In Mecklenburg you needed the grand duke's permission to marry until 1918
Long after other German states dropped such rules, people in Mecklenburg still had to ask their grand duke before marrying or emigrating, and in the late nineteenth century he personally owned half the countryside. The same dynasty had ruled almost without a break since the twelfth century, founded by a Slavic prince.
The name comes from Mikilenburg, Old Saxon for big castle, a fortress between Schwerin and Wismar; Slavs called it Veligrad, meaning the same thing, and scholars rendered it in Latin and Greek as Megalopolis. The landscape is mostly flat and boggy, dotted with ponds, marshes and small woods, better suited to grazing than crops. Beneath the peat lie old lava flows, and country builders cut that stone and combined it with brick and timber, giving rural houses a distinctive look.
West Slavs, among them the Obotrites whom Frankish writers lumped together as Wends, settled here from the seventh century. Their prince Niklot, who died in 1160, founded the ruling house that later became dukes and grand dukes. Henry the Lion of Saxony conquered and Christianised the region in the late twelfth century, and waves of German and Flemish settlers brought new law and farming methods. Slavic traces survive in place names: Schwerin was once Zuarin, and the gard in Bresegard comes from grad, meaning town.
The region's emblem is a grinning steer's head with hide and crown, perhaps recalling helmets made from a bull's head with the skin hanging down to shade the neck. Unusually for German lands, Mecklenburg kept stable borders and relative independence from its neighbours for centuries, though the dynasty split it among branches, notably Schwerin and Strelitz, which became grand duchies in 1815. Constitutions arrived only on the eve of the First World War, and the last grand duke abdicated in 1918.
Berlin merged the two halves in 1934. After 1945 Soviet authorities joined Mecklenburg with Western Pomerania, and the combined state took in many refugees expelled from lost eastern territories. East Germany broke it into three districts in 1952, but reunification in 1990 revived Mecklenburg-Vorpommern as one of Germany's 16 states, with Rostock and Schwerin among its main cities.
Source: Mecklenburg
