The travelling merchant Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, passing through in 965, called it Nakon's Castle after the Obotrite prince who held it. By 995 the documents say Michelenburg or Mikelenburg: Old Saxon for large castle, from mikil, large, and Burg. The Slavic name it replaced was probably Veligrad or Wiligrad, which means exactly the same thing, and Latin writers rendered it Magnopolis, which also means exactly the same thing. Four languages, one adjective. Archaeologists put the first fortification here in the seventh or eighth century, raised on a peninsula in low wet ground astride the trade road running from Hamburg east to Wolin on the Oder. Some scholars have identified it with Reric, the Baltic emporium destroyed in 808, though the current consensus places Reric on the coast at Gross Stroemkendorf. The old Slavic name did get a second life: Wiligrad Castle, built at Luebstorf on Lake Schwerin between 1896 and 1898 for Duke John Albert of Mecklenburg, borrowed it deliberately.

By the tenth century this was the seat of Obotrite princes — not a frontier outpost but the political centre of a Slavic polity with its own dynasties, the Nakonids and later the Niklotings. Under the Christian prince Gottschalk, who ruled from 1043 to 1066, the place became something close to a capital: several churches inside the walls, three monasteries by 1066, and an Irish bishop, John of Mecklenburg, in residence. It ended in a single year. A pagan uprising in 1066 killed Gottschalk and drove his family out. His younger son Henry avenged him in 1093 by killing the usurper Kruto — and then pointedly declined to live here, choosing Liubice instead, out near the Wagrian border. The heart of Obotrite territory was becoming the wrong place to sit as the Kingdom of Germany pushed east.

In 1149 the Archbishop of Bremen installed a bishop named Emmehard at Mecklenburg, filling a see vacant since the uprising, as part of Duke Henry the Lion's expansion. Eleven years later Henry and King Valdemar the Great of Denmark came against the Obotrite prince Niklot together. Niklot's answer was to deny them everything worth besieging: he burned his own strongholds at Ilow, Mecklenburg, Schwerin and Dobin and took to the field, where he was killed at Werle. His territory was carved up among Saxon ministeriales, Mecklenburg Castle going to Count Heinrich von Schaten, and the bishopric moved to Schwerin the same year. Niklot's son Pribislav rebelled in 1163 and sacked Mecklenburg in 1164, but the rising broke at the Battle of Verchen later that year. Then politics turned: in 1167, needing a counterweight to his own Saxon nobility, Henry handed Pribislav his father's inheritance and made him prince of Mecklenburg, Kessin and Rostock. That bargain founded a dynasty that ruled until 1918.

Market traffic is documented at Mecklenburg in 1168, but the trade was already draining toward Schwerin, and a stronghold whose region has moved on is just an expensive pile of material. In 1265 the castle was dismantled and its fabric carted off to build Wismar. Someone rebuilt it in 1277 as a staging point for raids; it was pulled down again forty-five years later. By the middle of the fourteenth century a village had grown up beside the ruins, and that village is still there. Dorf Mecklenburg holds the name that an entire region borrowed, and almost nobody outside it knows the borrowing happened.

Georg Christian Friedrich Lisch made the first proper survey of the ruins between 1839 and 1841, at the moment German antiquarianism was discovering that earthworks counted as monuments. Grand Duke Friedrich Franz II declared the rampart a memorial in 1854 and had oaks planted from 1856, which is why the site reads today as a wooded ring rather than a bare mound. The real accounting came much later. Excavations directed by Professor Donat between 1967 and 1971 cut a 52-metre section through the wall and opened 1,175 square metres of ground, establishing an oval inner court between 95 and 140 metres across, enclosed by ramparts standing ten metres high. The street Am Burgwall runs out to what is left. The ground inside has been a cemetery since 1870 — a burial place laid out, without much ceremony, on top of the spot a whole region is named after.