By the end of the 14th century the Hanse is at the top of its game. The Cologne Confederation had shown that they could act in unison if the need arises, can defeat the largest and best run kingdom in Scandinavia. And even the mighty duke of Burgundy had to yield to the power of the merchant cities.

But just 10 years into the new century the association faces a mortal crisis. Not because of retaliation from the outside but due to internal tensions. Not everyone in the great trading cities is happy about the war efforts and the impressive infrastructure projects…

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 121 – A Constitutional Crisis

By the end of the 14th century the Hanse is at the top of its game. The Cologne Confederation had shown that they could act in unison if the need arises, can defeat the largest and best run kingdom in Scandinavia. And even the mighty duke of Burgundy had to yield to the power of the merchant cities.

But just 10 years into the new century the association faces a mortal crisis. Not because of retaliation from the outside but due to internal tensions. Not everyone in the great trading cities is happy about the war efforts and the impressive infrastructure projects…

But before we start it is again time to say thanks to my patrons and one-time contributors who maintain a truly astounding level of generosity. I am well aware that we are going through a cost-of-living crisis and that many people are struggling. If you are one of those and you feel uncomfortable about not making a contribution – don’t be. There are many other ways to support the podcast for instance you could comment or share a post from the History of the Germans on Facebook or Twitter. Just so you know, sharing and commenting has a much bigger impact on the algorithm than just liking a post. And those of you who feel so inclined, you can become a patron at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or you can make a one-time donation at historyofthegermans.com/support. It is really, really appreciated. Thanks a lot to Gavin E., Axel J., OldPivi and Michael M. who have already done so.

Last two weeks we talked about how a Hanseatic merchant operated. How he, and sometimes she could ensure that their business partners were reliable and worked in their interest, how they could get hold of the necessary market intelligence. What products were in demand where, what price one may achieve, how risky the journey would be and whether there were any new taxes, tolls or regulations. And we looked at the ways a Hanseatic Merchant transferred the funds to pay for the goods bought in Bruges or the copper from the Falun Mine in Sweden.

This week we are resuming our narrative. We have come to the beginning of the 15th century. The Hanse had fought and won a war with Denmark. As consequence the gemeine kopman had gained even more extensive privileges on the herring market in Scania, privileges that allowed them to push out the English and Dutch competition. And they had received some major political concessions, for one they had occupied the main fortresses controlling the Oresund for a period of 15 years. And they had been given the right to select the ruler of Denmark upon the death of King Waldemar Atterdag.

And they had not only won this conflict, but had also defended their rights in Bruges, England and Novgorod against some strong opposition. And last, but not least they had gained the upper hand over the Victual Brothers, the famous Baltic pirates.

By 1405, it looks as if the Hanse is invincible.  Their political opponents are subdued, their privileges confirmed, and trade keeps growing strongly. Some of the most iconic Hanseatic buildings, like the Holstentor in Lubeck, the town hall of Danzig and the façades of the Rathaus in Stralsund and Lubeck, were constructed during this period.

But if you look under the bonnet, things are not quite as rosy as they seemed. Tensions are rising, both inside the cities and between the different cities. The kings and major princes are consolidating their power and competition with England and Holland intensifies.

Internal conflicts and revolts were a feature of the 14th and 15th century, much more than in the High Middle Ages. Flanders was the epicentre of both peasant revolts and conflict between the city dwellers and their overlords. It started with peasant rebellions in 1280, 1302 and then 1323-1328. The cities shook off the princely control, at least temporarily, first under Jacob van Artevelde in 1337-1345 and then his son Philip in 1381/82. More rebellions followed in the 15th century.

Other notable uprisings were the Jacquerie in France in 1358. Etienne Marcel a rich merchant in Paris use the Jacquerie to force the Dauphin to sign the Great Ordinance of 1357, a document that could have become the Magna Carta of France had it not been rejected by the king. And let’s not forget the Peasant’s revolt in England in 1381.

In Sweden we had the Engelbrekt rebellion in 1434-36 which played a major role in maintaining the country as a separate entity within the Kalmar union.

The largest and most successful of these revolts were the Hussites in Bohemia, modern day Czech republic who rose up against their king in 1419, a story we will explore in quite some detail in an upcoming series on the Luxemburger emperors.

These revolts were all different. Some were led by peasants rebelling against the heavy taxation, others involved rich burghers fighting for the freedom of their cities, others again were triggered by political and economic inequality within the cities. Some, like the English Peasant’s revolt and the Hussite Wars had strong religious components.

There are many reasons for this rising unrest amongst the people. The change in the economy is the most obvious component. The economic boom that underpinned the High Middle Ages had ended. That was in part due to the end of the medieval warming period. The climate in europe was now on a cooling trajectory known as the little Ice Age that hit its Nadir in the 17th century. But we also find that innovation had stalled. The improved agricultural tools and practices of the 11th and 12th century are now rolled out across almost all of Europe.

What has also ended was the colonisation of the East. The option to emigrate first into the eastern marches and then further into Poland, Prussia and the Germanic enclaves along the Baltic shore was no longer there. The local rulers no longer needed or were able to accommodate large numbers of foreigners looking for land to cultivate.

Plus the Black Death and the waves of epidemics following it had reset the relationship between Landowners and peasants and between burghers and city labourers. Labour had become scarce and hence wages had risen. Keeping peasants as serfs on the estate became seen as more and more unfair as they knew they could find better work and better living conditions elsewhere.

And finally, the moral decline of the church following the move of the papacy to Avignon fed into this general sense of discontent. We are now at the hight of the great schism where various attempts to return the pope to Rome has resulted in first two competing papacies and now three contenders. Not only did they raise tithes to fund their lavish courts and the fight against their opponents, but they were too engrossed in their conflicts to care much about the souls of their flock.

The cities of the Hanse weren’t free from such tensions. They did erupt in many cities and shared a similar background to what happened in Flanders. But they did have some specific Hanseatic characteristics.

The Hanse cities were quite different to places like Bruges and Ghent or the capital cities of Paris and Prague.

All the Hanseatic cities were dominated by an upper class of long-distance traders and major landowners. These were men of significant means, usually commanding a fortune of more than 5,000 mark. They were members exclusive merchant associations, the Artushof in Danzig, the Great Guild in Reval, the Richerzeche in Cologne or the Circle society in Lübeck. They sat on the city council and one of them was the city mayor, the Burgermeister. These were the patricians. The cities on the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea tended to be dominated by the long-distance traders, whilst the inland cities like for instance Cologne, Dortmund, Muenster and Brunswick had a higher proportion of landowners amongst the patricians.

Being a patrician was in principle a function of birth, but at least in the 14th and 15th century this was more theory than practice. As we have seen with our two Tallin merchants, Bernd Pal and Hans Selhorst. Bernd Pal’s father sat on the city council in Lübeck as did his grandfather. But Bernd did not manage to get there. The scale of his business and his failure to make a suitable marriage effectively relegated him from the patrician status of his forefathers. Hans Selhorst on the other hand had come from Hamm in Westphalia with at best a modest amount of money and no connections. He rose to be member of the great guild and the city council thanks to his great commercial acumen and a favourable marriage.

Across the Hanse patrician families stayed in the top flight for a few generations before they are relegated. But that varied considerably between cities. Membership in the Richerzeche in Cologne for instance was very stable with some dynasties like the Lyskirchen sticking it out for 500 years. On the opposite end were Hamburg and Stralsund who had a materially higher turnover, chucking out families after just 2 to 3 generations. Lubeck and most others were somewhere in the middle averaging a staying time of 3 to 4 generations before disease, inbreeding or incompetence pushed them out of their position.

It is also notable that the patricians were perfectly happy to admit foreigners into their ranks, even allowing them to become Burgermeister, provided they were successful, rich and fitted in. Hinrich Castorp, the legendary Lübeck Burgermeister was originally from Dortmund and was admitted to the city council just 7 years after gaining citizenship.

Most cities did not have something akin to the Golden Book of Venice where the names of all the patrician families were entered. Patrician status in the Hanse city was mainly achieved by getting admitted into one of these great societies and from there into the city council.

By the 15th century these patrician societies operated a bit like English gentlemen clubs. First you have different grades of those, from the top, top level, like the Circle Society and then further down the society of St. Lawrence or St. Anthony and at the entry level the society of Blackheads that admitted unmarried new merchants who had finished their apprenticeship.  To get into the higher levels, you needed not only a certain minimum wealth, but you also needed to be the right sort of chap. For instance, the circle society in Lubeck was so snobbish the rejected Nouveau Riches set up their own club, the Koplude Kompanye, the company of merchants.

Once one had joined one of these societies, one had a chance to get on to the city council. Membership there was for life. Once a member had died, the existing members co-opted somebody new to the council, again usually from one of these societies. In some cities there were rules on how many members from each society should have a seat on the council.

Below the patricians was a quite large upper middle class comprising the smaller long-distance merchants, brewers, shippers, clothmakers and sometimes horse traders. These people were well off and well connected across the Hanse world, but they were excluded from the levers of power and the great information exchange within the patrician societies.

As membership of the patrician societies was relatively fluent, members of this upper middle class could expect that over a number of generations there was a good chance they could join these societies and become a member of the city council, either at home or in a different city. But these aspirations were often several generations in the future, too far off for many.

Whether or not this upper middle class joins a rebellion depended very much on the question how amenable or open the patricians were to let others in. In Cologne, the power of the very exclusive Richerzeche was broken under widespread pressure in 1396. In Hamburg where society was more permeable, there was much less tension.

Below these two layers, the patrician and the upper middle class were the artisans. The size,  composition and importance of this group depended upon the economic structure of the city. A place like Cologne with a broad set of industries had many and powerful artisan guilds. In the mainly trading-driven settlements like Riga or Tallin, the artisan community was smaller and much less politically significant. In most Hanseatic cities the artisans had no representation on the city council and other than the Upper Middle Class, did not have a realistic option of moving into the patrician class over time. What added to their frustration was that their interests are often diametrically opposed to that of the merchants. They had little benefit from wars fought over trading privileges or major infrastructure projects.

And finally, we have the lower classes, the labourers and servants. The size of this group again depended on the economic structure of the city. In Flanders with its huge cloth production, labourers were a large group, and they played an important role in the various rebellions. The Hanseatic cities tended to have a lot less manufacturing activity so that they made up just 25% of the population of Hamburg or 38% of Rostock.

You can see where the fault lines lie. The artisans are constantly frustrated and ready to rebel. To succeed they need the support of the Upper Middle Class to overthrow the patricians. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

The first such conflict erupts in Magdeburg. In 1301 the artisans demand more representation in the city council. The archbishop together with the council responds with utter brutality and has 10 guild masters burned at the stake. But by 1330 the artisans succeed in the next uprising and a new city constitution is passed, giving Magdeburg artisans an important voice on the council.

Brunswick was the next epicentre. There had already been an uprising of the artisans in 1293/94. Things got worse when two brothers, both dukes of bits of Brunswick fought for control over the city. One supported the artisans, the other the patricians. The patricians won and the successful duke had all the members of the artisan’s city council executed.

In 1374 another uprising occurred in Brunswick when the patrician city father increased taxes to deal with the huge debt burden accumulated in the wake of the Black Death. This was quite a bloody affair and the mob murdered 8 members of the patrician council. The remaining council members fled to Lubeck where a Hanseatic diet was in session. They told the assembly of their plight and demanded that the Hanse excluded the city of Brunswick from the Hanse privileges until the old council is reinstated and its members compensated.

That exclusion lasted from 1375 to 1380. The city of Brunswick took a serious economic hit, but the artisans were unwilling to give up. Brunswick had become hugely important since the time of Henry the Lion who had built his great palace of Dankwarderode here. It sat right on the intersection of two major long distance trading routes, one the Via Regia, an east west connection from Magdeburg to Aachen and the north south salt route from Lüneburg to Erfurt and Nürnberg. Cutting Brunswick out led to major deviations and delay in the shipping of Eastern European and Baltic goods south and west. Many even patrician Hanse merchants therefore opposed the exclusion of Brunswick.

Things moved back and forth and by 1380 a compromise was found. The exiled council members were compensated and allowed to return and a new city constitution is established sharing power between patricians and artisans.

From the perspective of the patricians both in Brunswick and across the majority of the Hanseatic cities, the exclusion policy had been expensive and still ultimately had resulted in failure. As a consequence, the Hanse did not get involved in the following conflicts between artisans and patricians in Cologne in 1396, Dortmund in 1399, Danzig in 1416 and Breslau/Wrocław in 1418.

But when these problems hit Lübeck the situation became precarious.

Like everywhere else in the Hanseatic League, the artisans were unhappy with the rule of the patricians. First ructions happened in 1380 and 1384 when a man called Hinrik Paternostermacher conspired to topple the city council. He wasn’t an artisan but the son of an upper middle class merchant. He blamed his lack of commercial success on the snobbishness of the Lubeck societies and teamed up with the guild of the butchers. Before the conspiracy could get going properly, it was discovered. 18 of the 47 conspirators, including Hinrich Paternostermacher were executed.

Things heated up again after 1403. The city was in a very challenging financial situation. On the one hand they were fighting the war against the piratical Victual Brothers, which included a two year closure of the herring market in Scania. At the same time, they were building the Stecknitz Kanal that linked the Trave River to the Elbe, creating a waterway connecting the Baltic and the North Sea from Lubeck to Hamburg. And finally, Lubeck had taken an ever-increasing role in the management of the Hanse. Most Hanseatic diets took place in Lübeck, requiring the city to lay on festivities and banquets for their honoured guests at vast expense.

Somebody had to pay for that and the patrician-led senate decided that the artisans of the city should make a sizeable contribution. This was as unsurprising as it was unpopular. The artisans could see how much these initiatives were supporting the great long-distance merchants, what they could not see is what benefit any of these things would have for them.

As one would expect, the brewers and artisan guilds objected. In the subsequent negotiations the Council made some material political concessions and the artisans agreed to this one-time tax.

Two years later the financial situation still had not improved and another tax was proposed, this time on beer. This again was unpopular. The council was forced to admit the creation of a committee of 60 representatives of the different boroughs to debate the proposals. This committee of 60 quickly became the place where all sorts of grievances against the council were aired.

A list of complaints was compiled, ranging from excessive taxes all the way to the expense associated with the leading role of the city in the Hanse. The Committee of 60 then assumed control of parts of the city bureaucracy. To top it off, they proposed a reform of the city constitution which included the election of members of the council.

Things went back and forth, but by 1408 a minority of the council members agreed to the reforms. At which point the conservative majority, 15 out of 23 left the council and the city. A new council was formed that allowed for a representation of Artisans and whose members had to face re-election every 2 years.

Those of you who have studied the French revolution may see some rather obvious parallels in the way you get from financial difficulty to loss of power.

 We now have two city councils, the old patrician council that has gone into exile and a new more democratic council that controlled the city.

The new Council went straight to King Ruprecht of the Palatinate to gain recognition as the official representatives of the city of Lubeck. Lubeck was a free imperial city and as such the emperor had at least theoretically the final say in such a matter. In exchange for the imperial grace they offered an oath of allegiance and payment of the outstanding imperial taxes the patrician council had so far refused to pay.

Ruprecht graciously grants the new council what it wants, but the old council then sues them in front of the Reichshofgericht and wins, at least in so far as it demands the reestablishment of the old council.

At this point the new council orders the confiscation of the possessions of the members of the old council and refuses to follow any future imperial or court summons. That – and the fact that he had never seen a dime of the promised taxes – turns king Ruprecht against the new council. He places the whole city into the imperial ban, which means that in principle everyone can apprehend anyone form Lübeck, put him in chains and take all their goods.

As one can imagine, this creates chaos in the city and devastates the Lübeck trade. But not only that. By now Lübeck had become some sort of secretariat of the Hanse. They kept the records, they sent out the invitations for the Hanseatic diets, they coordinated the activities of the Hanseatic Kontors. All that is now on hold. The New Council is banned and therefore cannot send envoys plus many of its members do not want to take a lead role in the Hanse in the first place. The old council is in exile, is short of funds and has no venue for these kind of events.

Effectively for 8 years the coordination mechanism of the Hanse is stalling. Many merchants fear the whole thing will collapse. In particular the traders inside the Kontors are struggling to maintain their position in what is effectively hostile territory.

Moreover, the Hanse itself is split. Some cities like Brunswick, Cologne, Dortmund had undergone a transformation towards a more open constitution. They are now joined by Wismar and Rostock in their support of the New Council in Lubeck. Meanwhile the other cities who were still ruled by the patrician class sided with the old council, fearing that their defeat would bring about their own downfall.

To keep things rolling, a Hansetag was called in Hamburg and it was decided that all correspondence from the Kontors should be sent there. But then Hamburg formed its own committee of 60 and expelled Lubeck’s Old Council who were staying there at the time. The old council moved to Luneburg and this city became the new secretariat city.

