A trade route which came from Leipzig and Magdeburg in the southeast crossed the river here, leading northwestwards to Lüneburg and Hamburg, with a branch-off to Braunschweig in the west.

The Welf dukes repeatedly gave Calvörde Castle in pawn to local nobles like the House of Alvensleben, while the adjacent settlement (Flecken) prospered, with town walls, a city council and seal.

With several surrounding villages and manors, it was reorganised as the Amt Calvörde, which remained an eastern exclave of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg between the Brandenburgian Altmark in the north and the Archbishopric of Magdeburg in the south.

Under the unlucky rule of Duke Frederick Ulrich of Brunswick, Calvörde was devastated by Imperial troops in the Thirty Years' War, until it passed into the allodial possessions of his wife Duchess Anna Sophia.

After World War II, however, according to the 1945 Potsdam Agreement, it fell with the Prussian Province of Saxony to the Soviet occupation zone and from 1949 was part of East Germany.