The Copper Mines of Falun and the Fisheries of Skane

“on its eastern side the sea breaks through and cuts off the western side of Skaane; and this sea commonly yields each year an abundant haul to the nets of the fishers. Indeed, the whole sound is apt to be so thronged with fish that any craft which strikes on them is with difficulty got off by hard rowing, and the prize is captured no longer by tackle, but by simple use of the hands.” So writes the the late 12^th century Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus about Zealand, the island he believed to be the most delightful province and heart of Denmark.

In the year 1400, 550 ships arrived in Lübeck, bringing 65,000 barrels of salted Herring to the city at the mouth of the Trave River. But that was only a fraction of the total that is estimated to have been as much as 300,000 barrels of herring a year that were caught in the narrow sound between Copenhagen and Malmo and then processed in a giant temporary market town on the Skanör peninsula. All these vast quantities of fish were needed to feed the European population who had not only acquired a good dose of piety but also as many as 140 fast days per year when the consumption of hot-blooded animals was banned.

How the trade in Baltic Herring became a monopoly of the Hanseatic league and the backbone of its trading network is what we will discuss in this episode. No worries, it is not just about salting techniques and the difficulties of shipping a load of fish over thousands of miles. There will be a battle with knights and everything…..and an extended detour into the largest copper mine in Europe that funded the 30-years war. I hope you will enjoy it.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 111: Hewing and Herring

“on its eastern side the sea breaks through and cuts off the western side of Skaane; and this sea commonly yields each year an abundant haul to the nets of the fishers. Indeed, the whole sound is apt to be so thronged with fish that any craft which strikes on them is with difficulty got off by hard rowing, and the prize is captured no longer by tackle, but by simple use of the hands.” So writes the the late 12^th century Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus about Zealand, the island he believed to be the most delightful province and heart of Denmark.

In the year 1400, 550 ships arrived in Lübeck, bringing 65,000 barrels of salted Herring to the city at the mouth of the Trave River. But that was only a fraction of the total that is estimated to have been as much as 300,000 barrels of herring a year that were caught in the narrow sound between Copenhagen and Malmo and then processed in a giant temporary market town on the Skanör peninsula. All these vast quantities of fish were needed to feed the European population who had not only acquired a good dose of piety but also as many as 140 fast days per year when the consumption of hot-blooded animals was banned.

How the trade in Baltic Herring became a monopoly of the Hanseatic league and the backbone of its trading network is what we will discuss in this episode. No worries, it is not just about salting techniques and the difficulties of shipping a load of fish over thousands of miles. There will be a battle with knights and everything…..and an extended detour into the largest copper mine in Europe that funded the 30-years war. I hope you will enjoy it.

But before we start let me tell you that the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Carsten H., Marilyn M-J., Brendan and Steffen D. who have already signed up.

And a bit of housekeeping. In episode 109 I said that the St. Olaf’s yard in Novgorod was named after the Swedish king Saint Olaf. That was not accurate. Even though the Gotlanders were nominally Swedish subjects, they worshipped king Olaf of Norway in their church in Novgorod. Sorry about that. I am not sure how that happened, but it did. Will try to do better next time.

As for the accurate parts of the podcast, we ended last week with the opening up of new trade routes to Novgorod and Smolensk via what is today Latvia and Estonia. The cities that were founded there, most prominently Riga, Reval (modern day Tallin) and Doprat (modern day Tartu) had joined together with Visby into one of the regional subgroups of the Hanse, the Thirds or Drittel in German. Theirs was called the Livonian Third.

The Livonian Third’s main trade was in the Eastern Wares, the beeswax, fur and silk road wares that came in via Novgorod and the Dnieper River. They also had one more trade we have not talked about, and that was the trade with Sweden.

When I think of Swedish exports, I think of obviously Abba, Tetra Pak, Ikea and mobile phones. But for centuries, Sweden’s biggest exports were metals, and in particular copper. When I say centuries, I mean centuries. There is archaeological evidence that some mining activity took place as far back as 850 AD at the mine at Falu Gruva, about 200km northwest of Stockholm. This enormous mine at some point provided 2/3rds of Europe’s copper supply until it was finally closed in 1992.