The leader of the Old Council was Jordan Pleskow, an accomplished diplomat. He initiated a policy to undermine the new Council by cutting the city’s trade off from key routes of the Hanse. In 1411 he showed up in Bruges and demands the return of the property of the exiles. He placed his demands not just with the Konor, but also with the duke of Burgundy and the four main cities of Flanders. Using the judgement by the Imperial Court, this would have authorised the Flemish to seize the whole of the Bruges Kontor, effectively killing it. Surely not something Pleskow wanted, but it was the lever that forced the Kontor to join the side of the Old Council.

Pleskow then went to Prussia and convinced the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights to place an embargo on all Lubeck trade.

Meanwhile a new king had ascended the throne, Sigismund. The New Council thought that this was the option to gain the upper hand. They offered him 6,000 guilders if he was to lift the imperial ban and declare for them. Sigismund said yes, but only if they paid 24,000 guilders, a first tranche to be paid on all saints day 1415 in either Paris or Bruges.

The problem for the new Council was that after years of tensions and ban, that kind of money was simply no longer there. When no cash arrived, Sigismund changed tack, revoked all imperial privileges for the city of Lubeck and reconfirmed the imperial ban.

The final blow came when Eric of Pomerania, the new king of Sweden, Denmark and Norway took the opportunity to confiscate Lubeck ships and incarcerate Lubeck merchants.

The New Council had to give up. They admitted the 10 surviving members of the Old Council back into the city. They co-opted a further 10 patricians allowing just 5 members of the new Council to remain. That meant the patricians were back in control. A tax was imposed to pay emperor Sigismund 13,000 guilders so that he lifted the ban. Meanwhile patrician rule had also been reintroduced in Rostock and Wismar wiping out artisan participation in the Wendish cities.

The return of the patrician was remarkably bloodless. There were only 2 executions and also during the reign of the New Council the patricians who had stayed behind had been unharmed. That is where the comparison with the French revolution no longer holds.

This episode had however a major impact on the way the Hanse thought about itself. Having come to the brink of dissolution so soon after its great string of successes urged its members to rethink the association.

They came together in one of the largest Hanseatic diets ever, in 1418.

The Hanse was to get a proper constitution. In 32 articles the member cities agreed to several innovations:

  • The Hanseatic diet can now intervene in the internal affairs of a city. Specifically, cities whose population had replaced the patrician council were no longer admitted to the diet.
  • A merchant who wants to partake in Hanse privileges must now prove that he is a burgher of a member city of the League.
  • Lubeck and the Wendish cites were put in charge to look after the interests of the overall organisation in between the times the diet was sitting.

And Lubeck was trying to go further and initiated formal alliances between several cities that committed each member to provide a specific number of ships and soldiers and to place them under the command of Lubeck. That the Hanseatic diet rejected, but over the next century at times cities came together in such alliances, called Tohopesaten.

The general trend towards formalisation continued after 1418. The Hanseatic diet issued regulations on shipping, trading, production, quality control, all intended to facilitate trade. Since Lubeck convened the diets and drafted the proposed regulations, the city on the Trave became not the capital of the Hanse as some had said in the past, but some sort of general secretariat that could steer the organisation’s policy in a direction that benefitted them, sometimes more than others.

The dominance of Lübeck became a problem as the century progresses. Other important participants, Cologne, Danzig and the Livonian cities find the dominance of the city on the Trave River increasingly chafing. Their interests are diverging and with a city council now stacked with members of the great families, all fearing the next uprising, the leader of the League finds it harder and harder to cope. How this pans out we will discuss next week. I hope you will join us again.

Before I go just a big thank you again to all my Patrons who kindly keep this show on the road. I really, really appreciate your generosity. And if you want to join, there is still a chance to grab one of the unlimited patron subscriptions at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or historyofthegermans.com/support.

This was supposed to be an episode where we talk about the challenges the Hanse was facing after the victory over the Danes and the Peace of Stralsund. But that is not to be. Listeners Mehmet and Nina pointed out a few gaps in what I had been talking about last week and now these need to be filled.

It is all good talking about the trading network and the flow of goods across the Baltic and northern Germany. But what about the opposing flow, the flow of money? How do the Merchants get paid? How can they pay for all the goods they, or their agents, are buying way down in Flanders and England? How do they cope with the sometimes erratic monetary policies of late medieval rulers?

After all, it is money that makes the world go round!

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 120: Money, Money, Money

This was supposed to be an episode where we talk about the challenges the Hanse was facing after the victory over the Danes and the Peace of Stralsund. But that is not to be. Listeners Mehmet and Nina pointed out a few gaps in what I had been talking about last week and now these need to be filled.

It is all good talking about the trading network and the flow of goods across the Baltic and northern Germany. But what about the opposing flow, the flow of money? How do the Merchants get paid? How can they pay for all the goods they, or their agents, are buying way down in Flanders and England? How do they cope with the sometimes erratic monetary policies of late medieval rulers?

After all, it is money that makes the world go round!

But before we start, let me thank all of you Patrons and one-time supporters out there. I really, really appreciate that supporting a show you can listen to for free is an act of immense generosity. To say it with the author Roman Payne: “Of all public figures and benefactors of mankind, no one is loved by history more than the literary patron. Napoleon was just a general of forgotten battles compared with the queen who paid for Shakespeare’s meals and beer in the tavern.” You see, there is a chance to outdo Napoleon for a mere £2 a month, less than a chocolate croissant. All you have to do is go patreon.com/historyofthegermans or historyofthegermans.com/support. And thanks so much to Mary Teresa H., Raphael F., David C. M. and Michael S. who have already signed up.

Last week we talked about how the Hanse worked, or more precisely how current historians believed the Hanse worked. Because the interactions between the merchants and cities are so multifaceted that for the last 200 years each generation of writers picked elements of the story and wove their own narrative, curiously matching contemporaneous political or economic developments.

So, for now the prevailing story is that the Hanse was a complex network that allowed both information and trust to be exchanged so that merchant could send bulky goods to exactly the right place at exactly the right time over vast distances.

Each trader would have a number of associates in each of the main ports. And these associates would send not only the merchandise ordered but also regular reports about the goings on in their own location, as well as what they heard from elsewhere. These letters would contain things like: prices for squirrel pelts are up because winter has come early, the abbot of the local monastery has decided to build a new church and needs wood and other building materials, old Hinrich Warendorp has died and his company is being dissolved, people are gossiping that Jan de Waal is in financial trouble…etc., etc.,

This information is crucial because the goods the Hansards traded in were usually bulky and meant for consumption. Once the ship full of grain had reached Bruges, the grain would have to be sold in Bruges, because shipping it elsewhere was very costly. Knowledge of the likely prices this grain would fetch at Bruges made the difference between a handsome profit and a crippling loss.

Having multiple associates in each city also kept one’s business partner honest. The business community, even in a place like Lubeck was small enough that many people would know if a merchant was taking advantage of one of his partners abroad. Information about that would quickly find its way back to the injured party who could take corrective action.

One success factor I had not mentioned last week, despite its crucial importance was language. The Hanse merchants, from Narva to Bruges, from Cologne to Bergen all spoke the same language – Middle Low German. Middle Low German had developed from Old Saxon, spoken in the duchy of Saxony and is most comparable to modern day Dutch. This was the language not just of the people, but also the written language. All these letters the merchants wrote to each other were written in Middle Low German, not in Latin. This was a crucial advantage, as it meant business partners could understand each other across the whole of the Hanseatic world, along the 2,500km from Narva to Bruges and the 1000 miles from Westphalia to Bergen. They held their court sessions in Middle Low German and even the recesses of the Hanseatic diet changed from Latin to Middle Low German in 1369. There were various dialects of Middle Low German, though Lubeck, thanks to its role within the Hanse managed to dominate. Even the Scandinavian courts would maintain diplomatic communication in Lübeck dialect. Middle Low German was the Lingua Franca of Northern Europe. As it happened that state of affairs lasted only for a short period. By the 16th century Low German was gradually replaced by High German spoken by the protestant preachers who used Luther’s bible. This  linguistic development mirrored the political development, as the largely separate history of the North we have followed in the last 25 episodes was converging with the history of the south.

A tight network of traders who shared information, trust and a common language sounds very neat and efficient, leaving only one question, a question some of you have asked and I have clearly overlooked last week. What about the money?

Oh, such a grubby word. No honourable Hanseatic merchant would talk about money. Or as my grandfather used to say, money is no object since it is non-existant.

And he wasn’t so far off the truth. 14th century moneybags had no money. At least no ready cash.

There weren’t even any banks in the Hanse before two Florentines, Ludovico Baglioni and Gerardo Bueri founded one in 1410. They were associates of the Medici, presumably sent out into this frontier market to test the waters. The waters prove to be rather cold, and the bank closed when Bueri died in 1449. A few years later a group of Hamburg merchants led by Godeman von Buren tried again but that experiment also failed in 1472. After that there were occasional attempts, including by associates of our friend Bernd Pal from Tallin to set up banking operations, but they never gained much traction and by the 16th century the competition from southern Germany, from Nurnberg, Augsburg and Ravensburg took charge of these activities.

Moreover, the Hanseatic diet banned merchants from borrowing on several occasions, namely in 1401, 1411, 1415, 1417, 1418, 1423, 1434 and 1447.

Does that mean the Hanse was some sort of commercial paradise of honest brokers who traded on fair terms and shunned excessive leverage, never touching the filthy lucre?

Obviously not. They liked a bag of cash as much as the next man. They just did not think that Uncle Scrooge’s Money Bin was the best way to manage wealth. Their wealth was in constant circulation.

One of the reasons the merchants no longer travelled around with their goods but had become fixed in one location, was that it allowed for a much more efficient investment of cash. Goods they had sent to one place were sold there and turned into other wares that would then travel to the next place, where again, they would be sold and replaced with something else.

Take our friend Bernd Pal, the merchant from Tallin we met last week. He had partners in Lübeck, Narva, Gdansk and Antwerp, but he himself mainly stayed in Tallin. He would ask one of his associates to procure furs from Novgorod via Narva. Those he had shipped to Lübeck where another associate would sell them on his behalf. The proceeds of that transaction would then be used to buy English cloth as per Bernd Pal’s instruction and send back to him in Tallin. Meanwhile he would do the same for his associates and partners who wanted to buy or sell goods in Tallin.

As a consequence, Bernd Pal’s warehouse was full of stuff belonging to his trading colleagues, whilst the goods he owned were in someone else’s cellar. The same goes for the money. The money in Bernd’s strongbox were mainly the proceeds of the sales he had made on behalf of his business partners, whilst again, money he owned was somewhere else in the network. A full reconciliation and payout only happened when Bernd Pal died, and his inheritance was settled.

As long as these transactions operate on a bilateral basis, there is not much need for financial instruments. But the trade had grown a lot more sophisticated than that. Let’s say Bernd Pal has an associate in Lubeck he wants to sell his furs but does not trust to get him a good deal on the English cloth. In that case the money raised by selling the furs needs to go to the broker who will procure the cloth. The way to do that was a bill of exchange.

A Bill of Exchange works is as follows. Bernd Pal wrote an instruction to his fur dealer to pay the cloth dealer an amount of 100 Lübeck Mark at Michaelmas, which is September 29th. This document will be sent to the cloth dealer who would then go to the fur dealer and ask him whether he would honour this instruction. If the fur dealer accepts this Bill of Exchange he becomes the Payor, meaning that at Michaelmas he has to pay the cloth dealer 100 Lübeck mark, no ifs or buts. Now the cloth merchant has a claim against the fur trader who lives in his town and who he could take to court if he fails to pay on time. There is a shortened court procedure for bills of exchange, meaning that he could send the bailiffs round in no time. And if the fur merchant is bankrupt, he could still claim the money from Bernd Pal.

From the cloth merchant’s perspective this Bill of Exchange is almost as good as cash, which means he is happy to find Bernd Pal some English cloth and send it across to Tallin.

Bills of exchange are very common in the Hanse world, as it is in many other trading systems. What the Hanse merchants also use are bearer bonds, which are less common elsewhere.

A bearer bond works as follows. Let’s take again our friend Bernd Pal in Tallin. Assume he wants to buy English cloth for 200 Lübeck mark, but the fur he is sending is worth only 100 marks. He also does not have 100 marks in ready cash to send along with the furs to make up the difference. So, what he can do is issue a document that says he would pay anyone who presents this document back to him the sum of 100 mark. This he sends to the cloth merchant, together with the Bill of Exchange.

The cloth merchant is a long-standing associate of Bernd Pal’s so he knows that Bernd is good for a 100 marks. However, Mr. cloth merchant is unlikely to go to Tallin any time soon to collect the 100 marks. That issue is overcome by the fact that Bernd Pal promised to pay to whoever shows up with this bearer bond. So, cloth merchant can take the bearer bond and swap it with someone else who needs to pay 100 marks in Tallin. In return he receives either cash or another bearer bond or Bill of exchange, for instance in London where cloth merchant gets his cloth from.

Normally bearer bonds do not work very well between individual merchants engaged in long distance trading for the simple reason that they normally do not know each other well and more importantly have no current information about their creditworthiness. In the Hanse with its tight network of information exchange and social control, bearer bonds can work between individual merchants.

Bills of exchange and bearer bonds are not only means to facilitate payments, but they also have a short-term credit element. Bernd Pal knows that it will be several weeks before the bearer bond he issued to pay for the cloth will make it back to Tallin. The 100 marks he will need to pay out once the bond returns in say 6 weeks can be used to finance some short-term investment. In practice this makes the bearer bond a short-term loan. So is a Bill of Exchange. These instruments cover a big art of the liquidity needs of Hanse merchants.

But there are financing needs beyond covering liquidity. For instance, our other Tallin trader, the ambitious Hans Selhorst needed to borrow money to buy himself a large and representative house in the centre of town to convey his new status as a member of the Great Guild. The funds for that he seems to have borrowed from fellow merchants.

We find that some of the large merchants ran a financials business alongside their wholesale franchise. What they mostly did was extending credit to their suppliers of wares. The burghers of Tallin would for instance extend credit to owners of the large Estonian estates, who were also their suppliers of grain and other agricultural produce. They would even lend large sums to bishops and the Teutonic Knights themselves. The reason for these loans was mainly to tie the suppliers to the traders. In Bergen this was an integral part of the business model as the Hansards linked their lending to the exclusive right to purchase the fishermen’s catch at a predetermined price.

Another major finance activity was money exchange. Currencies across the Baltic differed considerably. The silver mark of Lübeck was a key reference currency but most of the large cities, like Riga and Gdansk had their own currencies. The Scandinavian rulers as well as the German princes were minting coins and tried to enforce their use in the cities belonging to their territories. Burgundy and England too had important currencies, which meant that traders were constantly obliged to use foreign exchnage. To avoid having to ship vast amounts of gold and silver in various denominations around the place, a lot of this was done through Bills of Exchange. Say Bernd Pal in Tallin would issue Bill of Exchange, drawn on himself in Riga Mark of silver. That could be exchanged into a Bill of exchange drawn on a Lübeck merchant in Mark of Lübeck at an agreed exchange rate. The exchange rate was also often use to hide the interest on the loan element of the instruments.

Again, the people who would do that were Hanseatic merchants, rather than banks. Once a merchant has risen through the ranks and joined the city council, he will have to spend a lot of time on political issues, sometimes even go on long missions abroad. Unless he has an excellent setup with great apprentices or a competent successor, it will be difficult for him to keep all the different balls in the air, making sure goods arrive on time, payments are made when due etc., That makes finance and real estate more attractive. Lending money or renting out houses requires less oversight and leaves room for political passions, which is why most creditors tend to be the most senior and most powerful people in town.

Bottom line is that there was a lot of banking activity in the Hanse, just that it wasn’t performed by banks. In the same way that the network system precluded the emergence of large trading firms, it also prevented the creation of large banks.

In most markets banks can offer loans on commercial terms superior to individuals. That is down to three reasons. First, they make a spread on the difference in the interest rate they pay on deposits and the interest they charge on loans. The second element is diversification. Banks have large portfolios of loans so that if one borrower fails, the bank can sustain the loss. And third, at least in principle Banks have superior information and sophisticated tools to assess the probability and severity of default.

When the Hanse was at its height, none of these advantages cut through. Deposits were quite rare in a system where merchants kept running their business literally until they dropped dead. They never cashed out. Diversification too was of limited benefit given that the market was comparatively small and major events, such as wars or climate effects led to correlation between defaults. And finally, the network was a much more efficient information and risk mitigation model than a medieval banking house.

Only in the end markets of the Hanse, in London and Bruges did a banking model have a major advantage over the individual merchants, and that is exactly where you find the great banking houses operating. The victim of the privateer Paul Beneke was a banker, Tommaso Portinari, main representative of the Medici bank in Bruges. These banks would offer loans secured by bonds or Bills of exchange. For instance, it allowed a German merchant to use a Bill of Exchange drawn on another Hansard back in Hamburg to purchase goods from a Catalan. The Catalan would not accept the Bill of Exchange on a guy he had never seen or heard of, but the bank would.

