Which city did the Hanseatic League call its leading member?

Lübeck, and the League is one of the odder political entities in European history - a commercial alliance of towns with no capital, no army of its own, no constitution and no fixed membership, which dominated northern European trade for something like three centuries.

It worked by controlling the terms rather than the territory. Hanseatic merchants negotiated privileges in foreign ports, ran their own trading enclaves - the Steelyard in London, Bryggen in Bergen - and enforced compliance with boycotts, which could ruin a city that crossed them. It fought wars occasionally, and beat Denmark in 1370, but its normal weapon was the collective refusal to trade.

It declined for reasons no one decision could fix. Atlantic routes made the Baltic less central, strong nation states stopped tolerating foreign merchants with special privileges inside their borders, and the Dutch outcompeted it. The last formal assembly met in 1669 with nine towns attending. Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen still carry Hansestadt in their official names, and the German airline's name, Lufthansa, is a direct borrowing - air Hansa.