Copper from Falu Gruva did not only cover the roofs of the palace of Versailles but is also the base material for some of the most iconic images we have of Sweden, the red painted wooden cottages. That red paint was made from the sludge of the mine, mixed with water, rye flour, linseed oil and other ingredients to produce an excellent anti-weathering cover.

Falu Gruva was one of the most important, if not the most important economic activity in Sweden. It funded most of its wars when Sweden was a European superpower paying for Gustav Adolf’s rampage across the German lands in the 30-years war and Charles XII unintentional trip to Constantinople. As the Regency declared “This kingdom stands or falls by the Great Copper Mountain!”

So, what has all that to do with the Hanseatic League? Well, quite a lot actually. German merchants showed up in Sweden almost right from the beginning. Sometime around 1173 Henry the Lion had managed to get an agreement with the king of Sweden that protected their merchants and allowed Germans to settle in Swedish cities. That process accelerated after the former trading and royal centre in Sigtuna was destroyed by raiders from across the Baltic Sea. In 1252 the country’s regent Birger Jarl invited German merchants and artisans to come and help building Sigtuna’s replacement, the newly founded city of Stockholm. Stockholm never became entirely a city of foreign merchants like Riga or Tallin, nor did Sweden get taken over by a German speaking ruling class as Latvia and Estonia had been. But the German population had a major and sometimes dominant position inside the major cities, in particular in Stockholm. They brought their customs and ideas about city governance to their new home. The Swedish language too has been heavily influenced by the low German the Hanseatic Merchants spoke. Many terms, in particular those relating to artisan products, trading and politics have their roots in lower German. Whether the German influence on the Swedish language was indeed as significant as that of Norman French on the English language I am not entirely convinced. But if any of you is a Swedish linguist, I would love to hear what you think.

These Germans who came to Sweden were initially attracted by the opportunity to export agricultural products, in particular butter as well as furs. But when our intrepid Hanse merchants got wind of this mountain of copper out there in the wilderness, they realised that they had hit on the jackpot.

Though the mining in Falu Gruva had begun in the 9th century, it wasn’t a particularly professional operation. Most of the miners were farmers in their day job and went down to look for copper in their spare time.

The Lübeck merchants on the other hand knew about the most professional mining operation in northern Europe, the great silver mine in Goslar. They recruited mining professionals from there to come up to Falu Gruva and develop this abundantly large deposit. Like the merchants in Stockholm, the miners from Goslar brought with them their traditions and ways to organise tings. They were free men with highly sought after skills. Hence, they were given wide ranging privileges to elect their own representatives who negotiated their pay, who settled disputes within the community and set standards for the safety and operation of mines. The mine hence functioned largely autonomous, just overseen by a royal official.

As for ownership of the mine itself, that was split between Swedish nobles and the German merchants from Lübeck and Stockholm. In 1347 King Magnus visited the mine and felt a fundamental reorganisation was needed. He laid out the respective rights and privileges of mine owners and master miners, probably based on how things had been supposed to work since the 13^th century. Interestingly this document keeps getting cited as the incorporation document of Stora Koppersberg Bergbelaged AB, a subsidiary of Stora Enso, one of Swedens large industrial conglomerates. If true, it  would make Stora Enso indeed the oldest joint stock company in the World. Whilst the New York Times and Al Gore are pushing the story, many historians are doubtful of that notion given that the mine owners and master miners were a long way from pooling their resources, and in the latter’s case an even longer way from lounging about and drawing dividends.

What is however not much in dispute is that until the Late Middle Ages Lübeck merchants dominated the Copper export business out of Sweden. Even the German merchants in Stockholm struggled to get a look in. we know that between 1368 and 1370 just 9 Lübeck merchants accounted for 60% of the copper exports from Sweden, a level of concentration most unusual in the Hanseatic league.

