The Hanseatic League Was Designed to Facilitate What?
Information technology was a lucrative business for the merchants at its centre, families like the Wittenborgs of Lübeck, whose trading tentacles stretched from England to Russia. The Wittenborgs would take material from, say, Flanders and luxury goods from the Mediterranean, and then transport them to eastern markets. In return, they would option up furs, timber, corn, wax for candles, and fish – particularly cod and herring – which they salted and sold on, or devoured themselves. "The Germans are enormous eaters," one Venetian traveller was said to have commented – and their feasts were famously lavish.
But this coin-spinning functioning was not just virtually enterprising individuals. Lübeck, and families similar the Wittenborgs, lay at the center of an extraordinary medieval trading network. The Hansa, equally that network was known, sought to dominate east-w merchandise in and around the Baltic from the 12th to the 17th centuries. And it largely succeeded: at the pinnacle of its ability, upwards to 200 towns and cities were part of this extended network.
The scramble for trade
The Hansa's means of doing business organisation – including innovative payments mechanisms such as offering borrowers lines of credit – seem in many ways remarkably modern. And although its influence waned from the 15th century, its retentivity is even so cherished in northern Europe today – not simply in the proudly 'Hanseatic' towns of Germany only as far afield every bit London and Male monarch's Lynn.
The cause of the Hansa's emergence in the mid-12th century was the ascension of the Baltic as a powerful trading hub, one that provided new goods for Europe's expanding, urbanising and e'er more than demanding population. Such demand created opportunities, but it also sparked tensions, every bit rival merchants jostled to secure a pale of these lucrative new markets.
In 1161, as rivalries grew and occasionally escalated into violence, merchants in the Gotland city of Visby decided to interact in a trading network designed to farther and protect their interests. The great Baltic trading island of Gotland off today's Swedish coast had built on older Viking networks to grow wealthy on trade with the e, as can exist seen in Visby's beautifully preserved medieval centre today. Others at present wanted a slice of the activeness.
Information technology was usual to see helmet, armour and sword hanging up above stores of codfish, bales of herrings and casks of beer
Soon the Visby merchants had been joined past trading towns and cities across Europe (see map overleaf) – from Gotland in the due north to cities like Cologne and Krakow in the southward, and from the netherlands in the due west to the territory of the modern Baltic States in the e (where Germanic economic influence was already strong, courtesy of the crusading campaigns of the Teutonic knights in the 13th century, which paved the way for aloof Germanic settlers.) By 1259, this network had evolved into a powerful transnational group, the Hanseatic League.
So what explains the Hansa's rapid growth? The answer lies, in office, in the benefits information technology conferred on its members. It created a network of trusted assembly in far-flung parts of the European market, a network that whatever individual Hanseatic trader could turn to for advice and protection. Considering they often lived together in trading bases, or convened at Hanseatic gatherings, members could tap into information about the availability of appurtenances for trade – from Russian wax to Baltic grain – and their irresolute market value. Convoys were formed to defend shipping against piracy. The Hansa also oversaw the manufacture of new ships ideally suited to Baltic trade.
Key to the Hansa offering was quality control – whether that be in the standard of the goods being traded, the avoidance of counterfeiting, or the standardisation of weights and measures. And, by the mid-14th century, regular meetings of the Hansa were being held to regulate their affairs. Although it had a sometimes fluid membership, and no formal constitution or central government, the Hanseatic arrangement did develop a gear up of customary practices and laws, and from 1373 a kind of court of appeal was based in Lübeck to settle disputes.
Resorting to strength
For all the benefits that Hansa membership offered European traders, information technology's of import to remember that these benefits weren't designed for everyone. The Hansa was not aiming to create a free merchandise utopia but rather to protect its privileges. Members used their collective power to try to negotiate the almost favourable terms possible for trade in foreign markets – terms designed to give them an advantage over their rivals. The Hansa equally a group could try to enforce its volition by boycotting its enemies commercially, notably against Flanders in the 14th century. And if that didn't work, they sometimes resorted to force.
So merchants became not merely traders but sometimes soldiers. A 19th-century historian of the Hansa, Helen Zimmern, wrote that in a typical Lübeck merchant's firm "it was usual to run into helmet, armour and sword hanging up to a higher place stores of codfish, bales of herrings, casks of beer, bales of cloth, or what not besides".