We know from English records that the Hanse merchants were some of the most prolific users of lending services in 15th century London.  One example of such a heavy user of banking services was Hildebrand Veckinghusen.

The largest set of papers relating to the business of a Hanse family is the Veckinghusen archive consisting of 12 account books and 600 letters, today part of the UN World Heritage. They trace the career of Hildbrand Veckinghusen whose ambition exceeded many of his contemporaries. He had based himself in the Hanse Kontor in Bruges from where he rapidly expanded, trading not just in the classic Hanseatic markets but down into Southern Germany and even Venice. The scale of his business was impressive. In 1411 he claimed to have bought goods worth 70,000 ducats after having sold wares for 53,000 ducats. He traded in everything, including luxury goods like amber from Prussia and furs from Novgorod. But also bought salt in vast quantities. To fund this expansion, he turned to Italian bankers. But he was just not lucky enough to play in that league. His associates lost goods and one defrauded him, the figs he ordered from Italy arrived rotten, as did some rice. When the economy tanked in the early 15th century, leverage ended up biting him back and in 1422 he was arrested for not paying his bills and was put into debtor’s prison.

All the way into the 20th century historians had dismissed Veckinghusen as the exception that proves the rule. Hansards, so the story goes, were sober, calculating traders who refrained from speculation and excessive risks. In particular Hansards allegedly did not like credit, in fact they had it banned.

And indeed, there were explicit decisions by the Hanseatic Diet banning the use of credit in 1401, 1411, 1415, 1417, 1418, 1423, 1434 and 1447. Does that mean the Hanse was opposed to lending in principle? Most people believed that until the 1980s when Stuart Jenks took a close look at the background of these bans on borrowing issued in the early 15th century.

What came out was an utterly fascinating but extremely geeky story. So, if you are not particularly interested in the intersection of macros-economics, finance and politics in the 15th century, fast forward, wild guess 4 minutes and we will talk about more accessible topics.

The first official ban on borrowing was issued in 1401 and applied specifically to Bruges.

At that time Bruges, like the rest of Flanders was part of the duchy of Burgundy. The duke of Burgundy was Philipp the Bold a man much engaged in war. As such he was always short of the gold he needed to pay the troops. That seems surprising since he was the ruler of the most active commercial and financial markets in Northern Europe, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp and should hence be immensely rich.

Being the overlord is great, but the problem was how to extract the money from the rich burghers of these cities. He could have increased taxes again, but that had been done already. Plus, it tended to affect the poor more than the rich and these wretches had a tendency to revolt.

If not by tolls and taxes, another way territorial lords funded themselves during this period was by manipulating the currency. Territorial lords, like a state today had the right to determine what was legal tender in their lands. Specifically, they could declare that new coins are being issued and that everyone had to come and exchange their old coins for the new ones. The way the lords made money from that was by handing back less gold or silver than they had received in the exchange.

The victims of this cash extraction could only avoid a loss by two means. Either they melt their coins down and send them abroad. Or they could simply hoard them and wait for better days.

To prevent the former, the lord would issue a ban on all exports of gold, silver or coin upon severe punishment. Whether that works depends a lot on their ability to enforce the ban. And quite frankly a high medieval prince did not have the means to check every transport of grain, cloth or wool for some gold ingots.

A territorial lord who had gone through a couple of rounds of these kinds of devaluation finds himself confronted with a simple question. Is the reason that so few coins are presented at the mint down to either, that there is no more gold left in the country, or is it down to people hoarding precious metal.

In 1399 the duke of burgundy came up with a way to find out. He ordered that from now on all transactions had to be made in cash. That was a shock to the system. We may be in the 14th century, but as we have seen with the Bills of Exchange and the Bearer Bonds, a lot of commercial transactions were already cashless. That was even more the case in Bruges, the financial centre of Northern Europe.

The citizens of Bruges were as unwilling to walk around with the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of pounds then as we would be today. A merchant coming to Bruges would set up an account with a Bruges banker, often the host he was staying with. This banker in turn had accounts with most other bankers in Bruges, so that any transaction could be settled account to account. Alternatively, the parties could use bills of exchange, bearer bonds or banker’s drafts. If the merchant was creditworthy, he may also be granted an overdraft on the account or could borrow funds to pay for the merchandise.

That way nobody ever saw any gold or silver coins.

But the duke was convinced they existed, based on the irrefutable evidence that these moneybags seemed to be literally coining it. So, to lure out these elusive florins, livres, pounds and marks, the duke made the city of Bruges demand that all transactions have to be done in cash.

So, instead of handing over a Bill of exchange in lieu of payment, the buyer would have to cash his paper and bring the coins to the seller. Or if the buyer was buying in credit, he needed to get the banker to give him the funds in coin and then hand them to the seller. At that point it was clear who had what coins at home and the duke’s men could come and demand them to be swapped into the inferior specie.

Somehow the grand plan backfired, and badly. Because the duke, great warrior that he was, was no economist, let alone an expert in how money is created. I guess nor are you, so let me take you through a little game.

Imagine there was only one bank in the world with a capital of $100,000 and that is all the money that exists. If I were the luckiest man in the world and was allowed to borrow these $100,000 from this bank, I would receive $100,000 in cash from the bank. The bank now books a claim of $100,000 against me on their balance sheet. I take the $100,000 dollars and buy a house. The person I buy the house from receives the $100,000 in cash and puts it into his bank account with the same bank. The bank now has the $100,000 in cash that they can lend that out again. If you are the second luckiest person in the world and allowed take this $100,000 loan and buy a house, the same thing happens. The Bank books another $100,000 loan as an asset on its books. The seller of the house puts the coins back in the bank, so that there are now loans and deposits of $200,000 in the world, whilst the total number of coins is still only $100,000.

By 2023 we have gone through a couple of iterations of that process so that today the amount of USD cash in circulation is about 2.4 trillion and the paper amount, the so-called M2 is almost 10 times that, 21 trillion.

I think we can forgive our friend the duke of Burgundy for not getting it.  How could he have known that there was a whole wall of totally legitimate money without any coins? When he demanded settlement in cash for every credit transaction, Bill of exchange etc., the financial system in medieval Bruges went into meltdown. There was already so much more paper money than cash in circulation that there was no way this could be covered. Demand for coins went stratospheric and the nominal price of goods crashed. To get an idea what happens when you do that, google Plano Collor, a more modern equivalent of a similar policy in Brazil in the 1990s.

So, this is the background to the Hanse ban on borrowing. There is financial chaos in Bruges. Coins are hard to come by, which creates hyperdeflation. Merchants who bring in goods to Bruges will get paid a lot less for their goods than they had hoped for. At the Kontor in Bruges it is panic stations.

Remember how the bill of exchange works. Our friend Bernd Pal is sending beeswax to his partner in Bruges for sale as well as a bearer bond for him to cash so that the company can buy some cloth. What he does not send is coins, silver or gold.

His partner in Bruges now has a problem. He has to turn the Beeswax and the bearer bond into local currency and not just into money as an accounting measure, but into actual coins. Even if he manages to do that, the exchange rate is likely absolutely terrible. He then goes and takes the coins to buy the cloth. Cloth prices too have fallen thanks to the deflation, but that is unlikely to be enough to make up for what has been lost on the exchange rate.

That causes a heavy loss to Bernd Pal for which he will blame his partner. Now imagine if Bernd Pal had issued his Bill of exchange in local Bruges currency, in Pound Grote. At that point the associate in Bruges is really in the dumps. Either he accepts the Bill of exchange and pays out the Pounds Grote which means he takes the loss on the exchange rate, or he refuses the Bill of exchange, at which point his own and Bernd Pal’s credit is utterly destroyed.

The merchants at the Hanse Kontor in Bruges realise that something needs to be done urgently. They need to stop this flow of Bills or exchange and other credit instruments coming in from Cologne, Danzig, Riga or Lübeck, at least until this madness is over. The Kontor writes to the Hanseatic diet in Lubeck and asks for them to ban the use of credit in Flanders. Initially the participants in the diet did not quite understand why this was such a big issue. But in the second round they realised that they may lose either the Kontor in Bruges or the good credit of the Hanse merchants in Flanders. So, they reluctantly issued an order to block the issuance of credit. Once the madness is over, the ban is lifted again, and things return to normal.

The duke of Burgundy tried the same stunt again 2 or three times and the Hanseatic diet responded again with a ban on the use of credit. These bans were again lifted once the issue was over.

And that means the Hanse had no problem or objection to credit or cashless payments at all. They blocked its use in circumstances where princely shenanigans caused serious harm to some of the merchants.

So, banking and the use of financial instruments was an integral part of the Hanseatic trade. There was nothing unusual about the way they operated.

However, there was one significant difference between Hansards and their Italian, English, Flemish and Spanish counterparts. They did not use double bookkeeping. The trading records we have from this period suggest that accounting was a complete mess. A Hansard merchant literally had no idea whether his assets and liabilities were balanced, nor did he have a reliable cash forecast. It often took years to work through the collection of letters and order books to reconcile the accounts of a company once one of the partners had left.

Not knowing how much equity a business has is not something that one would want to disclose to the bank when looking for a loan. That may be another reason that there were no banks and that Hanse firms never grew to the size of a Fugger or Ravensburger. They simply could not handle it.

I actually struggle to imagine how they even managed what they had. As we have seen with Bernd Pal, even relatively small merchants would be involved in 3 or 4 different companies whose goods and finances he had to keep separate from his own. Some of his Bills or exchange or bearer bonds were issued in his own name, some in the name of the company, all with different due dates. Cash had to be kept separate and tracked. It really is mindboggling.

And finally, a word about all these currencies. Having all these different coins and frankly mad monetary policy must have been a major problem. A large part of banking in the Middle Ages was foreign exchange. Either direct exchange of foreign coins into local currency or by issuing some sort of traveller cheques which allowed a crusader or merchant to draw funds in lands far away. In both cases the foreign exchange banker would make a handsome profit, usually about 5%.

This made trade more expensive than strictly necessary which is why the Hanse tried to resolve the problem. Many cities had acquired the right to coinage during the 12th and 13th century. The cities did not try to turn their currency into money-making schemes the way the dukes of Burgundy and pretty much all princes were doing. They wanted their currency to remain stable. Cities would form currency clubs that attempted to regulate the quality of the coinage. The most important one was the Münzverein of the Wendish cities. This was formed immediately after the peace of Stralsund and included Lubeck, Hamburg, Wismar and Luneburg as well as a number of associated members. They committed to rules about the minimum silver content in the mark, they had ordinances about how the mint and its personnel, and they would procure the precious metal together from Bohemia. This did help a bit, but even within this club discipline was sometimes lax and it took until the 16th century before they issued their first joint coin, a large silver 1 mark containing 18g of sterling silver.

Having a stable currency would have been a huge benefit to the Hanseatic League and Northern and Eastern Europe in general. But the currency clubs operated outside the context of Hanseatic diets, which did slow down financial integration across the association so that there never was a common currency across the region.

How important this could be is shown by the example of England, the great rival of the League in the 15th century and the emerging world trading power. England had one currency, pound sterling that was legal tender across a sizeable territory, and – most importantly – could not be used as an ATM for the royal purse. Since the 12th century the quality of the English coins is checked every year by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, financial leaders, representatives of the Royal Mint and the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. And this is not a joke, the process happens every year and once the Assay office has confirmed the accuracy of the coins, the verdict is read out by the clerk of the Goldsmith’s company on behalf of the Senior Master and Kings Remembrancer, a title going back to 1154…..only in England.

Which is where we will be going next week. We are now in the period where the Hanse begins to notice the unintended consequences of its success in the war with Denmark. Taking control of the herring market in Scania and banning the Dutch and the English from access sets off a sequence of events that turns the great victory into a smouldering calamity. I hope you will join us again next week.

Before I go just a big thank you again to all my Patrons who kindly keep this show on the road. I really, really appreciate your generosity. And if you want to join, there is still a chance to grab one of the unlimited patron subscriptions at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or historyofthegermans.com/support.

And finally, bibliography. This episode relied heavily on:

Jahnke, Carsten: Die Hanse | Reclam Verlag

Jahnke, Carsten: Netzwerke in Handel und Kommunikation an der Wende vom 15. zum 16. Jahrhundert am Beispiel zweier Revaler Kaufleute. Netzwerke (hansischergeschichtsverein.de)

Stuart Jenks: War die Hanse kreditfeindlich? on JSTOR

Historical documents of Hanseatic League added to UNESCO archival heritage list | Tallinn

What is the Hansa?

That was the question king Edward IV asked the representatives of the Steelyard in 1469. And he had a good reason to ask, because tensions between the English and the Hansa had escalated, ships were captured, and people got killed. He wanted to know who to negotiate with and in particular, who could sign a binding agreement that would put an end to this.

The answer he got was not very satisfactory:

Quote: “the Hansa Teutonica is not a societas: (a company) for it knows neither a common ownership of goods nor shared ownership of the good, since in the Hansa Teutonica there is no joint ownership; nor is it a company formed for certain commercial transactions, since in the Hansa Teutonica each individual makes transactions for himself, and the profit and loss falls on each individual…

It is also not a collegium (a college)….since it is formed from separate cities. It is also not a universitas (a corporate body), because…for it is required that it has property, a common treasure, a common seal, a common syndicus and a recognised leader.

“the Hansa Teutonice is … a firm alliance of many cities, towns and communities for the purpose of ensuring that commercial enterprises on water and on land have the desired and favourable success and that effective protection is provided against pirates and highwaymen, so that the merchants are not deprived of their goods and valuables by their raids.”

Yep, me neither. And for most of history, historians have remained as befuddled as king Edward IV about the nature of the Hansa.

This being the History of the Germans Podcast, ambiguity is nothing we are afraid of. Let’s step into the debate and be wrong on every count…

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 119 – What is the Hansa?

That was the question king Edward IV asked the representatives of the Steelyard in 1469. And he had a good reason to ask, because tensions between the English and the Hansa had escalated, ships were captured, and people got killed. He wanted to know who to negotiate with and in particular, who could sign a binding agreement that would put an end to this.

The answer he got was not very satisfactory:

Quote: “the Hansa Teutonica is not a societas: (a company) for it knows neither a common ownership of goods nor shared ownership of the good, since in the Hansa Teutonica there is no joint ownership; nor is it a company formed for certain commercial transactions, since in the Hansa Teutonica each individual makes transactions for himself, and the profit and loss falls on each individual…

It is also not a collegium (a college)….since it is formed from separate cities. It is also not a universitas (a corporate body), because…for it is required that it has property, a common treasure, a common seal, a common syndicus and a recognised leader.

“the Hansa Teutonice is … a firm alliance of many cities, towns and communities for the purpose of ensuring that commercial enterprises on water and on land have the desired and favourable success and that effective protection is provided against pirates and highwaymen, so that the merchants are not deprived of their goods and valuables by their raids.”

Yep, me neither. And for most of history, historians have remained as befuddled as king Edward IV about the nature of the Hansa.

This being the History of the Germans Podcast, ambiguity is nothing we are afraid of. Let’s step into the debate and be wrong on every count…

But before we…..ahhh, I can feel it. You have your finger over the 30 second forward button. Are you sure this is a good idea. Remember last week when you did that and found yourself in the middle of the horrific rendition of Oh Tannenbaum.  Just think about what else I could do. No, I won’t. I should probably apologize for that singing. It was cruel and like all real cruelty, somewhat unintentional. I knew it would be quite bad, but listening to it again once the episode had been published, I realised just how godawful it was.

At which point I have to express my gratitude to all of you who – instead of running away horrified – have decided to go to patreon.com/historyofthegermans or to historyofthegermans.com/support and contributed to the show. Your commitment to swap chocolate croissant for mental nourishment goes beyond what could reasonably be demanded. Your names will appear here soon, though for now I want to thank Stefan A. Ole F., Friso B. and Albert V. who have already signed up.

So, what is the Hanse?

To answer that it may be useful to look at the Hansa in comparison to other European trading organisations, in particular the world of Mediterranean trade, i.e., Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Florence etc.

Both operated in geographically closed oceans, the Mediterranean and the Baltic.  They transported goods over longer distances.

But pretty much everything else was different.

Mediterranean trade was mainly in high value, low weight goods, spices, silk, incense, carpets, glass coming into Western Europe in exchange for silver as well as more pedestrian goods like wine, salt, grain, olives and fish. The Baltic trade was predominantly in bulky everyday goods, herring, rye, stockfish, cloth. The only luxury items were furs and beeswax, though these were still quite bulky.

The med traders sailed on galleys who would be rowed wherever the helmsman pointed her at, whilst the Hansards sailed on sailing ships that could not really go upwind, making arrival times and sometimes even arrival locations somewhat unpredictable.

