Two Towns in One: The Feudal Aristocratic Toompea Hill and the Merchant Lower Town of Medieval Tallinn

Before the 19th century, Toompea occupied an anomalous position in Tallinn’s urban geography: administratively and legally distinct from the Lower Town, it was never regarded as part of Tallin (Reval) proper. The hill functioned as the seat of ruling elites, secular lords, landed nobility, and the higher clergy, and its governance had little in common with the merchant city below.
Following the Danish conquest of 1219 and the consolidation of feudal authority under the Teutonic Order, Toompea was governed by manorial and feudal law, while the Lower Town operated under Lübeck Law, a charter that guaranteed urban self-government. The Lower Town developed its own civic institutions, namely the Town Council (Raad), the burgomaster, and the merchant guilds, whereas Toompea remained under noble and clerical authority. Executive power was vested first in the Castle Bailiff (Burgvogt) and later in the Land Captains (Landräte), noble-appointed administrators who served successive sovereigns: Danish kings, Teutonic commanders, Swedish governors-general, and Russian imperial representatives alike.
Two bodies gave Toompea its institutional character. The Domkapitel (Cathedral Chapter of St Mary’s Cathedral) combined ecclesiastical jurisdiction with substantial landholdings. The Estländische Ritterschaft (Estonian Knighthood), a hereditary corporate body, represented the interests of the Baltic German nobility and convened in the Landtag, the provincial diet that met in Toompea Castle. Under both Swedish and Russian rule, the Ritterschaft used the Landtag as the principal instrument through which it negotiated with, and frequently resisted, the demands of the crown.
These two systems of law and authority ran in parallel for centuries. In 1878, Toompea and the Lower Town were formally merged into a single municipality. The reform was not merely administrative: it dissolved a distinction that had defined the city’s social and legal geography since the medieval period, and brought to a close the long separation between the hill and the town at its foot.