority of the city and the "elb-adel" (aristocrats) and its old history ("Wir waren Hanse, wat ward ihr?

Our identity is largely European since hundreds of years (see for example our history in the Hanse), before the German nation existed.

The first signs of that can be traced to the early renessaince era, with Italian merchant princes, the Fugger and the Hanse.

There seems to be some baltic old Hanseatic League town connection here, as Lübeck where Niederegger comes from was also in the Hanse[0].