The cities around the Mediterranean were in constant competition with each other. The Venetians would attack a Genoese galley with the same fury as a Muslim one, or maybe with even more vigour. Within the Hansa the cities cooperated if they found common grounds. And those who did not agree would either not send a delegate to the Hanseatic diet or if the delegate was already there, the delegate would not vote. After that, those who had walked away would be left alone, unless they would proactively undermine the effort of the majority, at which point they could be excluded.

Venice and Genoa conquered their trading posts along the Mediterranean and incorporated them into their maritime empires. Some of these, like the islands of Corfu and Crete were sizeable in themselves. In the later stages, Venice would become a significant land-based sate as well as a maritime republic.

None of the Hanseatic cities pursued a similar policy. When they went outside their own territory, they did that through their Kontors, which were embedded into the trading centres of Bruges, London, Bergen and Novgorod. They did go to war, and as we have seen quite successfully. But they usually tried to avoid it. And it was never to gain territory, but to force the princely rulers to confirm privileges and trading rights.

Another major difference was the relative size of trading firms. In Italy great trading firms emerged with representatives in all the major centres, from Cairo to Bruges. The owners of these firms became immensely rich and dominated politics until gradually transitioning to princely rulers, like the Medici in Florence or the tight oligarchies in Florence and Genoa.

The Hanse world on the other hand was mainly one of medium-sized merchants where well-educated ambitious men could rise to the highest positions in their city, whilst sometimes the sons of successful merchants find themselves relegated to the lower ranks if they lacked the skills required.

This is the factual bit.

What the discussion has been about for the last almost 200 years is why it was what it was. A state like Venice is easy to understand with a modern mindset. The Hanse is not. As the English would say, it is a crocodile where you can only see a small part with the main body and the terrifying jaw is hidden from view. And that is why everyone has been interpreting this thing in their own way, reflecting more their contemporary perceptions than the reality at the time.

In the 19th century the Hanse was seen as German purely nationalist endeavour. Led by the mighty city of Lübeck the Hansards formed an organised military power that dominated the North Sea and colonised the Baltic all the way up to Estonia, Sweden and even Finland. That narrative fit neatly into Kaiser Bill’s idiotic ambition to building a German navy rivalling Britain. And on top of that it provided a bit of colonial tradition, another thing it was felt the nation sadly lacked.

This notion was then supercharged during the nazi regime, where the Hansards were painted as German Übermenschen who together with their fellow Teutonic Knights turned the people of Prussia and along the Livonian coast into slaves providing the foodstuff needed to feed the Germans back home.

After the war, two schools of thought emerged. In east Germany the Hanse was given the Marxist-Leninist treatment, setting them up as bourgeois proto-capitalist, constantly suppressing the uprisings from the lower classes.

In west Germany something rather weird happened. The Hanseatic archive of Lübeck had been brought to safety in east Germany and was later transported to the Soviet Union. That made it hard to access for western scholars. As a consequence, the research about the Hanseatic league in the West stagnated. In the absence of new research, the pre-war findings kept being repeated. I sometimes stumble reading books and papers from the 1980s and 90s about the Hanseatic League because they do sound a feel quite different, quite antiquated.

The archives returned to Lübeck in the early 1990s and gradually a new wave of research began to emerge. Many a beloved story was put under intense scrutiny, like the story of Klaus Störtebecker we talked about last week.

This research focused more on the cooperative and international component of the Hanse. In the public perception the Hanse turned from a German nationalist project to a predecessor of the European Union. Andrus Ansip, prime Minister of Estonia celebrated the country’s entry into the European Union by saying “the EU is a new Hansa”. A new Hansa was formed as a marketing association between Hanseatic cities from Belarus to the United Kingdom.

For what it is worth, the Hanse never had the equivalent of a European council, a European Parliament and the European Commission which makes all this as believable as the idea that Charlemagne was some sort of lovechild of Adenauer and de Gaulle.

Looking at the current iteration of historical writing, we are moving into the next stage, the Hanse as a network. When I first read that I thought – yes, this is inevitable. We have tried naval superpower, the Germanic Übermensch, Marx and Fukuyama’s end of history. The natural next step is the Hansa as an early ebay, amazon or Alibaba.

But let’s park the cynicism and let me take you through the logic of the Hansa as a Network. I rely here mainly on Carsten Jahnke, Justyna Wubs-Mrozewic and David Abulafia, the sources you find in the show notes.

Let’s begin with the challenges the Hanseatic merchants faced. The first one is simply distance. Let’s assume you are based in Lübeck and you trading between Novgorod and Bruges. That means you set off for Bruges to buy the cloth. Then you take the cloth to Novgorod where you sell it. You use the proceeds to buy fur which you then bring to Lubeck for sale. That is about 6,500km, which on a cog going at 3 to 4 knots per hour and not always in the right direction can easily take a year. Medieval ships could not go to windward so merchants could find themselves stuck in harbour or blown to places you never wanted to go to in the first place.

It was also extremely risky. On the one hand there are the risks of pirates, confiscation of goods by the local ruler, shipwreck etc. Plus, you have all your eggs in one basket, this one set of goods you are travelling with. If they are lost or damaged you will be destitute, and so will your family.

These extreme events are one thing, but there is also a of less dramatic but equally serious problems. What if the cloth you brought along from Bruges was not what the Novgorodians find fashionable anymore. What of you bring the furs to Lübeck just when a whole fleet is coming in with Norwegian furs, what if city of Bruges is on fire just when you arrive with the beeswax.

Around the turn of the 14th century the Hanse trade changed. Up and coming merchants were still criss-crossing the Baltic with their own wares. But established merchants would settle down in one place and trade across multiple markets. They would buy space on one ship going to Novgorod, on another going to Bergen, whilst buying goods coming in from Narva or Stockholm to be forwarded to London.

This system diversified the risk but had other challenges. The merchant could ask the shipper, the captain and owner of the ship, to sell the goods and buy new ones. But how would he be sure that the shipper will not screw him over. Alternatively, he could send an apprentice to travel with the goods. But the apprentice will ask for detained instructions which at the time of arrival may already be obsolete.

And this does not solve the problem of information discrepancy between the locals and the person trading into this port. You still do not know whether you have the fashionable colour of cloth.

But we do know that this system worked, because otherwise we would not have a podcast series about the Hanseatic League.

So, it may be worth to look at an individual merchant to understand how it might have functioned.

Bernd Pal was such a merchant. He had based himself in Reval/Tallin, though he was originally from Lübeck.  His father had been an important merchant in Luebeck who traded with England and Bergen. The Pal family had been in Lubeck for a long period of time and some had risen to become members of the city council. Amongst the wider family are merchants in Wismar and Dulmen in Westphalia.

He was born in 1437 and in 1444, i.e., at the age of just 7 he moved to Tallin to be apprenticed to a merchant in Tallin. He is likely to have already learned to read and write as well as some basic maths at one of the city schools that had been gradually replacing the monasteries as places of learning.

In 1454 he gets admitted to the society of the Black heads, the Schwarzenhäupter. That was the association of the unmarried merchants, which comprised those who had been born and bred in Tallin as well as foreign merchants. He is now 17 and his career is taking off.

He is a lucky guy because he has some seed financing. His father had remarried and under Lubeck Law he had to set aside some money for the children of his first marriage in lieu of inheritance. Having been admitted to the guild of merchants his guardians in Lübeck pay him the 800 Lubeck Mark he was owed.

And he gets going immediately. He trades in the classic Hanseatic merchandise, cloth and herring. Since nobody yet knows him as a honourable merchant, he needs to have guarantors, one of whom may have been the merchant where he had been an apprentice. And another connection is made. He is appointed as the representative of Thomas Grote, a member of the city council in Lübeck.

Three years later he goes to Novgorod for a season where he is likely to meet more Hansards from different cities. These connections seem to have come in useful when he gets going properly in around 1460. The size of his operations keeps going and so is his standing inside Tallin. He is made treasurer of the society of Black Heads.

His father died in 1469 and so Bernd Pal returns to Lubeck where he quickly gains a foothold. With the help of his extended family, he is admitted to the fraternity of St. Anthony and that of Saint Laurent. He is made the guardian of one of his nephews who had – like him – left for Livonia as a minor.

He keeps trading on the route from Novgorod via Tallin and Riga to Lübeck and then onwards to London and Bergen. In 1477 or 1488 he moves back to Tallin. He is now 32 and at that age he should have been married. But for whatever reason that never happens. Despite his promising start in Tallin, he does not progress to the upper echelons. Because he remained unmarried, he cannot be admitted to the Great Guild, the natural progress for a successful merchant. He also does not gain access to any of the other fraternities or societies where merchants get together. His business continues at roughly the same scale he had reached when he was in his late 20s. He died in 1503, aged 66, probably after having had a mild stroke a few years earlier.

When he died, the value of his inheritance came to 1,506 Lübeck mark.

In other words, Bernd Pal was an mid level merchant who did preserve the money he had inherited but failing to reach the level of success his father had achieved.

But despite his modest profile he had a number of companies with important partners as well as a dense network of friends and colleagues across the Baltic.

Thanks to his family connection he was close to the Greverade family in Luebeck who were a large and very successful clan of merchants. Bernd Pal had a merchant company with Hinrich Greverade II the head of that family group and the founder of one of the earliest banks in the Hanseatic market. This company traded herring and silver between Luebeck, Tallin and Narva.

Then he had a second company that did the whole route from Bruges to Narva which he ran with two other partners, one of whom was based in Bruges. Then he had a company with again another partner trading weapons, another serving the Danzig-Tallin route trading hops and butter and hemp. And finally a last company again with another cousin trading with Bergen.

But that was not all. Beyond the partners in his company, there were other merchants he was in constant contact with. And these were quite a few. When he was in Lübeck he had 15 trading associates in Tallin, 5 in Dorpat and 5 or 6 in Narva and smaller numbers in Danzig, Stockholm, Novgorod, Bergen op Zoom and Antwerp.

That kind of network meant that Bernd Pal was capable to procure pretty much any merchandise you could ask for from these various locations. That is great, but you have to remember that it was quite rare that a customer would go to a merchant and ask him to get a few tons of herring or wood or whatever shipped. That process was simply too time consuming given the distances.

What happened much more often was that merchants would send wares to a place in the hope that there would be demand. And that is where the networks like the one Bernd Pal maintained come in handy.

First up, it means you can send wares to your business partner in say Antwerp and have him sell it there on behalf of the company. Your partner is a local with local connection and a good understanding of what price can be achieved. So, he should be able to get a good deal on the merchandise.

But then Antwerp was a long way away and how could you be sure that your business partner kept his goods and the company’s goods neatly separated, professionally stored and selling them at the same price. That is where these various other associates come in. They re expected to keep an eye on your business partner, making sure he stays on the straight and narrow. And mostly that is what Hanseatic merchants did. The constant social control, the knowledge that if you let down your trading partner, he will hear about it worked.

The other thing that these associates and partners were extremely helpful with was the exchange of information. Every time a merchant would send goods to his partner or associate, he would enclose a letter. These letters would not contain just news about the other merchants in the town but also general information about the state of the market, whether there was a shortage of hops, whether the church of St. Mary urgently needed wood for repairs, whether there were pirates out in the sound, whether there is a new tax regime. And to close some gossip about family affairs, who is marrying who, who died, who was negotiating with who about marriage etc., etc. basically the content of the Financial Times with Hello magazine inside.

These letters produced a constant and robust flow of information. Hanseatic merchants were busy all-day collecting and processing information that they would then feed back into the network. The system had a lot of redundancy as the same information may be distributed by several members of the network. And that is exactly what made the system faster and more resilient. If Bernd Pal was waiting for news from Narva, there were six ships coming down to him in Tallin and whichever was the fastest would bring the information. And even if one of them was blown of course or God behold sank, the news would still get through. Yes – exactly like the internet. The information is copied and then sent though multiple routes to the recipient.

What that also meant is that the larger one’s network, the better the information, the higher the chance of making good money. So, every merchant was constantly trying to grow the network. And how do you do that?

If information is the currency that keeps the network going, you have to have good information so that people want to join your network. And as you grow your network, your information becomes better and so a forth and so forth.

But this isn’t Twitter. These guys do not just send messages back and forth for likes and retweets, they are traders. They want to see some business in return for all that letter writing. So, to maintain the network merchants also need to occasionally send trades to associates who are not their primary business partners.

Another way to increase the strength of the network was to join the various merchant clubs and fraternities. Being a member of the confraternity of St. Anthony or St. Laurentius does not just mean you get to worship in the church. It also means you are invited to the dinners and meetings where people will talk shop, because if you write letters all day, talking shop is second nature. Other famous merchant associations were the Artushof in Danzig and my personal favourite, the Circle in Lübeck. If you get in there you are made, but you have to have made it to get in.

Again, there is no free lunch, if you want to receive information, you also need to share information, and so it flows and flows.

The last leg to becoming a seriously successful merchant is to get on to the city council. That is where you get all the really juicy information. Will there be a naval expedition to put down pirates, has the King of England really decided to strike back, will the duke of Burgundy cave on the question of privileges in Bruges – that is the sort of information that makes and saves fortunes.

The difference that made was significant. Another Tallin merchant, Hans Selhorst who did make it all the way into the city council and became a major player in the Great Guild and all the other societies left behind 8,177 Lübeck Mark or 5.5x more than Bernd Pal when he passed away.

But it was still only 5.5x. If you think about the gulf in wealth between a Medici and an average Florentine trader or Jakob Fugger and his colleagues, then 5.5x does not appear a huge multiple.

The reason for the relatively small differential might have again been the structure of the Network. Because one needed more than one, ideally more than 5 associates in each city, even relatively small merchants would gain the occasional piece of business from the #1 trader in another city.

It also meant that an ambitious and aggressive player could not just open a branch in another city and thereby expand his share of the value chain. The branch manager would never be allowed into the important societies, let alone on the city council, meaning he would never get the juicy gossip. Plus, the existing associates would likely cut off any merchant who pursued such aggressive tactics.

That meant ambitious merchants could not build trading empires with branches everywhere from Venice to Bergen and Narva to Antwerp. It also forced a level of honesty amongst the merchants. Sending false information or mishandling your trading partners goods would be easily picked up by their fellow merchants and they would inform the other party. Such a merchant would be excluded from the broader network and his business would operate at a massive information disadvantage. The honourable Hanseatic merchant isn’t honest because he fears God, or because he has a conscience, he is honest because the downside of dishonesty is too large.

These particular features of the network explain a couple of other particularities of the Hansa too.

Because each merchant was in a symbiotic relationship with other merchants in other cities, the cities were prone to cooperate rather than fight each other. And where the co-operation would be harmful to an individual city the way to deal with it was by simply not coming on the Hansetag, the Hanseatic Diet where the issue would be discussed. And if that happened, the cities that were keen to take action would pretend nothing was amiss, at least as long as the dissenters did not proactively undermine the initiative.

There wasn’t an official list of Hanseatic cities, no capital, no foundation treaty, no common seal or permanent bureaucracy. Even the Hanseatic diets were only attended by a few dozen cities at best, never the famous 77 full members and 200 smaller members. Decisions of the Hanseatic Diet weren’t binding. And that wasn’t only in case the city had not sent a delegate. A delegate was completely within his rights to declare that he could not vote on this decision as he did not have an explicit instruction to do so from back home. Afterwards the city in question would convey its answer to the diet, which could be that they would not participate in whatever initiative was proposed.

Why such a loose structure? Imagine the diet chooses to go to war with England over the Merchant Adventurers breaking the rules of the game in the Baltic. That may be the right decision for Gdansk, Stralsund and the Wendish cities. But for Cologne or Bremen it could be fatal. They depend on the English trade and have no beef with the Merchant Adventurers in the Baltic. In the original Hanse system, they could just pretend nothing happened and that would be that. If they were forced to participate, the situation could quickly spin out of control ending with Cologne or Bremen leaving the League. Once key staging posts in the network are lost, the whole weakens until it finally collapses. And that is pretty much what happened when this situation arose in 1469.

It all links up. The network effect is what created the co-operative model of a loose federation of cities, cities that were inhabited by medium-sized individual merchants who had no territorial ambitions, a structure that was so fundamentally different to the situation in the Mediterranean which was dominated by city states that were themselves controlled by large international trading houses who slowly but surely turned into princes.

As I said before, I really like this theory about how the Hansa worked. The only thing that stops me in my tracks is that it sits so neatly in the historiography. Maybe we are again projecting our world onto the rather malleable word of trading in the Baltic during the High Middle Ages. Wouldn’t have been the first time.

From first time to next time, next time we will look at the years following the wars with Denmark and the Victual Brothers. The Hansa is at the height of its powers. But storm clouds are gathering, first all the way east in Novgorod, but then the herring moves…. I hope you are going to join us again.

Before I go just a big thank you again to all my Patrons who kindly keep this show on the road. I really, really appreciate your generosity. And if you want to join, there is still a chance to grab one of the unlimited patron subscriptions at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or historyofthegermans.com/support.

