Johann Heinrich Bartels (20 May 1761 – 1 February 1850) was a scholar from Hamburg who became a city senator in 1798. He played a leading role in civic administration during the difficult years of French occupation (1806-1814). In 1820 he was elected Mayor of the city, a position which he occupied for a remarkable three decades. Life Claes Bartels (1728–1806), the father of Johann Heinrich, was a Hamburg merchant and cake baker ("Zuckerbäcker"). He was also a leading citizen of the city, being appointed an "Oberalter" in 1797. His wife, Johann Heinrich's mother, born Katharina Maria Seelandt (1739–73), was the daughter of a Protestant minister: she died in the year of Johann Heinrich's twelfth birthday. Bartels attended the Gymnasium (Secondary school) after which he progressed to the University of Göttingen where he studied Theology in anticipation of a career as a churchman. At university he also covered a wider range of subjects, including at this stage, middle eastern languages, in which he was taught by Johann David Michaelis. By the mid 1780s, however, he had come to acknowledge that he had no inner vocation to follow the career that had been mapped out for him. In Autumn 1785 he set out on a journey which would take him as far as the south of Italy, and from which he would return to Hamburg only at the start of 1787. Much of his "Grand Tour" is described in a volume that Bartels dedicated to his father and later published, entitled "Briefe über Kalabrien und Sizilien" ("Letters about Calabria and Sicily"). During the latter part of 1785 he traveled via Nuremberg, Regensburg, Vienna and Trieste before reaching Venice. In the course of his subsequent travels Bartels undertook studies that took in Archeology, Art history and Natural science. Through the publication of his studies included in his volume of "Letters" he became a member of various scientific academies. He traveled home via Paris and the Netherlands, and shunning the offer of a professorship covering subjects for which he had become known, returned to the University of Göttingen in order to study Law, becoming a Doctor of Jurisprudence in 1790. In 1792 he returned with his friend Amandus Augustus Abendroth to Venice where he remained for long enough to claim as his bride Maria Elisabeth, the daughter of a banker called Johann Conrad von Reck. The marriage took place on 16 September 1792.