Apart from copper, iron ore was another important Swedish export, though we are still a long way from the days when Sweden was one of the largest sources of iron ore in Europe in particular for the Ruhr.

Whilst Sweden was coerced into selling its most valuable resource via Lübeck, and only via Lübeck, their neighbours in the West, the Danes too found themselves cornered by the aggressive Hanseatic merchants for their most valuable commodity, the humble herring.

Today we eat very little herring, which is a shame since this oily fish can be absolutely delicious. But it isn’t just its taste that made it the Middle Ages favourite fish. Herring have a number of great advantages. The first one is that they often move in large schools as solitary herring are getting quickly confused and lost. The name Herring might go back to the Old High German word “heri” meaning “lots” or “many”. All you need it finding a place where the school of herring passes regularly and you can catch them on an industrial scale.

And Herring are exceptionally good at reproducing. A female herring lays 30,000 eggs on average that she lets drop to the bottom of the spawning grounds after which the male herring release a cloud of milt over the same area. Who ever said romance is dead. What is particularly helpful is that different herring populations spawn at different times so that there is less seasonality with these fish. And finally the Herring tend to return back to the spawning grounds where they have been conceived going down the same route every year.

In the Middle Ages Baltic herring would spawn somewhere in the Baltic sea, we do not know exactly and then move out into the North Sea from where they would return between July and September. Now if you have been good at geography or can find an atlas, take a look at the connection between the North Sea and the Baltic. Yep, right across that entrance into the Baltic lay two massive islands, Fyn/Fuenen and Zealand. There is a way through but the navigationally challenged Herring tend to go through the straighter gap called the Oeresund which is just 4km wide at its narrowest point. And that is where every summer millions of Herring pass through, making good old Saxo Grammaticus claim that you would get your boat stuck if you tried rowing across.

Another great advantage of the humble herring is that it is very oily. That means it is easy to preserve. They can be pickled as Matjes, smoked as Kippers or simply salted.

There we are. A near inexhaustible supply of fish, caught in a geographical net laid there cunningly by Slartibartfast and ready to be salted, pickled smoked or otherwise cured for a long journey across Europe. A Europe where for 140 days a year the consumption of warm blooded animals was forbidden. And since not everyone fancies Alligator, Lizard, Puffin or, weirdly, beaver, the majority of those who could afford animal protein opted for fish.

That leaves only one question. Who will get all the money from that Bonanza. Another look on the map gives you the answer. Both shores of the Oeresund were part of Denmark for a large chunk of the Middle Ages. So surely it is the king of Denmark who will be shipping that most desirable commodity all across Christianity.

Well we know he didn’t. So why was that?

One reason was often believed to have been the Battle of Bornhoeved.  In this rather epic encounter where fighters on both side waded through blood and the king of Denmark lost an eye, the future of the Baltic region was decided for a few centuries to come.

In that battle King Valdemar II of Denmark, son of Valdemar the Victorious faced the counts of Holstein and Schwerin, the duke of Saxony, the bishop of Bremen and troops from Lübeck and Hamburg. On Valdemar’s side was Otto the child, grandson of Henry the Lion and not many others.

Before he was so crushingly humiliated Valdemar II had expelled the counts of Holstein, fought over the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen, run a crusade into Estonia and forced the dukes of Mecklenburg and Pomerania under his suzerainty. Even Lübeck had become part of his Danish empire. The young emperor Frederick II still fighting Otto IV had to accept these changed circumstances in 1220.

Valdemar’s problems began when he fell foul of one of his recently acquired vassals, the count of Schwerin over a property deal that had gone sour. Or for sleeping with the count’s wife, or both. When I talk about property here, I mean a whole county, not just a detached villa with delightful views.

The count of Schwerin responded by imprisoning the king and his son when they came over for a relaxing hunting party in 1223. Now the count of Schwerin needed allies since the friends of Waldemar, including the pope, put pressure on him to release the king.