And finally, bibliography. I would like to add a few works to our usual list, in particular:

Jahnke, Carsten: Die Hanse | Reclam Verlag

Jahnke, Carsten: Netzwerke in Handel und Kommunikation an der Wende vom 15. zum 16. Jahrhundert am Beispiel zweier Revaler Kaufleute. Netzwerke (hansischergeschichtsverein.de)

Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz and Stuart Jenks, eds. The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. The Northern World: North Europe and the Baltic c. 400–1700 AD: Peoples, Economies and Culture 60. Leiden: Brill, 2013. vi + 296 pp. $171. ISBN: 978-90-04-21252-7. | Renaissance Quarterly | Cambridge Core

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans The Boundless Sea (wolfsonhistoryprize.org.uk)

In 1878 workmen building the Speicherstadt, the magnificent city of warehouses in the harbour of Hamburg made a gruesome discovery. In the mud of the Grasbrook, an island at the entrance of the medieval harbour of Hamburg emerged two piles of wood connected by a wooden bar. An ancient beacon guiding ships. What made it so special was what was nailed on to the bar, human skulls. Whoever these men were, they had been decapitated and their heads displayed as a warning. One of these skulls was quickly identified as that of Klaus Störtebecker, the notorious pirate.

The skulls were brought to the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte, the Museum for the history of Hamburg. There they reconstructed the facial features of Klaus Störtebecker so that vistors can get a better picture of what Hamburg’s greatest nemesis looked like.

If you leave the museum and turn right you quickly get to Simon von Utrecht Strasse, named after the man who captured Störtebecker on his agile small cog, the Bunte Kuh, the painted Cow.

Störtebecker was brought to the Grasbrook where he and his 72 companions were beheaded on October 20, 1401. As his last wish, Störtebecker asked that all the men he could walk past after his head had fallen should be freed. That wish was granted, but when the headless pirate had passed 11 of his shipmates, one of the members of the city council tripped him up and in the end all of his men were killed, including those he had walked past.

Hundreds of books have been and will still be written about Störtebecker and Simon von Utrecht. Some of those I have devoured as a child and this is why it hurts so much to have to tell you – all a lot of nonsense. Störtebecker lived and robbed until 1413, 12 years after his execution, which is a long time for a headless corpse. And Simon von Utrecht was just a lad when he allegedly seized Hamburg’s greatest adversary.

The story may be a tall tale, but piracy and the Victual Brothers were real and they were a real threat to the Hanse, or at least I believe it was.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 118 – Pirates

In 1878 workmen building the Speicherstadt, the magnificent city of warehouses in the harbour of Hamburg made a gruesome discovery. In the mud of the Grasbrook, an island at the entrance of the medieval harbour of Hamburg emerged two piles of wood connected by a wooden bar. An ancient beacon guiding ships. What made it so special was what was nailed on to the bar, human skulls. Whoever these men were, they had been decapitated and their heads displayed as a warning. One of these skulls was quickly identified as that of Klaus Störtebecker, the notorious pirate.

The skulls were brought to the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte, the Museum for the history of Hamburg. There they reconstructed the facial features of Klaus Störtebecker so that vistors can get a better picture of what Hamburg’s greatest nemesis looked like.

If you leave the museum and turn right you quickly get to Simon von Utrecht Strasse, named after the man who captured Störtebecker on his agile small cog, the Bunte Kuh, the painted Cow.

Störtebecker was brought to the Grasbrook where he and his 72 companions were beheaded on October 20, 1401. As his last wish, Störtebecker asked that all the men he could walk past after his head had fallen should be freed. That wish was granted, but when the headless pirate had passed 11 of his shipmates, one of the members of the city council tripped him up and in the end all of his men were killed, including those he had walked past.

Hundreds of books have been and will still be written about Störtebecker and Simon von Utrecht. Some of those I have devoured as a child and this is why it hurts so much to have to tell you – all a lot of nonsense. Störtebecker lived and robbed until 1413, 12 years after his execution, which is a long time for a headless corpse. And Simon von Utrecht was just a lad when he allegedly seized Hamburg’s greatest adversary.

The story may be a tall tale, but piracy and the Victual Brothers were real and they were a real threat to the Hanse, or at least I believe it was.

Now before we get going you will have to endure my 30 second plea for support to the show. The other day I encountered someone who has been very successful in the podcasting business who  suggested to me that if I were to put advertising in, the number of Patreons would actually go up. The pain of listening to crypto nonsense on an infinity loop seems to be sufficiently painful for people to part with large amounts of cash, just to be able to get advertising-free content.

Now I promised not to do advertising and I stick to it. But I thought about what he said and realised that one way for me to achieve a similar reaction from you would be to sing. You should know that I am from a family that has been relieved from singing classes in the seventh generation and my in-laws have banned me from belting out Oh Tannenbaum at Christmas. So here we go: Oh Tannenbaum, oh Tannenbaum, wie gruen sind deine Blaetter…du bluehst nicht nur zur Sommerzeit, nein… Ok. I stop now. You get the gist of it.

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Ok – pirates. Pirates are as old as sea-borne trade. Julius Caesar was captured by pirates and Pompei cleared the Mediterranean from this menace in 66 B.C. and they are still around, though the Somali pirates seem to have been got under control these last few years.

We all know what pirate is, right. Jack Sparrow throwing the grappling hook on to the unsuspecting Spanish Galleon whilst the cannons roar, the snipers shoot from the crow’s nest and a parrot shouts pieces of eight, pieces of eight.

Well, a pirate in the late 14th century was quite different. First up, no cannons, no snipers, no parrots and no pieces of eight. All of that did not yet exist.

By the time of John Sparrow marine technology was dominated by cannon. Ships meant for combat not only carried cannon but were also built to sustain being shot at by cannon. That in turn meant these ships were a lot heavier, needing more sail and deeper draft, which in turn meant more crew. Basically, a merchantman was a very different construction to a warship.

In the Baltic of the 14th and 15th century there was no major difference between warships and merchant vessels. Any vessel could be turned into a naval vessel, all that needed to happen was to replace goods storage with bunk beds for armed men.

And that meant that the ship’s crew too could easily be repurposed from peaceful trader in furs and wax to sailors in the navy of their hometown or to pirate.

Many an honourable merchant found himself through circumstance forced to make up losses through piracy. All it took was to tell the crew that instead of going to load up with stockfish in Bergen, they were to do that on the high seas at the expense of some passing Dutchman.

The way these encounters took place was only half as bloody as it is shown in the Pirates of the Caribbean. Because there were no distance weapons apart from bows and crossbows, the main task was to get close enough to the quarry to place a grappling hook to reel in the other ship and then it was a simple question of numbers. If the attackers were 30 men and the prise had a crew of only 10, why would anyone risk a fight that results in loss of life or limb. In particular not if this was essentially a commercial transaction, admittedly a rather one-sided transaction, but a transaction nonetheless.

And if the numbers were even, the attacker is likely to give up the chase before he loses some of his own precious crew. When we hear about seriously bloody encounters it usually happened because something in the mutual assessment of relative forces went wrong or other, non-commercial motives played a role.

All this sits in the general context of the Middle Ages. There was no monopoly on violence held by the state. It was understood and legitimate that anyone who could not gain redress in the courts was perfectly in his rights to seek satisfaction by means of violence. If that happened between landowners, it was called a feud and it was exceedingly common. In previous seasons we heard about the attempts of medieval monarchs and the church to restrain or regulate feuds and how that regularly failed.

Controlling violence on the Baltic and the North Sea was even more difficult. One reason is quite simple, a merchant vessel travelling alone is a lot more vulnerable than a caravan travelling along a busy road. A maritime attacker can disappear much quicker and if need be witnesses can be sent to the bottom of the sea never to be seen again. Things are likely to have gotten a lot worse since the middle of the 13th century. The two great powers, the Holy Roman Empire and the kingdom of Denmark were no longer able to control their subjects. The smaller entities were even less able to exercise power over the knights and cities nominally under their rule, except maybe for the Teutonic knights and the king of England. 

You remember that merchant from Danzig we heard about last week who failed to get compensation for his goods stolen by baron Dispenser in the English court? Well, he had one last option left. He could set upon a ship owned by the Baron Dispenser or one of his relatives and get his compensation at the point of a sword. And if he did that, nobody would describe him as a pirate, well, nobody except for Dispenser, his relatives and his king, obviously.

In other words, the borders between merchant, navy captain and pirate were very, very fluid. One man’s pirate is another man’s naval hero.

In 1469 the Hanse is forced to explain its organisation and purpose to the Privy Council of the King of England. After explaining at length what they are not, they end by saying that: (quote) “the Hansa Teutonice is … a firm alliance of many cities, towns and communities for the purpose of ensuring that commercial enterprises on water and on land have the desired and favourable success and that effective protection is provided against pirates and highwaymen, so that the merchants are not deprived of their goods and valuables by their raids.”

It basically says that protection from violence on land and at sea was one of the two main purposes of the Hansa. And if you look at the early stages of the Hanse, that is exactly what the association provided. The merchants would travel together in a convoy to Novgorod, having sworn to protect each other against any attack along the way. The more merchants joined the convoy the safer it became, which I turn attracted more shippers to join, even if that meant they would all arrive together and achieve a lower price for their wares than if they arrived earlier or left later.

Though piracy is quite obviously a major problem right from the very beginning, we hear very little about pirates in the records before the late 14th century.

It in this period following the victory over Waldemar Atterdag that we suddenly get lots and lots of stories about piracy. At the heart of these stories is another association, the Victual Brothers. The Victual Brothers are described as the antithesis to the Hanseatic merchants.  They are pirates who live by the slogan “God’s friend and all the world’s foe”. This motto is inscribed in the statue of Klaus Störtebecker, the city of Hamburg erected in 1982 on the site of his execution, which ironically has become the largest urban redevelopment project in Europe.

Who were the Victual Brothers? For that we have to go back to Danish history in the late 14th century.

You remember that when Waldemar Atterdag died in 1475 the Hanse helped to pass the crown of Denmark to his grandson, Olaf II, the five-year old son of Waldemar’s daughter Margaret, Margaret it turned out was a political genius eclipsing her already very successful father.

When Margaret took over the kingdom it was still in a fragile state. The great fortresses on the Oresund were managed by the Hansards meaning that only 1/3 of the now much reduced tolls for transitioning the strait came to the crown. Equally the Hanse blocked Dutch and English merchants from getting to the herring markets in Skanoer and Falsterbo which reduced this once great fair where all kinds of product was traded to just a place to load up on fish. This plus the privileges of the Hanse traders meant that revenue from there also shrunk considerably.

Like her father Margaret was a patient empire builder, just better at it. She stayed quiet and compliant until the term of Hansard occupation of the castles was over and in 1385 took them back. And then she began pushing up the price of the tolls, thereby rebuilding the finances of the realm. In 1386 she found an at least temporary compromise on the ever-burning question of Schleswig by agreeing that the counts of Holstein would hold the duchy as a fief from the Danish crown. This meant the count was now constrained in what he could or could not do in Denmark, including was no longer able to support the rebellious Danish nobles in Jutland. It also meant that already messy notion of whether Schleswig was Danish or part of the Holy Roman Empire went into another painful iteration. Though it remained disputed who it belongs to for the next 550 years, the two territories, Schleswig and Holstein are from now on united into one.

Ok, that was a bit of a diversion. The other territory Margaret acquired was Norway. Oh, sorry, she did not acquire it, her son, still a minor at the time did. Margaret’s husband, king Haakon had died in 1380, at which point the crowns of Norway and Denmark were united. It will take until 1991 before Norway will get a king again who was not also king of either Denmark or Sweden and who was born in Norway.

Olaf II of Denmark

Being Olaf II of Denmark and Olaf IV of Norway sounds quite impressive, but little Olaf had the trifecta of claims to Scandinavian crowns. His grandfather had been king Magnus IV of Sweden. If Magnus had remained on his throne, little Olaf would have smoothly picked up this crown as well. But Magnus had not held on to his crown.

Magnus Ericsson

15 years earlier Magnus had clashed with his nobles who regarded him as a weak ruler. He had lost Sania to Waldemar Atterdag and he was also accused of excessive favouritism towards a young courtier, Bengt Algotsson. A group of rebellious nobles formed who were then exiled by Magnus in 1363. The nobles sailed across the sea to meet up with Albrecht of Mecklenburg, the brother in-law of Magnus and father of another Albrecht who had at least a little bit of Swedish blood through his mother. This Albrecht it was concluded should be made king of Sweden.

Albrecht II Duke of Mecklenburg

The project was supported by a number of German princes and some of the Hanseatic cities. They showed up in Sweden in 1364 and a civil war began between Albrecht and Magnus. In 1365 Magnus is captured and the conduct of the war is now left to Magnus’ son Haakon, who was married to that self-same Margaret and is also the father of little Olaf, soon king of Denmark. Haakon could therefore count on support from the Danes.

Are you still following?

We now have another theatre of war in the Baltic involving basically Norway and Denmark on one side and the German princes plus some Hanseatic cities on the other. This war is raging for a cool 31 years, from 1364 to 1395. Inside Sweden the countryside is largely supportive of Magnus, Haakon and finally Olaf/Margaret whilst the main cities, Stockholm and Kalmar with their large population of Hanseatic merchants, support Albrecht.

Stockholm comes under siege in 1371 and Albrecht relies on Hanseatic ships to keep the city supplied with food and weapons. For that he turns to his Mecklenburg subjects including the cities of Rostock and Wismar. They are happy to help but it raises the question of how they should be paid. Neither the harassed king of Sweden nor his dad, the duke of Mecklenburg had the funds to pay.

If we were in the 18th century the way to deal with this would have been to give the captains of these ships a letter of marque. That is what Francis Drake had, a letter from the king authorising him to capture vessels of the enemy on his own account. These letters of marque made him a privateer, i.e., a pirate who could take refuge in the harbours of the king of England.

Letters of marque did not yet exist in 1371. It would be a hundred years before the first privateer order was issued by the city of Lübeck. But the concept is the same. The duke of Mecklenburg authorised the ship’s captains to seize enemy vessels and bring them to the harbours of Rostock and Wismar.

Being able to seek refuge in a major trading city was crucial. Think about what is on these ships they capture: Furs, beeswax, grain, herring, cloth. If you want to turn this into cash to pay the crew, to repair damage to the ship and to ultimately retire, you needed a fence, a fence who can offload a couple of tons of grain or 50 barrels of herring. That is no fence, that is a merchant.

That is the big difference between Baltic piracy and Captain Blackbeard. In the Caribbean they went after the ships full of gold and silver. That requires no fence at all. What they needed were safe places to make repairs and maybe a place to get a barrel of rum and some entertainment, but they did not need a full-service trading city that could move stolen goods into major export markets.

Baltic pirates needed full-service trading cities. Rostock and Wismar were full-service trading cities.

Which gets us to the next question, who were the enemies these sea captains were permitted to attack? Well, naturally that would be Albrecht’s enemies, Norway and Denmark as well as the Swedish nobles.

But here is the rub. Neither Norway nor Denmark had many ships. We have just gone past the Peace of Stralsund and trading in the Baltic is pretty much a monopoly of the Hanse. There was some disagreement between the Mecklenburger duke and say Lübeck and Stralsund because they had signed the peace deal of Stralsund without asking him. But that was not really enough to call an outright war. And Rostock and Wismar were Hanse cities, so obliged not to attack other Hansards. And finally his main supporters in Sweden were the German merchants of Stockholm and Kalmar who had close connections to the Hanse.

So, thinks stayed in limbo for a while. The privateers went after the rare Danish and Norwegian vessels. They even did take the occasional Hanseatic vessel and sold its content in Rostock or Wismar. The owner protested and the other Hanseatic cities demanded that they stopped fencing stolen goods. But Rostock and Wismar said that their hands were tied. As loyal subjects of their overlord, the duke of Mecklenburg there was nothing they could do. Ah, and it also made them rich, so they did not really want to stop.

In 1376 the Hansetag decided to raise funds to pay for a fleet to run these pirates down. But then the Prussian cities refused to pay the tax and the whole thing petered out. Looks like Rostock and Wismar weren’t the only ones playing the fencing game.

That went on until 1389 when the war between Margaret of Denmark and duke Albrecht of Mecklenburg entered its final phase. Albrecht of Sweden was captured, and his father grew desperate to get him back. In that situation he went from a more informal approach to a declaration of all-out war at sea. He proclaimed that he would open all the harbours in his duchy of Mecklenburg to quote “anyone who was prepared to go to sea to harm the kingdom of Denmark”.

According to Philipp Dollinger this opened the floodgates and knights, burghers, peasants and common thieves joined the banners of Mecklenburg noblemen who fitted out ships for war. Rostock and Wismar became the headquarters of the piracy operation where raids all along the coasts of Scandinavia were planned.

This all out war at sea turned the tide for Albrecht, at least a little bit. The privateers attacked shipping all across the Baltic, but particularly in and out of the herring market in Scania. No longer did they spare ships from Lübeck, Stralsund or Gdansk.

