Berlin in the Middle Ages

With the beginning of the great migration of peoples, antiquity began to
stop step by step and the early Middle Ages slowly began. It was like this from
the late 4th century onwards and dragged on for quite a while, which is not so
bad for us, because there wasn't too much going on in our area anyway. Here, in
the swampy meadows and in the dark forests of Warsaw-Berlin's glacial valley,
bears and wolves and other animals probably said good night to each other. So
we can confidently skip a few centuries to get to the subject of our tour and
land in a period from about 1150 to the early 16th century. But - no hurry.
Everything developed slowly and started with a marketplace, or more precisely
with two. Namely on both sides of a shallow Spree crossing. Finding one of these seemed to be a difficult undertaking, as other
inexpensive Spree crossings had already been
occupied. So if you want to know how it all began with the primeval blob
Berlin/Cölln, take a walk through' s' Medieval Berlin'. When it all began is
not fixed for the year. With the help of calculations and, above all,
excavations in the settlement centres of Berlin/Cölln, we stalk our way back to
our beginnings for decades. But a year of foundation, let alone an exact date,
has not yet been determined. In any case, it was a rather arduous journey from
the marketplace to a patrician-ruled bourgeois town with a considerable number
of rights and freedoms to the electoral residence: How did trade and change
thrive? Were our ancestors always obedient or unruly subjects? And anyway - was
the Middle Ages really that dark?

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