These allies were the sworn enemies of Waldemar, count Adolf IV of Holstein who had been expelled from his lands and bishop Gebhard of Hamburg Bremen for the same reason. 2 years into the imprisonment of king Waldemar, his son in law, a member of the Wettiner clan musters the energy to come up and try to free him. But count Adolf IV and bishop Gebhard cut that short and the next family member joins Waldemar in his certainly most comfortable prison in the castle of Dannenberg. At that point Waldemar realises the game is up and starts negotiating.

Terms are tough. Return the lands of the Holsteins, Schwerins, and the bishops, release the newly acquired vassals in Mecklenburg and Pomerania from their oaths, pay 45,000 mark of silver and just generally Foxtrot Oscar.

Waldemar did sign at the dotted line and went back home to Denmark, fully intent on doing not a single thing on the long list of concessions. Instead he raised an army and got back to the job of conquering Holstein. He has some initial success and forces the Dithmarscher, these free peasants who live like the ancient Germanic tribes, back into his army. He also finds support from the house of Welf in the form of Otto the Child, who is by now no longer a child, just still called that.

His opponents have also been busy recruiting new members and can secure the duke Albrecht of Saxony, one of Albrecht the Bear’s descendants.

On July 27, 1227 it is showtime. Either side sets up in the usual order of a central contingent with the king on one side and Count Adolf IV on the other plus two wings each. Behind the Danish army were the Dithmarscher as a reserve and behind the German princes the Mecklenburger. That is about as much battle order there is. Because once the two armies have made contact it is the usual man against man fighting.

The whole process dragged on for a long time and casualties were high on both sides. There are many different versions of what ultimately decided the battle. There is the apparition of the virgin Mary displaying an unexpected fondness for kidnappers and a more credible stories that the Dithmarscher swapped sides in the midst of the battle. Or it was simply that one side was hammering harder and longer at the other one. In any event, Waldemar was injured and fled the field of battle.

The net result of this encounter was decisive. Waldemar gave up all ambition on the lands south of the Eider River, meaning the Holy Roman empire returned back to its borders that Frederick II had so carelessly sacrificed. This border will play an important role in that intractable Schleswig-Holstein question that according to Lord Palmerstone’s famous quote only three people ever really understood. I am confident you will remember that when we get there in about 3 years.

The count of Holstein regained his county and some. The Schauenburger will from here on out be major players in Danish politics. Mecklenburg and Schwerin return to being imperial princes instead of Danish vassals. Albrecht of Saxony gained Lauenburg and Ratzeburg. The Dithmarscher moved into nominal vassalage of the bishop of Bremen but basically lived as a free peasant republic until 1599. Basically instead of one dominant political power in the Baltic there were many medium sized ones, none of which strong enough to stand up to the Hanseatic League.

And many hundreds of miles north the Livonian Brothers of the Sword use the weakness of the Danes to take Tallin and fill it with German merchants.

And Lübeck, Lübeck gets extended privileges as a free imperial city making it now entirely independent of any of the neighbouring powers. And in the traditional telling the augmentation of Lübeck and the fall of the king of Denmark allowed the Hanse merchants to grab hold of the Herring trade in Scania.

But that is not quite true. Yes, a weakened Denmark is a good thing for the merchants, but as it happened King Waldemar had been a great sponsor of Lübeck and had invited them to come to Scania to trade Herring long before his defeat in 1227.

The reason the Danes allowed the Hanse in was the same reason why the Gotlander took them along to Novgorod. It was about the white gold, salt. Salt that Lübeck merchants could procure from Luneburg, from Oldesloe and from Halle an der Saale. Without salt the Herring could not be preserved or at least not in the quantities required. So the Lübecker traded salt for access to the trade in Herring.

Though the Danes had no salt, the Hanse merchants weren’t the only ones in the whole wide world who had salt. There was the Baie of Bourgneuf. Never heard of it? Me neither. But in the Middle Ages this bay on the western French coast just south of where the Loire enters the Atlantic was the largest source of salt in Europe. The bay used to be significantly larger than it is today because the vast salt fields where they evaporated the water and collected the valuable white crystals has shifted the coastline 20km westwards.