In 1391 they took Bornholm and Gotland, then Viborg, Abo and some other fortresses in Finland. They raided the city of Bergen in 1393 and Malmö in 1394. All goods stolen there were channelled back into the European market via Rostock and Wismar.

These privateers came to be known as the Victual Brothers. The word is usually linked to the French word vitailleur or viteller in English. These were the detachments of soldiers sent out to procure food and drink for the army on the march. In the chaos of the Hundred-Years war these vitailleurs turned into outright robbers. The term came up from France and was then attributed to the privateers. Some modern historians claim that the addition of the word brother was given to them by their enemies to create the impression they were an organised, coherent army rather than a loose confederation of independent military entrepreneurs.

Another term used for them was Likedeeler, referring to crews who shared the loot equally.

The response of the other Hanseatic cities to the Victual Brothers was twofold. One was obvious, they raised fleet after fleet to fight the pirates. The other was a lot more effective. They agreed with Queen Margaret of Denmark to shut down the herring market in Scania. This was an event of European significance. In Danzig, the prices for fish tripled and further inland, say Frankfurt, the price went up factor 10, making it hard, if not impossible for the lower classes to stick to their fast days.  

The embargo did work. By cutting off the trade route, pirates no longer made enough money to warrant their risks, and many went home. The two Albrechts had to give up the struggle for the Swedish crown. In 1395 the two sides agreed a peace treaty. Albrecht, king of Sweden was released from captivity and returned home to finish his days as duke, no longer featuring much in the history books.

Margaret of Denmark took over Sweden and brought the three Scandinavian kingdoms which also included Finland, Iceland, Greenland Fraoer etc. under the rule of one man in an agreement known as the Klamar Union. This is the 14th century, so it had to be a man. Little Olaf, who had never gained any power alongside his mother had died unexpectedly. Margaret therefore replaced him with a young cousin, Eric of Pomerania, a dashing and foolish man. The three kingdoms were now ruled by the wise and energetic Margaret, and she did rule well. On this eternal back and forth between world domination and raging impotence that Denmark was now famous for, this was the brief moment in the sun. Eric would have to wait until Margaret’s death in 1412 before he could make a right royal mess of things.

The capitulation of Albrecht of Mecklenburg left the remaining privateers in a bit of a pickle. The harbours of Rostock and Wismar were now closed. They had acquired Gotland and with it the city of Visby. Visby had suffered a lot in the last decades being constantly fought over by Danes and Swedes. But there were still some merchants there and they could still fence some of the goods the sea captains brought up. The privateers were now no longer restrained by their agreement with Albrecht to attack only Denmark and its allies. They went out to attack anyone irrespective of where they were from.

The cities of Lübeck and Stralsund who had taken the lead role in the military operations against the privateers so far did not have the capacity to take Gotland on their own. Visby’s famous walls, 3.6km long and protected by 51 towers were beyond their siege capabilities. They needed help from a major land-based military power. The Teutonic Knights who had been largely neutral so far could be convinced to get involved. Not for the lofty goal of creating safe shipping lanes, but because they were interested in taking Gotland for themselves.

Visby City Wall, east side facing north in winter. Visby, Gotland, Sweden.

In 1398 the Grand Master Konrad of Jungingen mustered 84 ships and 4000 men and sailed for Visby. He took the city with ease and held it for the following 10 years. There is a Swedish folk song that described Visby as follows:

With hundredweight they weighed their gold,
They played With precious stones,
Their women used golden distaffs,
And pigs ate out of silver troughs.

When the Teutonic Knights left in 1408 there was no gold, no silver and no precious stone left in Visby. The place emptied out and by the 16th century all the churches were abandoned except for St. Mary, the church of the Gotlandfahrer. It depends very much on your nationality whether you blame Waldemar Atterdag’s siege of 1361, the pirates or the Teutonic knights for the fall of the once great centre of Baltic trade. The only thing we can agree on is that it is gone.

Who else is gone from the Baltic were the privateers. Without a base where to offload and sell their loot, piracy on the scale they had operated until now was no longer feasible. Most I guess just went home to live out their last years as honoured members of the city council. Some relocated to the North Sea. There they found a new base amongst the chieftains of Ostfriesland.

East Frisian Chieftain

Yes, chieftains. In German they are called Häuptling, the same word we use for the leaders of the native Americans. These guys were another leftover of the days when Germanic tribes scaled the walls of Roman forts. Originally these weren’t aristocrats in the classic feudal sense but elected leaders of free men. They settled in East Frisia, the land roughly between Bremen and Groningen on the North Sea coast. They operated somewhat outside the general structures of the Holy Roman empire, being neither subjects of a territorial prince nor of the emperor.

These guys gave refuge to the remaining Victual Brothers who now harassed the ships travelling along the coast from Hamburg and Bremen to Flanders. And this is where the famous Klaus Störtebecker appears for the first time. There is no record of him when the Victual brothers were riding high in Rostock, Wismar or Visby at all.

Now he was allegedly the great leader of the Victual Brothers enjoying the hospitality of the Friesian chieftains. In 1400 the cities of Hamburg and Bremen mustered a fleet and defeated the Frisian chieftains. The chieftains signed an agreement, never to hire any Victual brothers again. The following year the Victiual brothers were back in East Frisia. The chieftains said that these guys weren’t Victual Brothers but just common mercenaries. The Hamburgers returned and defeated the Frisians again and made them sign another agreement promising not to let any Victual brothers, robbers, pirates or other malefactors into their harbours. It is on this later raid that Klaus Störtebecker was allegedly captured. He was brought to Hamburg, he and his men were executed and there was no more piracy harassing the Hanseatic trade ever again…..

Ah, no. piracy did not stop. Simon von Utrecht, the Hamburg naval hero who allegedly defeated Störtebecker at the age of maybe 15 fought pirates well into the 1430s. The Victual brothers keep popping up in Hanse documents until about 1470. And after 1470, Lübeck issued a detailed ordinance about how to run a legitimate privateer operation.

The most famous act of piracy post Störtebecker occurred in 1473. The Hanseatic League is at war with king Edward IV of england. Paul Beneke, a city councillor from Danzig sailed under a letter of marque chasing English merchantmen. He commanded the largest ship in the Hanseatic fleet, the Peter of Danzig, 51 metres long with a displacement of 1600 tons. To put that in context, the Santa Maria that carried Columbus to the Carribean was just 19m long with a displacement odd 108 tons.

The Peter von Danzig

Whilst cruising off the shore of Zeeland, not far from Sluis, the Peter von Danzig comes upon a galley leaving Bruges. This galley was ostensibly owned by Tommaso Portinari, the manager of the Medici bank branch in Bruges and flew the flag of neutral Burgundy. Still Beneke approaches and demands to know whether any English goods are on board. The captain of the galleys laughs out loud and points at the large Burgundian banner. An altercation ensues, shots are fired. Beneke and his men capture the galley. Later they will say they found English merchandise on board and proof it was owned by king Edward IV. We do not know whether that is true. What is certain though is that they found something very valuable on board. The Last Judgement an enormous triptych by the Flemish painter Hans Memling. It had been commissioned by another Medici agent in Bruges, Andrea Tani. Beneke takes that painting and puts it into the church of St. Mary in his hometown where it stayed until it became the star exhibit in the Gdansk National Museum.

The Medici mobilised the pope to demand the return of the painting to its rightful owner, but the city council of Danzig refused, claiming it to be a legitimate prize. In the 19th century Beneke became a national hero, not of the Poles, but of the Germans residing in Danzig. The Nazis built a memorial shrine for Beneke complete with statue and mural, Gunther Grass makes up a grandiose tall tale about the figurehead of the galleon. One man’s pirate is another man’s naval hero.

So, pirates existed before the Victual Brothers and Klaus Störtebecker and they existed long afterwards, assuming the latter existed at all. Which leaves the question why this story has become such an icon of Hanseatic history.

To get to the bottom of it would require a full review of the perception history of the Hanseatic League, which we will do at the end of this series, as we always do. But there is also the question why the Victual brothers kept getting discussed on the contemporaneous Hansetage as a huge threat to the association.

One reason may have been that these pirates needed to be portrayed as a huge danger to each individual city in order to justify the raising of taxes to fight them. But I believe there is something more profound at work here.

Remember what the Hansa is for as per the statement from 1479, not just to protect the traders from pirates and robbers, but primarily to ensure quote “that commercial enterprises on water and on land have the desired and favourable success”. And the way they do that is by reducing friction in trade. They gain privileges in key trading centres abroad, the Hanseatic cities adopted either Lübeck or Magdeburg law which meant they had similar rules about trade and shipping and these rules were enforced by unbiased courts. Merchants in the Hanse had a vast network of personal relationships across the different cities, be it because they had been apprenticed in another city, had spent a winter in Novgorod and Bergen with fellow Hansards, had sailed to Bruges or London with others, had found their wives in distant shores and married their daughters to colleagues within the network. Carsten Jahnke describes the financial interrelationships within these networks and points out that merchants were constantly holding goods and funds in trust for each other. To function, these networks required each member to be trustworthy and predictable.

And that is why the Victual Brothers were a major shock to the system. Before 1370 any form of piracy or privateering was directed against explicit opponents, usually not against members of the Hanse. When Rostock and Wismar took part in this large scale operation and were trading the stolen goods through other Hansards, the system of mutual trust was at risk of collapse.

Networks like the ones that dominate the internet today can take some proportion of dishonest players. For instance, Tripadvisor still has some credibility despite a lot of fake reviews. But once a network is overrun by dishonest actors, it loses validity and collapses.

The leaders of the Hanse must have seen this danger and that is why they reacted so strongly and that is also why they kept the memory of the Victual Brothers alive. The story of the Victual brothers is therefore much less of a story about pirates, but a story about the Hanseatic League itself and its ability to heal. Violence at sea continued well after Störtebecker was allegedly beheaded, but no city would harbour privateers attacking other Hanse members as openly as Rostock and Wismar have done. As for the former fences in Rostock and Wismar, they returned to be honest merchants and their descendants proudly display their HR and HW numberplates.

Next week we will talk a bit more about what the Hansa actually was, how it operated and why the English described it as a crocodile, a dangerous animal, the body and strength of which was always hidden below the surface. I hope you will join us again.

Now instead of the usual closing speech referencing patreon.com/historyofthegermans and historyofhgermans.com/support, as promised, here is the section in the Tin drum by Gunter Grass talking about the national maritime museum in Gdansk:

The Tin Drum a book by Gunter Grass and Breon Mitchell. (bookshop.org)

End quote.

The story does not end here as you can imagine. There will be a death and sex before the end of this chapter. If you like such “frolicking fables that portray a forgotten face of history” as much as the Nobel committee that awarded him the prize for literature in 1999, get yourself a copy of the tin drum.

The Hanseatic League undergoes a fundamental transformation in the second half of the 14th century. It turned from a guild of merchants trading across the Baltic and the North Sea into an alliance of trading cities. An alliance that has proven that it can fight and win wars against major territorial powers. That sits quite uncomfortably with the existing European rulers who wonder what to do with this alien inside their body politic.

The Hanse had acquired a wide range of trading privileges in their main Kontors in England, Flanders, Norway and the Republic of Novgorod. These privileges did not only disadvantage the locals who were unsurprisingly hostile but also challenged the authority of the princes. That was just about bearable as long as this was just a community of grubby merchants from the Empire. Now that these merchants had built formidable cities, commanded great navies and toppled kings, it became an entirely different ballgame.

Furthermore, the legitimacy of the Hansa was fragile. The Hanseatic Cities, apart from Lübeck and Dortmund weren’t free imperial cities, making them at least formally subject to their territorial lords. As such they could not form an actual league of cities as the Northern Italian republics had done a hundred years earlier. Nor were they allowed to conduct foreign policy against their territorial lord, though they sometimes did. These fault lines will become ever more apparent as we go forward with our history.

This week we will get a first glimpse at what will lead to the ultimate demise of the League as we get into the year 1388, a year when the cities face off against three of the most powerful political entities in Northern Europe, the kingdom of England, the county of Flanders and the Republic of Novgorod.

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 117 – Embargoes

The Hanseatic League undergoes a fundamental transformation in the second half of the 14th century. It turned from a guild of merchants trading across the Baltic and the North Sea into an alliance of trading cities. An alliance that has proven that it can fight and win wars against major territorial powers. That sits quite uncomfortably with the existing European rulers who wonder what to do with this alien inside their body politic.

The Hanse had acquired a wide range of trading privileges in their main Kontors in England, Flanders, Norway and the Republic of Novgorod. These privileges did not only disadvantage the locals who were unsurprisingly hostile but also challenged the authority of the princes. That was just about bearable as long as this was just a community of grubby merchants from the Empire. Now that these merchants had built formidable cities, commanded great navies and toppled kings, it became an entirely different ballgame.

Furthermore, the legitimacy of the Hansa was fragile. The Hanseatic Cities, apart from Lübeck and Dortmund weren’t free imperial cities, making them at least formally subject to their territorial lords. As such they could not form an actual league of cities as the Northern Italian republics had done a hundred years earlier. Nor were they allowed to conduct foreign policy against their territorial lord, though they sometimes did. These fault lines will become ever more apparent as we go forward with our history.

This week we will get a first glimpse at what will lead to the ultimate demise of the League as we get into the year 1388, a year when the cities face off against three of the most powerful political entities in Northern Europe, the kingdom of England, the county of Flanders and the Republic of Novgorod.

But before we start, allow me to make you an offer you cannot refuse. From here on I will provide you with an episode of the History of the Germans every Thursday at 05:00 UK time, advertising free with a modest amount of humour and an excessive amount of detail. In exchange you help and support the podcast. You can do that by becoming a patron on patreon.com/historyofthegermans from as little as 2 of the shiniest British pounds a month, or by making a one-time contribution on my website historyofthegermans.com/support. If you want to help in another way, go out and tell everyone, friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, fellow shoppers and people on the street that you love the show. Word of mouth remains one of the most efficient ways to bring in new listeners.

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Last week we ended on the Peace of Stralsund the masterpiece of the diplomacy of Henning von Putbus, the leader of the Danish Royal council. After the crushing defeat at the hands of the Hanseatic League and its allies, king Waldemar Atterdag and even the kingdom of Denmark itself had been done for. The allies’, i.e., the counts of Holstein, the king of Sweden, the duke of Mecklenburg and some of the great aristocratic Danish families intent was to turn the clock back to 1340 when the kingdom did not have a ruler, its great provinces had been mortgaged to German princes and the Hanse controlled to Oresund as well as the herring market in Scania.

By driving a wedge between the Hanse whose interests were mainly mercantile and its allies, the princes, whose interests were purely territorial, Henning von Putbus managed to preserve the kingdom of his absent monarch. It came at a price though.

Denmark had to cede control of the main castles that controlled the passage between the Baltic and the North Sea to the Hanse for a term of 15 years. Throughout that period the Hanse could collect 2/3rds of the tolls for the use of the Oresund and -even more important – could control who was allowed to go through and who wasn’t. Being able to block access gave the Hanse a monopoly on all trade with the Northeast of Europe. The Hanse had control of the export of Baltic herring a staple of European diet, of the finest beeswax that lit up the great cathedrals and monasteries and the large shipments of grain from the Hinterland of Pomerania, Prussia and Livonia that fed the large cities of Flanders and England.

The final concession Putbus had to make to secure a deal was to give these plebeian merchants a say in who would become king of Denmark once Waldemar Atterdag were to die. By the way, I initially called him Waldemar Dawn, which is a translation of the Danish word Atterdag. But I found it more fun to say the word Atterdag than the word Dawn, and if you search for Waldemar Dawn on Google you will struggle to find anything useful, whilst Waldemar Atterdag will get you straight there.

So, Waldemar Atterdag had no son. With his current wife still very much alive and past child-bearing age, the succession was likely to go through one of his daughters. The older, Ingeborg was married to Henry of Mecklenburg who in turn was the brother of the current king of Sweden as well as the son of the duke of Mecklenburg. The younger one, Margaret was married to Haakon, the king of Norway. Both of them had male children, Ingeborg’s son was called Albrecht and Margarets was called Olaf. 

Both were infants in 1375 meaning that their guardians, i.e., either the duke of Mecklenburg or the king of Norway would effectively rule Denmark. 1375 was the year king Waldemar Atterdag passed.

When the royal council of Denmark asked the Hanse, who amongst the two pretenders they were to choose, the Hanse went for the Norway option, king Olaf II who was five at the time. That seemed like the right decision since the Mecklenburger already had Sweden and were the overlords of Rostock and Wismar. It seemed a lot better to let the Norwegians have Denmark. Norway was a lot smaller than Sweden, further away and, as we heard before in the episode about Bergen, utterly dependent upon grain shipments from Lübeck and Prussia.

This was one of those decisions that were entirely rational but turned out to have been a majorly wrong in hindsight. What the Burgermeisters and city councillors did not know and probably could not even have imagined, was that Margaret, youngest daughter of Waldemar Atterdag was the greatest Scandinavian politician of the Middle Ages – full stop.