And it wasn't only rival trading blocs or Baltic pirates that felt the strength of such weapons. Frequently, the Hansa found itself at loggerheads with governments.
There's little uncertainty that the Hansa'due south ascension to power was facilitated by the weakness of many medieval governments, a weakness exacerbated by the want of cities to complimentary themselves of the restrictions medieval rulers placed upon them, ranging from taxes to bans on what kinds of weapons they could behave. In fact by the mid-14th century, with its laws and courts of appeal, the Hanseatic League had itself started in some ways to resemble a authorities. So, when it found itself at state of war with the Danes in the 1360s – following the Danish sacking of the strategically vital Baltic port of Visby in 1361 – the stakes were incredibly loftier.
The Hansa did non have any kind of defeat lightly. When one member of that bang-up fur-trading Wittenborg family unit, Johann, failed in his attempt to defeat Danish forces, he was executed in Lübeck's market. In the end notwithstanding the Hansa prevailed, imposing the 1370 Treaty of Stralsund in which the Danes were compelled to concede Hanseatic privileges. For some historians, this marks the summit of Hanseatic ability.
That power gave the Hansa the telescopic and the ambition to develop an early version of the logistics chains then prominent in international commerce today. Warehousing was a key to this, providing secure places to store, weigh and assess goods in locations linked to send networks.
One such warehouse can nonetheless be seen in King's Lynn on the Norfolk coast. This is England'southward best-preserved role of the Hanseatic network, an impressive beamed edifice constructed in the late 15th century by merchants mainly from the Hanseatic town of Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland). It was, as one historian has observed, a "petty slice of Germany in England", creating a rich trade connection betwixt the English port and merchants from Danzig. Intermarriage between the populations of the two towns helped reinforce the human relationship.
Grateful English kings
London was not a member of the Hansa only it was habitation to a major Hanseatic base, the 'Steelyard', situated on the site of what is now Cannon Street station. The Steelyard was a self-independent community and compound, including storage space for goods, a weighbridge, accommodation, a wine cellar and a garden.
Security was tight. Only Hansa merchants were permitted to enter by means of a countersign ("bread and cheese"), a curfew was enforced, all women excluded. Its traders enjoyed privileges given to them by grateful English monarchs in render for financial favours. Edward III pawned his crown jewels in the Hanseatic city of Cologne between 1339 and 1344 to fund the early stages of the Hundred Years' War. In render the king granted the Hansa privileges including concessions in many of the Cornish tin mines. The German language traders – also known every bit 'Easterlings' – had a reputation for sound money and may have given us the name 'sterling' for our modern British currency.
The Prussians and Nazis attempted to exploit Hanseatic history equally an example of Germanic racial expansion
Given such a strong position and all-encompassing facilities, information technology'south hardly surprising that many Hansa fortunes were made in England, and that Hansa merchants went on to dominate the country's textile export trade. Hans Holbein famously painted the portraits of Hanseatic merchants operating out of 16th-century London (see image on page 59). These men exude status, wealth and, higher up all, cracking confidence in their future as well as their illustrious past.
Yet, the privileges that these merchants enjoyed – including freedom from abort and exemption from many customs duties – caused resentment. The Hanseatic League was accused of "crocodile-like behaviour", showing only its caput and teeth, while the rest of the body remained concealed below the water. In England, rival trading groups, such equally the Merchant Adventurers, began to flex their lobbying muscles. Worse still, so did the government itself. Fears that Hanseatic dominance of shipping was threatening England'south emerging maritime prowess provoked a backlash from some of the most powerful figures in the country. In 1597 Queen Elizabeth I forced the Hansa to leave the Steelyard – admitting temporarily – and the site never regained its significance earlier being destroyed in the Swell Burn down of London.
By then, the Hansa'south fortunes were also under force per unit area in continental Europe. The Reformation led to disputes among its members. And there was the ascent of new regional powers, such as the Swedish monarchy: a war betwixt Male monarch Gustavus I and Lübeck in the 1530s led to the terminate of the Hanseatic trading monopoly in the Baltic Sea. New Dutch, Italian and southern High german traders – and commercial operators like the Fugger banking family – likewise challenged the Hansa families' commercial position.