In the early 13^th century mainly Dutch and English merchants collected the salt there and brought it to Denmark to salt the herring. They then took the barrels of salted herring back to England or Holland for onward distribution.

In the absence of their own salt, the Danes role in the Herring business was limited to catching the actual fish and to organise the trade.

In the Middle Ages commerce went either through major trading centres where merchants would live all year round like say Venice or Bruges. Or it would happen on fairs, where merchants from all over would get together on specific dates to exchange wares. Whether it was organised as fairs or as permanent establishments was a question of whether there was enough trading volume in the place all year around.

The most important fairs in the early Middle Ages were those of Champagne in France. These were six annual get-togethers of merchants from Flanders, Italy, Spain and Germany that took place in four cities, Troyes, Provins, Bar-sur-Aube and Lagny, each lasting about six weeks. The advantage of the fair was that it concentrated demand and supply by artificially constraining the time trading could happen. It is a bit like stock exchanges used to have limited trading hours so that everybody was compelled to bring their buy and sell orders in at the same time.

The Champagne fairs declined as the European economy grew and trade expanded. Once there was enough demand and supply to sustain trade flows throughout the year, they got bundled in one place, which for northern Europe at the time was Flanders, in particular Bruges. Later it went to Antwerp, then Amsterdam and finally London.

The fair that the Danish king set up on the small peninsula of Skanoer-Falsterbo was seasonal, less because of lack of sufficient demand but because of the seasonality of the supply. The Herring only appeared between July and September.

If you go to the Skanoer peninsula today, you are likely coming for the vast sandy beaches or to see the Falsterbo horse show. But these rather modest little towns had once been one of the most important economic centres in Europe.

The way the kings of Denmark had organised the fair was as follows. Each of the trading cities was given a specific area on the peninsula, a so-called Vitte where they could process and sell the Herring. On these enclosures the merchants would establish wooden sheds or houses in which to process the herring and store the supplies. The Vitten of Lübeck and of Danzig/Gdansk were the largest, each about 6 to 10 hectares all filled with wooden buildings.

As I said, catching the herring was largely reserved for Danish fishermen. They would land their catch and the merchants would buy it off their boats and bring it to their factory. There mostly Danish and German women would clean and then salt the fish and put them into barrels. Once that is done, the merchants may either sell his herring right there at the fair or have it shipped to their hometown. The amount of shipping that got into Skanoer was truly astounding. Lübeck alone sent 550 ships annually, some quite small, but others able to take 400 barrels of Herring down to the Trave River. In 1400 there were 900 registered Herring importers from Lübeck alone. Estimates range from 200,000 to 300,000 barrels of herring getting shipped from Skanoer when the place was at its peak. Lübeck accounted for 65,000 of them, so if we extrapolate from there, we are talking about literally thousands of ships going in and out of that place, a place that did not even have a real harbour so that all these barrels had to be rolled down to the beach, put on a dinghy or small boat and then transferred to a larger vessel.

Such a massive congregation of merchants always means that other things than Herring would be traded there as well. And since only some of the merchants came from the Baltic and others from Holland and England, each bringing different wares, the fair quickly became a major exchange for cloth, fur, beeswax, salt, spices, silk, butter, grain and anything else the medieval mind desired, not just herring. Thousands of people came to work on the Vitten to salt the herring, to bring the fish ashore, to ship goods from land to shore. There would have been entertainment put on for all these people who stayed there for a few months, plays, jugglers and musicians. Basically an enormous festival, one of Europe’s greatest and most profitable parties.

In all the revelry, there was something that irritated our Hanseatic merchants, and that was the presence of what they called the Umlandfahrer, the traders who came in from the North Sea, from Holand and England to buy the herring and sell their cloth. And these guys also had access to the resource that we have seen sits at the heart of Hanseatic influence in the Baltic, salt. The approach they took was twofold.