I heard Simon Sebag Montefiore saying on a different podcast that there is a fashion to elevate the role of women in history – presumably beyond of what their actual impact warrants. That may be so, but in the case of Margaret of Denmark there is no bigging up possible. She is undeniably an exceptional political operator, a crucial figure in Scandinavian history and the Hanse’s most formidable opponent.

But for now, you should park Margaret in the back of your mind. She will make her presence felt very soon. For now, we need to contemplate how the rest of Northern Europe felt about n association of cities taking charge of the fate of entire kingdoms.

For the last 150 years or so the counts of Flanders, the kings of England and the rulers of Norway and Novgorod had regarded the men who had come on their cogs from the east with furs, beeswax, grain, copper and whatnot as merchants. Which is not surprising given that was exactly what they were.

But in these years from 1360 onwards it had become clear that they were not just merchants. They had proven they could muster a navy that could bring down a king any time they so wanted. If the Hanse is not just a trading association but a political power, the trading privileges they held in Flanders, England or Novgorod take on a very different meaning.

No longer are they concessions made to attract trade and grow their own markets. They are also concessions to a foreign power that can use the benefits to fit out ships that could attack their harbours and castles. Moreover, some of these privileges meant the Hansards operated outside the jurisdiction of the local rulers. Cases against them for breach of contract had to be brought before their judges, not the local magistrate. In criminal cases they were either immune from the royal officials or were smuggled out of the country before they could be brought to heel.

In a world where the monarchies move gradually towards a modern understanding of the state as the holder of a monopoly on violence, these ancient privileges become increasingly hard to swallow.

All these misgivings were boosted by the constant complaints of the locals. The rulers own subjects  have to cough up for all the tolls and taxes these foreigners do not have to pay. The Hansards have privileges in the markets and in many places can even compete directly with their commerce by selling to retail customers.

And finally, along with the growing role of the state comes the understanding that all this economic activity actually matters. In 1319 the company of the Merchants of the Staple is established in England by Royal Charter. The merchants of the Staple are given the monopoly in the trade with wool, leather, lead and tin. That was intended both to concentrate the trade, making it more efficient as well as facilitating the collection of taxes and dues. A little later a competing association of Merchant Adventurers forms who trade in all the goods not covered by the monopoly of the Merchants of the Staple. They too receive a royal charter in 1407. And their major competitors are the Hansards.

These tensions result in an almighty blow-up in 1388. And it did not happen in just one place, but in three, but all at the same time. Let’s start with the events in Flanders.

When we left the scene in Bruges in 1360 the Hanse had just achieved a major victory. The city of Bruges had attempted to curtail the Hanse’s privileges. In response the Hansards staged a walkout thereby cutting Bruges off from supply of goods from the Baltic. Amongst those the grain from Prussia was the one that hurt the most. Bread prices for the lower classes in the overcrowded city went up, there was fear of riots and the citizens of Bruges, still the largest and most important trading place in Northern Europe had to cave.

For the subsequent 15 years things went reasonably smoothly, but by 1375 tensions rose again. The members of the Kontor complained to the Hansetag that Bruges was claiming import tax on the stockfish from Bergen, that they had banned the import of Hamburg beer and that the city authorities were unwilling to prevent attacks on their warehouses and then failed to honour claims for damages.

The Hansetag sent a delegation to Bruges to negotiate but they ran into a brick wall. After the delegation had returned back home, the Hansards in Bruges decided to take things into their own hands and stage another walkout.

They had to plan this in secrecy, not only because they did not want to give the city or the count of Flanders a chance to stop them, but also because they were no longer allowed to steer the policy of the Kontor themselves. Initially the Kontors were managed by the merchants who were on location at any given time. They would select their aldermen and make the decisions about how to handle any conflict with the locals. In 1366 the cities and the Hansetag took over control of the Kontors. From now on all major decisions had to be taken by the Hansetag and or one of the cities’ representatives on site.

Something went wrong in the process and the secret of the planned walkout came out before the Hansards could get themselves and their wares out of the city. The count of Flanders was apoplectic and had the merchants thrown in jail and their goods sequestered. Since they had acted without permission from back home, they did not get any support from the Hansetag.

Caught in the middle, the German merchants in Bruges had to swallow the demands of the count of Flanders. They were made to stay and to trade from their now much less privileged position. Once released from prison they wrote a bitter letter back home to Lübeck: quote “Now that the lords of the cities are in charge of us, they may also deliberate on the disgrace that has been done to us, for we did not want to give up our privileges.”

This is now quite embarrassing for the cities. They had wanted to take control of the Kontors and upon the first challenge, the new system had utterly failed. They had to do something. Sending a letter of protest was something, so they did that.

But negotiations did not even begin. That had less to do with the lack of seriousness of the letter, but with problems in Flanders itself. In 1379 the Revolt of Ghent broke out. The city of Ghent was rising up against the count of Flanders. Relations between the count and the city had been fraught for a long time.

The count had sided with the king of France during the hundred years war, which had a detrimental effect on the ability to import wool from England. English wool was critical in the production of cloth which is what had made the Flemish cities rich. The city of Ghent had previously revolted in 1338 and established an independent city government that signed treaties with England. But in 1345 the counts had brought Ghent and the other cities back under their control.

Fast forward to 1379 and revolt broke out again. The trigger was that the citizens of Bruges had been allowed by the count to build a new canal to the sea to protect their rapidly silting harbour. As work progressed, Ghent citizens attacked the workers from Bruges, killed a bailiff and burnt one of the count’s castles down. Things escalated and within weeks weavers all across Flanders took up arms against the count.

What followed was a brutal war between several of the cities, including Ghent Bruges and Ypres on one side and the count and his French allies on the other. A war that devastated the richest county in all of Christendom. In 1382 the count defeated the cities at the battle of Roosebeke which led to a series of reprisals against the leading citizens who had supported the rebellion. Only Ghent still refused to surrender and the war dragged on for another 3 years.

Bottom line was that most of the foreign merchants left Flanders during this period to avoid getting killed in the crossfire. By the end of 1382 only about 20 Hansards still held out in the devastated city of Bruges.  One of the reasons the war ended with a peace agreement was that the old count of Flanders died in 1384.

His incredibly rich county went to his son-in-law, the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold. Philip needed to urgently rebuild the economy of Flanders in order to fund his participation in the hundred-years war. He therefore entered into negotiations with the Hanse about a return of the German merchants to Bruges.  

The Hanse thought they had the upper hand and demanded the restoration of all their ancient privileges plus an exorbitant compensation for lost business. And on top of that they demanded that Philip would erect a chapel as atonement for the imprisonment of the Hanse merchants in 1378 as well as three masses to be sung every year to commemorate those who had died during the revolt.

These demands, in particular the chapel went too far for the duke of Burgundy. Even though it wasn’t him who had imprisoned the merchants, it was still his honour that would be diminished by such an atonement.

I am not quite sure what it was that made the Hanse to put forward such an obviously impossible and economically irrelevant demand. In part this may have been to gain a bargaining chip that could easily be sacrificed. It could also have been because the Hanse itself was divided. Lübeck and the Wendish cities were pursuing a hard line against Philip, whilst Danzig and the Teutonic Knights advocated for a more conciliatory approach.

This rift within the association shows that the Hanse was by no means a monolithic organisation. They could align behind one purpose and maintain tight discipline as they had done during the war against Denmark. But it wasn’t something the Hanse cities were usually comfortable with. The confederation of Cologne, that agreement they had all signed in the build-up to the war with Denmark and that demanded strict compliance by all members ran out in 1385 and was not renewed. The Hanse was not a league of cities or a permanent alliance, but something much looser, held together by cultural ties and common interests, not a command-and-control structure. And an outright commercial war with Flanders was not in everyone’s interest.

So, when negotiations with Philip of Burgundy collapsed in 1388, the cities came together on a Hansetag to debate whether or not to place Bruges under embargo again. The Wendish cities did win the support of the majority by a thin margin.

So, the embargo was declared and the merchants in the Kontor of Bruges left the city to settle in Dordrecht in Holland for the time being. And the terms of the embargo were even stricter than in 1358. All trade with Flemish merchants was prohibited. Even entering the prohibited zone without goods was to be punished. Goods arriving had to carry a certificate of origin. Any wares arriving from Flanders in any Hanseatic port had to be confiscated, even if they had come with a neutral ship. Previously the rule had been to just send the contraband back.

But, and there is a big but, the Wendish cities had to make material concessions to the Prussians to get their approval. Danzig, Elbing, Thor etc. were allowed to trade amber with Flanders, they were allowed to import cloth for the Teutonic Knight’s robes and even go to the markets in Brabant.

And as for the Dutch cities like Kampen, they were even more reluctant to comply. They saw a great opportunity to benefit from a major smuggling operation by allowing the grain ships from Danzig to unload in their harbours.

The laxity of the blockade meant that the embargo lasted a lot longer than last time. Only after 4 years did the parties agree. The Hansards had to drop the demand for a chapel and cut the damage claim to 11,000 pounds of silver. In return they got a few more privileges, in particular improved protection against piracy.

By the end of 1392 the merchants of the Kontor of Bruges returned. Again, the Hanse had triumphed over the greatest trading city in their world and one of the most powerful territorial lord on the continent. But the success already rang a bit hollow.

Even before the Hansards returned to Bruges did the local merchants vow not to let these foreigners gain any more headway. The new ruler of Flanders was the duke of Burgundy whose lands extended into Northern France, down into actual Burgundy and Holland. Next time the Hansards want to move their Kontor elsewhere in the Netherlands, they will find it more and more difficult to escape the clutches of the duke.

But most concerning was the constant breaking of the blockade. This unveiled internal disagreements between the cities whose economic interests had begun to diverge.

Flanders wasn’t the only flashpoint for the Hanseatic League. England was another.

King Edward III, the great friend and sponsor of the Hanse had died in 1377. Even by the end of his reign the relationship had cooled off a bit. Gone were the days when the German merchants went out of their way to save his majesty from the embarrassment of having his crown sold at auction to the highest bidder.

England had for centuries been just a producer of wool that was sold to the cities of Flanders where it was weaved into cloth. The merchants who had a monopoly on selling this wool were the Merchants of the Staple, a trading association established by royal charter in 1319 but probably even older.

This monopoly forced others who wanted to participate in England’s most important industry to look for ways to get around these restrictions. What the monopoly of the Merchants of the Staple did not cover was the finished product, i.e., cloth.

There was surely some form of cloth industry in England before the 14th century serving mainly local demand. But by the 1350s this industry had scaled up. The reason was probably threefold.

One was the simple profit motive. As the splendid guild houses in Ghent, Ypres, Bruges and later Antwerp make abundantly clear, there was a lot of money to be made in cloth, a lot more than in just producing wool.

The second was the disruption in the trade with Flanders caused by the hundred-years war. As we just heard, the count of Flanders and then his successor, Philip of Burgundy, supported the French. Hence England would often stop the export of wool to Flanders. That meant the wool producers in England needed to figure out what to do with all that excess wool they could no longer sell. So they began making cloth themselves.

And finally, these ambitious men who did not get a seat in the Merchant of the Staples’ hall opened up export markets for English cloth. They called themselves the Merchant Adventurers. There is still today a society of merchant adventurers in York whose splendid guildhall is well worth a visit.

By the 1350s these merchant adventurers had beaten a path into the Baltic, travelling the long way around Jutland. Their English cloth was cheaper and often easier to obtain than the Flemish product.  The return journey was profitable too as there was a lot of demand in England for wood, grain and copper.

The harbours the Merchant Adventurers sailed to were Elbing, Danzig and Stralsund, rather than Lübeck. They were often well received by the Teutonic Knights who had close relationships with the English aristocracy. British knights would come down to Prussia for sport during the years when the Hundred-years war went into a lull and opportunities for their favourite pastime, fighting, murdering and pillaging had become scarce.

The English Merchant Adventurers rented houses and market stalls and just generally made themselves comfortable in their new home. Soon their business expanded into the great herring market in Scania. Being great sailors and fairly close, they travelled to the Baie of Bourgneuf to load up with salt, turned round and headed for Falsterbo where they bought and pickled the herring they later sold back home or in Flanders.

When that started to bite into the profits of the Teutonic Knights and the merchants of Gdansk they turned against the English. After the war with Denmark, the Hanse had gained control of the Oresund and could therefore simply bar the Merchant Adventurers from coming in.

In return the English now made life difficult for the Hanseatic merchants in the Steelyard in London and their other Kontors along the east coast. Once Richard II assumed the throne pressure increased further. Other than his father, Richard was much more amenable to listen to his own subjects’ complaints against the foreign traders.

Upon Richard’s ascension to the throne the royal council refused to confirm the Hanse’s privileges unless certain conditions were met, including the preparation of a definitive list of Hanse members. The latter was wholly unacceptable to the Hanse as that would have forced them to take on a much more corporate structure with fixed membership and permanent institutions. And finally, the English had the audacity to demand reciprocity, i.e., grant the Merchant Adventurers the same rights in the Hanseatic Cities that the Hansards enjoyed in England. How dare they!

The initial reaction was diplomacy as per the usual playbook. The new Burgermeister of Lübeck, Jakob Pleskow travelled to England and after long and arduous discussions received the confirmation of the old privileges.

But that was just a piece of paper. The king still introduced new taxes on the Steelyard merchants, which they refused to pay on the basis of their ancient rights.

And generally the treatment of Hanseatic Merchants in England remained harsh. A Prussian envoy to the court of Saint James lists the following complaints:

  • In 1375 a Danzig citizen had his ship and contents confiscated by Edward le Dispenser and when he claimed redress his claim was rejected
  • In 1379 a ship was held for 8 months in the harbour of London, losing its owners 100 pound sterling
  • In 1381 a ship ran aground, and the locals took away its entire load worth 6oo pound sterling
  • In Scarborough in 1383 the locals accused a German merchant of being a Breton traitor and refused to pay him for the goods he had sold and handed over.
  • The most outrageous incident had happened in 1378 when another Danzig merchant was murdered together with his three shipmates by soldiers on an English Navy ship.

We can be sure that similar complaints were made by the English Merchant Adventurers about their treatment in the Baltic harbours.

Things escalated further until in 1385 an English fleet attacked German merchantmen in the harbour of Bruges. 6 of these ships belonged to the Teutonic Knights. The grand Master of the Teutonic Knights immediately declared an embargo on England.

To avoid having their goods confiscated, the Merchant Adventurers rapidly left Danzig and Elbing and hankered down in Stralsund where they initially found a friendly welcome.

But as there was no redress to be obtained for the various complaints, the city of Stralsund in agreement with the other Wendish cities confiscated the English merchants’ goods. At which point Richard II confiscated the goods in the Steelyard.

That was in that same year of 1388 when the Hanse declared an embargo against Flanders. The Teutonic knights and the Prussian cities who had been less keen on the embargo in Flanders as we have heard, nevertheless demanded all-out war against England.

Jakob Pleskow Bürgermeister of Lübeck and his colleague from Stralsund, Wulf Wulflam were dispatched to England to negotiate. These two can be credited with avoiding a most likely disastrous military engagement.

Even though the Hanse was still full of the glory of the recent success against Denmark, these two men and their colleagues on the city councils were hard-headed merchants who were used to measuring risk and return. They could think beyond the already massive military challenges posed by an attack on England to the impact such an action could have on an organisation as fluent as the Hanseatic League. And at the same time, they were astute negotiators who could bluff their way through a royal council of noblemen.

They could make their threats of imminent military intervention sound credible, whilst at the same time keeping their demands within a range that would not humiliate the king and his council. This time there were no calls for the construction of a chapel of atonement.

An agreement was finally reached. The confiscated goods were returned and the existing privileges for the Steelyard were again confirmed. In return the Merchant Adventurers were given the right to trade in the Hanseatic ports, even to trade ship to ship with other foreigners.

Who won in this contest is a bit of a debate. Yes, the Hanse managed to retain their privileges in the Steelyard without having to grant full equivalent treatment to the English. But in the long run the deal was probably more beneficial to the English than the Germans.

The Merchant Adventurers established a permanent base in Gdansk, their own guildhall and elected a governor. They went well beyond the agreement of 1388, formed corporations with Hanseatic merchants and offered their goods to retail customers.

In 1398 the Grand Master of the Teutonic knights had enough and unilaterally cancelled the agreement with the English Crown. But nothing came of it. In 1398 the League was no longer prepared to get into a fully-fledged fistfight with England.

That left the legal situation in limbo. Trade between England and the Baltic continued but without an overarching legal framework. Things depended a lot on circumstances and goodwill. Complaints kept going back and forth about how the English prevented the Germans from exercising their rights and how the Hanseatic cities imposed petty restrictions on the Merchant Adventurers, such as banning them from bringing their wives along.

This will go on and on until the closure of the Stalhof in 1598.

