There is hardly a town without a castle. This volume examines the relationship between feudal lordship and municipal organisation in the southern Baltic during the Middle Ages. Here we find a landscape dotted with a significant number of small towns that have long been neglected in research. Most of them, however, can be traced back in history to the sudden explosion of urban life in the 12th and 13th centuries. This book brings together a number of papers documenting the earliest phases of selected urban settlements in Denmark, northern Germany, Poland and Estonia. Special attention is given to the topographical and historical interactions between the emerging towns, their burghers and their lords' castles. With contributions by Niklas Alt | Rainer Atzbach | Felix Biermann | Martin Ebert | Ingolf Ericsson | Holger Gräf | Stefan Magnussen | Luisa Radohs | Fred Ruchhöft | Erki Russow | Frederic Zangel