One was to send their own ships out to the bay of Bourgneuf and bring back that sea salt from there and on the next journey stop in England and Flanders to sell the Herring. That was even a necessity for those Hanseatic cities that did not have a ready access to the salt of Luneburg, Halle and Oldesloe like Gdansk. Thanks to increasingly aggressive tactics the Hanseatic merchants crowded the Umlandfahrer out of the Herring trade.

Finally in the late 14^th century the Hanse fought multiple wars with Denmark we will discuss in more detail later. These being successful the Hanseatic League took over Skanoer for a period and formally expelled the non-Hanseatic traders, thereby creating a monopoly for Scania herring.

Did it work? No it didn’t. By the late 15^th century herring export from Skanoer had dropped to 50,000 barrels.

The big trading fair was a mere shadow of its former self. No more trade in anything but herring, fewer ships, less entertainment, no major bands coming to play, just a lonely dude with greasy hair and a bontempi organ.

This decline in the Herring trade was in part a function of the expulsion of foreign traders. The Hanseatic merchants were now shipping all that beeswax, fur, cloth and so forth directly to destination without stopping in the Oresund.

All this had also coincided with a decline in the number of Herring that passed through the Oresund. We know that their number declined, but the exact reason is unclear. My money is on the most obvious, overfishing. Herring tend to go back to the places where they were born. If one takes out a lot of the Herring who go back and forth into the Baltic, their North Sea cousins and competitors will take over their feeding grounds leading to a gradual decline in the population. There may also have been an impact from the shift in the climate that sets in from the 13^th century onwards.

In any event, the Baltic herring supply gradually declined in the 15^th century and was replaced by North Sea herring caught by Dutch fishermen and distributed via the emerging Dutch trading centres of Amsterdam, Delft etc.

What finally did for the Herring trade was the Reformation which abolished the concept of fast days and forcible eating of fish.

But this is still a long way away. Next week will talk again about fish, this time about dried cod, halibut and hake from Norway. And we will talk about grain, about the cities founded along the coast of Mecklenburg, Pomerania and into the lands of the Teutonic knights and finally about how the Hanseatic league uses its economic muscle to make the Kontor of Bergen the monopoly in the trade of Norway’s main export. I know I promised to do that last week, but I got waylaid by the story of Swedish copper, which I think was worth it, or wasn’t it?

You should know that this project is as much a journey of discovery for me as it is for you. I do usually know roughly what I will be talking about 2 to 3 weeks ahead, but the actual research takes place in the days before the recording. And if I find something interesting, I tend to dig deeper even if that means the schedule gets a bit messed up. So let’s see what I will dig up for next week. I hope to see you then.

Before I go, let me thank all of you who are supporting the show, in particular the Patrons who have kindly signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans. It is thanks to you this show does not have to do advertising for products you do not want to hear about. If Patreon isn’t for you, another way to help the show is sharing the podcast directly or boosting its recognition on social media. If you share, comment or retweet a post from the History of the Germans it is more likely to be seen by others, hence bringing in more listeners. My most active places are Twitter @germanshistory and my Facebook page History of the Germans Podcast. As always, all the links are in the show notes.    

And last but not least the bibliography.

For this episode I again relied heavily on:

Philippe Dollinger: Die Hanse – definitely my go-to-book for this season

Die Hanse, Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos, herausgegeben von Jürgen Bracker, Volker Henn and Rainer Postel

Rolf Hammel-Kieslow: Die Hanse

If you want to know more about the story of the Swedish copper mining have a look at the Falu Gruva website Falu Gruva – Upptäck tusen år av historia or go to the Unesco world heritage site about Falu Gruva and look through the application for the inclusion on the World heritage List which gives a very detailed account of the mining activities there: Mining Area of the Great Copper Mountain in Falun (unesco.org)

And finally I have to thank the Scandinavian History Podcast which helps me understanding the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian perspective on these events: https://podfollow.com/1536322900