Added to all that was a reorientation of European trade towards new opportunities opening up in southern Europe, Asia and across the Atlantic. And a shift in the natural world had an impact. Due to changes in bounding main temperature, huge shoals of herring, a staple of Hanseatic trade and diet (and once said to be so thick in places that they could be caught by hand) moved in the 15th century out of the Baltic and into the Northward Sea.
States fight dorsum
But it was the Xxx Years' War in the 17th century that possibly marked the terminal straw for the era of Hanseatic prosperity, as merchandise was disrupted by conflict, and newly emerging nation states – no longer cowed by Hanseatic ability – asserted their rights ever more strongly. In 1669 the final formal gathering of the Hanseatic League took place in its pre-eminent city, Lübeck.
That might have been the end of the story. But, during the Napoleonic invasions of German language territory, the memory of the Hansa was revived as an ideal of robust Germanic independence. The Prussians and Nazis besides attempted to exploit Hanseatic history as an example of Germanic racial expansion.
It is the purely economic achievements of the Hansa that are the focus today, as northern German towns and cities such equally Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg proudly proclaim their Hanseatic roots. The proper noun lives on too in the German airline Lufthansa and the football game team Hansa Rostock. And along the eastern Baltic coast the memory is still potent. In the Estonian uppercase, Tallinn, the Hanseatic past is celebrated through compages and cuisine in a fashion shrewdly designed to entreatment to German tourists.
Champions of the European Spousal relationship have tried to celebrate the Hanseatic League every bit a kind of prototype version of continental unification. Still, historians bespeak out that the Hansa never had the kind of political or economical integration associated with the Eu. And it is striking that a group of northern Eu members, collaborating today informally nether the proper noun the 'New Hanseatic League', support ideas of liberal and thrifty economics and freer trade rather than EU centralisation.
Meanwhile, memories of a simpler but evocative kind can be plant in the remains of Hanseatic architecture, such as elegant old salt warehouses in Lübeck or formidable churches built by prosperous Hanseatic merchants in Baltic towns similar Stralsund, decorated with images such as disguised Russians arriving at trading posts with mounds of furs. The squirrel trade, like and then much Hanseatic activity, faded over time, due partly to overhunting. The trading network had – in that particular field – been too successful for its own skillful.
Only it had shown the enormous potential of linking businesses, families, ports and urban centres, which others went on to exploit. And it reminds us why trade is so significant in global history.
Chris Bowlby is a journalist who produces documentaries for the BBC. His BBC Radio 4 documentary on the Hanseatic League, The Hansa Inheritance, presented by Chris Morris, is bachelor on BBC Sounds: bbc.co.great britain/sounds.
The Hanseatic Trading Empire
Feeding Europe's consumer nail: 7 products that greased the wheels of the Hanseatic trade network
Pepper was often sourced from southern Europe or markets like Bruges and and so supplied past Hanseatic merchants beyond its northern network. The Danzig merchants based at Male monarch's Lynn in England were known locally every bit pepper sacks'.
Grain was collected from farmland around Baltic river systems and supplied to keen cities of northern Europe. The Baltic grain trade remained significant for Europe until the opening of the American prairie markets in the 19th century.
Hanseatic traders brought together fish from the Baltic Sea and salt from cities such as Kiel on the Baltic coast. This enabled the preservation of fish and its distribution to those observing the religious rules of eating fish on Fridays. The prototype, left, shows a fishmonger gutting herring in the 15th century. Hanseatic networks distributed hops from central and eastern Europe, spreading ideas as well about how brewing methods could be improved. This helped reinforce, it's been argued, the dividing line between beer-drinking northern Europe and the wine-drinking south.
Timber and woods products were a highly significant Hanseatic production, brought from areas around the Baltic to western European trading markets like Antwerp and Bruges.
Wax was transported to the w from Russia and Poland, which may have given us the word 'polishing'. Sweet-smelling beeswax candles were in high need for lighting, and for ecclesiastical use.
This article was first published in the August 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
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Source: https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/a-medieval-european-union-why-the-hanseatic-league-still-matters/
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