To complete our story of the embargoes of 1388 we need to mention the conflict with Novgorod.

The Kontor in Novgorod was the first the Hanse had established and still accounted for much of the export in furs and beeswax. But conflict had existed for quite a while caused mainly by the Teutonic Knights.

The Teutonic Knights weren’t members of the Hanseatic League but exercised a significant influence over it in their role as overlords of the Prussian cities as well as thanks to their own trading activities.

For the rulers of Novgorod, the Teutonic Knights and the Hanseatic league were largely synonymous. So, every time the knights expanded from their holdings in Latvia and Estonia at the expense of the Republic of Novgorod, the Novgorodians retaliated by confiscating the goods in the St. Peterhof.

Tension kept escalating and by 1388 the Hansetag decided to put Novgorod under embargo too. Given the League had shut down trade with England and Flanders, the two major export markets for furs and Beeswax, the incremental damage to their trade was limited.

Again, the blockade was not super tight, but still Novgorod caved. A new trade agreement was signed that confirmed and detailed the respective rights and privileges. This agreement held for almost a century.

But what we see with all these embargoes is that 18 years after the great victory over Denmark and the Peace of Stralsund, the coherence of the Hanseatic League has starting to come away at the seams.

The confederation of Cologne is not renewed. The cities, namely Lübeck, Rostock, Wismar and Stralsund on the one hand and the Prussian cities plus the Teutonic Knights on the other have different economic interests that drives them to demand diverging political positions. And we have not even talked about the wavering cities like Kampen and Bremen who are notorious for their blockade breaking.

Next week we will talk about another chapter in 14th century Hanseatic history, one that is probably the most famous. I talk obviously about the Victual Brothers, the notorious Baltic Pirates and their last leader Klaus Störtebecker whose last walk is part of Hamburg Folklore. I hope you are going to join us again, and quite frankly, why wouldn’t you – its about Pirates!

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 just to remind you, the sub-podcast The Hanseatic League is still running. So, if you want to point a friend or relative towards the History of the Germans but want to avoid confusion, just send them there. The Hanseatic League is available everywhere you can get the History of the Germans.

The Hanseatic League is first and foremost an organisation driven by commerce and commerce rarely sees the necessity of war. But in 1360 the organisation that had only just transitioned from a community of merchants to an alliance of cities found itself in gridlock with Waldemar Atterdag, Waldemar Dawn, king of Denmark..

Waldemar’s objective throughout his 35-year reign was to rebuild the kingdom of Denmark that had virtually disintegrated under his predecessors. And for that he needed money. That money he got from the two sources of wealth of the state of Denmark, taxing the trade in herring and the tolls for passing through the Oresund. The Hansards who dominated the herring trade and the traffic through the Oresund were the ones who were supposed to pay for that.

If that had not breached the tolerance levels of even the most sober Hanseatic merchant, the attack on Gotland and occupation of the Hanseatic city of Visby did. A fleet leaves Lübeck in 1362 to put the Danish tyrant back into his box…

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 116 – The War with Denmark Part 2

The Hanseatic League is first and foremost an organisation driven by commerce and commerce rarely sees the necessity of war. But in 1360 the organisation that had only just transitioned from a community of merchants to an alliance of cities found itself in gridlock with Waldemar Atterdag, Waldemar Dawn, king of Denmark. Waldemar’s objective throughout his 35-year reign was to rebuild the kingdom of Denmark that had virtually disintegrated under his predecessors.

And for that he needed money. That money he got from the two sources of wealth of the state of Denmark, taxing the trade in herring and the tolls for passing through the Oresund. The Hansards who dominated the herring trade and the traffic through the Oresund were the ones who were supposed to pay for that.

If that had not breached the tolerance levels of even the most sober Hanseatic merchant, the attack on Gotland and occupation of the Hanseatic city of Visby did. A fleet leaves Lübeck in 1362 to put the Danish tyrant back into his box…

Before we get into this, I want to thank my Patrons again for their generosity. It is thanks to your support this show stays on the road and remains advertising free. You guys may have noticed that so many podcasts are getting overrun with adverts, and podcasters are made to wax lyrically about rather basic banking services or underperforming telco providers. You do not want to waste your time with that, and I do not want the cringe of talking about my mental health. So, if you feel that this show is worth supporting, become a patron for as little as a chocolate croissant per month. It will be good for both your waistline and your mental health. And special thanks to Jason H., Georg B., Carsten E. and Andrew K. who have already signed up. 

Last episode we looked at the impact of the Black death on the Hanseatic League which, despite a third or more of the cities’ population dead had no material adverse long-term effects. As it happened, the four great scourges of the 14th century, war, plague, spiritual disorientation and climate change did not stop the League from hurtling towards its economic and political zenith. Arguably it was the challenges of the 14th century that allowed for this alliance of trading posts on the edge of Europe to rise to the prominence it still retains.

Two things helped the Hanse to manage the plague.

Firstly, cities remained an attractive place for ambitious young men and women keen to escape the confines of village life. Throughout the 14th century peasants migrating into the cities made up for population lost to the regular outbreaks of Pestilence and Typhoid.

Secondly, the plague brought about a material rise in average incomes across Europe as workers exploited the persistent labour shortages. I found a statistic by the Bank of England that tracked real -not just nominal- GDP per capita on a consistent basis from 1270 to 2016. There you can see that there was only one sustained increase in real GDP per head for 500 years and that happened between 1350 and 1400. Economic activity per head moved from around £800 in today’s money to £1,100.

And just for anyone who dreams of living in the Middle Ages, today the average GDP per head in the UK is ~£29,000, a cool 25 times the levels after the boost to wages during the plague. Or to put it another way, the annual average wage in 1400 bought you just one iPhone Pro Max.

But luckily for us, the guys in the Middle Ages did not waste their money on electronic gadgets that fried their brains, but on magnificent churches, sturdy city walls, wooden ships and the occasionally tight leggings that left little to the imagination.

And it is of wooden ships not leggings we want to talk today.

We left the narrative last week with the Burgermeister Johann Wittenborg setting sail for the Oresund. The aim was to bring the king of Denmark, Waldemar Dawn back into line. He had taken over the strategic island of Gotland and had captured the Hanseatic city of Visby. There was no more room for compromise left.

The Wendish and Pomeranian cities, that means Lübeck, Hamburg, Rostock, Wismar, Lüneburg, Stralsund, Greifswald as well as Anklam and Demmin met and decided that war was inevitable. Each city committed to a full embargo on trade with Denmark and offered support in the form of ships funded by a war tax on all exports from their harbours.

The cities were not willing to take on Waldemar Dawn all by themselves though. They brought in the sworn enemies of the Danish king of which there were many. Waldemar’s policy of rebuilding royal power had taken away lands and privileges from many of the leading powers in the Baltic, the counts of Holstein, the kings of Sweden and Norway as well as many of the Danish nobles. Even the Grand Master of the Teutonic knights signed up to the alliance.

On paper this looked like a walk in the park. But as the Germans say “Papier ist geduldig” which translates as paper is patient. Makes no sense but then it still does.

The first crack appeared because the agreement bound only the Wendish and Pomeranian cities. There had not been a general Hansetag, a gathering of all the members of the league that had decided to go after Waldemar.

Because it was only one part the cities that had signed on the dotted line, other members of the Hanse were free to continue supplying the Danes. The Dutch cities, in particular Kampen on the Ijssel, then one of the largest trading centres in the low countries saw no reason to toe the line laid down by Lübeck. Kampen traders kept bringing the salt of Bourgneuf to Skane so that herring could still be pickled and could still be shipped to Europe.

Kampen (much later during the little Ice Age)

Even more irritating than the breaking of the blockade was the gradual backing out of the princely allies. Initial commitments to provide armies and undertake separate attacks were watered down into mere financial support. Only the count of Holstein still promised to attack Jutland and the King of Sweden promised an army for the siege of the great new castles built on the Oresund.

In April 1362 a fleet of 52 ships, of which 27 were the larger cogs set off for Copenhagen. Up to this point any military activity of the Hanseatic League had been undertaken in the context of a larger war. The cities provided auxiliaries, transport and occasionally warships. But they would usually operate under the command of an aristocratic general. This time there is no territorial lord who takes command. The expedition is led by a merchant, the Bürgermeister of Lübeck, Johann Wittenborg.

Wittenborg was typical for his class. His father had already been a citizen of Lübeck and a member of the city council. The family’s wealth came from trade and Johann had cut his teeth on the classic route from the Northern Baltic to Flanders and England.

That means he is likely to have received a thorough education in how to defend himself with a sword and lance, a skill eminently necessary for survival in the wilds of Finland or Russia. He would also have become a proficient sailor and leader of his ship’s company. The merchants of the Hanse fall broadly into two categories, the shippers and the traders.

A shipper would usually own a share in the ship, normally about 15 to 25% and would be in charge of the vessel and the crew. There would also be a Steuermann, a sailing master who would be in charge of the more technical aspects of sailing. Alongside the shipper were the normal merchants who would also own a share in the ship but would be simple passengers during the voyage. Being the shipper was generally the more lucrative position.

The shipper could bring both his own goods and goods from other traders who did not come along for the journey. Freight rates were generally very high given the risks and uncertainties of sea travel and depended on the value of the cargo. For instance, freight rates for grain from Danzig to Bruges were 48% of the value of the merchandise, Rye 68%, Salt 66% and wood 79%. For the even more perilous and long journey bringing salt from Portugal to Bruges it was 85%. Freight rates for luxury goods like wine, cloth and spices were more like 10%, still a good deal for the shipper given the much higher value of the merchandise.

So, if you wanted to be rich, you wanted to be a shipper. We do not know whether Johann Wittenborg was a shipper, we only know that he was rich. But these things go together so it is likely he had a lot of experience in running and managing large vessels full of valuable cargo.

But what he is unlikely to have received is the kind of thorough education in military strategy and tactics the sons of lords and princes received. That was the reason why the mayors of the Hanseatic cities had until now let others take command in war.

In the 1362 campaign there were no others, or it may have been that both Wittenborg himself and his fellow councillors and city mayors believed that it was time for the Hansards to step out of the shadows and take control of military operations themselves.

So Wittenborg, 41 years old and brimming with confidence sets off to tear down the fortresses Waldemar had built on the Oresund. His 27 cogs and 25 smaller ships were merchant vessels just marginally altered to carry soldiers.

Cog

We are still in a period where there are no guns on ships. Therefore, there was no need to have warships with much stronger hulls and openings for cannons. Sea-battles where they were fought involved ramming and then boarding the enemy vessel.

Bows and crossbows were the only distance weapons available, meaning engagements were taking place at very close quarters. It is likely that this form of naval warfare resulted in ships with ever higher constructions on the bow and stern  from where bowmen could rain arrows down on the enemy’s deck.  

The 1362 campaign did not envisage any major naval battles, mainly because Waldemar had no navy. For the last century the Hanseatic and other merchants had monopolised the Danish sea trade, meaning there were few Danish merchants and even fewer Danish sea-going ships.

The plan was to take the castles on the seashore. In the absence of guns, taking a castle, even one right on the seashore, meant that the ship’s company would disembark and then pursue a siege pretty much like any land army would do.

The ships’ job was to block attempts to resupply the besieged from the sea. When Wittenborg arrived at the Oresund he had counted on his ally, the king of Sweden to bring along his army so that the combined forces could take either Copenhagen or one of the other big castles, Malmo, Falsterbo, Skanor or Helsingborg.

For the Swedes Helsingborg was the best option as it was on the eastern, that means on their side of the Oresund and furthest away from the other three castles.

For Wittenborg it was the least attractive, being the furthest away from his position and required him to pass the Danish defences in Copenhagen, Malmo and Falsterbo before getting there.

But the need for Swedish troops trumped the concerns of the league commander. Helsingborg it was to be.

Imagine Wittenberg’s disappointment when he finds that the king Magnus of Sweden too had softened in his determination to take revenge on King Waldemar Dawn. What kept the Swedish ruler from keeping his promise was probably that Visby had thrown out the Danes in the winter of 1361/62 which removed the immediate threat to Sweden. And at the same time duke Albrecht of Mecklenburg was stirring up trouble at home which two years later would result in an uprising, an invasion and the removal of said king of Sweden.

King Magnus Ericsson

So, the Swedes did not show, leaving Johann Wittenborg carrying the can. The sensible thing would have been to sail back and curse the treacherous swedes all along the way. But in this case the oh so sober Hanseatic merchants did not do the sensible thing. Instead, they did a silly thing.

They disembarked the majority of the soldiers and commenced a traditional siege of Helsingborg. The siege lasted 12 weeks until Waldemar staged a daring raid on the poorly guarded Hanseatic warships in the Oresund. He gathered his men, rowed across the barely six miles from Zealand to Helsingborg and captured 12 of the precious vessels laden with supplies and weapons.

That put an inglorious end to this first military expedition of the Hanseatic League. Johann Wittenborg signed an onerous armistice with Waldemar and returned his much-diminished fleet to Lübeck.

The blame for the debacle was squarely put on Wittenborg. He was thrown out of the city council as soon as he arrived. Then he was brought before the court. What specifically he was accused of is not reported. His conviction was for letting the ships be captured and for “other reasons specific to him”.  He was beheaded “pour encourager les autres”

The defeat took literally the wind out of the sails of the Hanseatic League. The negotiations for a permanent settlement with Waldemar dragged on until 1365 and left both sides deeply dissatisfied.

The cities squabbled over the cost of the failed campaign and the lost ships. There was serious concern the unity of the “common merchants of the empire” could fall apart. But it did not.

Despite the defeat there was still a lot left the alliance provided to its members, first and foremost the Kontors. In 1366 the cities got together in another assembly, a full Hansetag in Lübeck and fundamentally reorganised the Kontors.

Instead of individual merchants, the Kontors were now to be run by representatives of certain cities on behalf of the whole. That gave these cities an important stake in the well-being of the organisation whilst at the same time bringing them under a degree of supervision from their peers.

And another thing helped. King Waldemar Dawn, otherwise an incredibly astute politician fell victim to the sin of pride.

He was now 43 years old and had been on the throne of Denmark for 23 years. In that time he had almost single handedly rebuilt his kingdom from literally nothing into the dominant power in the Baltic. He had expanded Danish rule into Oland and Gotland effectively controlling all the trade that came west. He had forced the citizens of Visby to fill up three barrels one with gold, one with silver and one with jewels and taken this treasure home in triumph.

And last but not least he had defeated a menacing alliance of his enemies, including the immensely wealthy Wendish and Pomeranian cities.

Between 1362 and 1367, Wldemar Dawn acted as the lord of the Baltic, charging taxes and tolls as he liked. When captains refused to pay or even just protested, he had their ships confiscated. He did that not just to the his former enemies, but also to his former allies the Dutch merchants as well as  the ships of the Teutonic Knights who were an entirely different kettle of fish.

These harassments pushed the Hanseatic cities and the Teutonic knights closer together. Meanwhile Albrecht of Mecklenburg had replaced the unreliable Magnus on the throne of Sweden, with a bit of help from some Hanseatic cities.

Albrecht was unsurprisingly interested in the reconquest of Skane and its herring market that Waldemar had taken back in 1360. The counts of Holstein did not need an invitation, nor did the Danish barons who were all still smarting from the loss of their land, power and influence by Waldemar’s hand.

But this time Lübeck and its allies had learned from their mistakes in 1362. This time the city alliance needed to be acting as one. No more blockade runners would be allowed. And this time the fleet needs to be of a size and power that can get the job done without having to rely on unreliable Swedes.

In 1367 the representatives of the Hanseatic cities gathered for a general Hansetag in Cologne. The first and only time a Hansetag took place in Cologne.

This Tagfahrt as the Hansards called their negotiations has over time gained a near mythical status in Hanseatic history. Apart from the unusual location, the participants were also much broader than on previous and future occasions.

The Dutch cities, including Kampen that spearheaded the smuggling of contraband during the first war against Waldemar made an appearance. But not only them but also other North Sea cities including  a famous pilgrimage site where one could see a holy host that had been vomited up and burned but had still remained intact. That city, founded in 1300 or 1306 and whose fortunes were dependent upon the 90,000 pilgrims who came to see this piece of unleavened and undying bread was none other than the city of Amsterdam.

Still today on the night of the 15th of March the Catholics of Amsterdam gather for the Stille Omgang, the silent procession around the place of the former pilgrimage church to venerate the now lost proof of divine presence.

But what the Hansards wanted from Amsterdam was not just the help such a holy relic could certainly provide, but also their and their fellow North Sea dwellers commitment to respect the blockade. Getting this commitment prove difficult to get, even from Bremen and Hamburg, mainly because they had no beef with king Waldemar. The negotiators had to resort to the threat of Verhansung, the expulsion from the association to get them in line.  

What the cities agreed in 1367 was a true change in the nature of their organisation. Until now they were a loose cooperation focused mainly on maintaining the privileges in the Kontors and mutual support against pirates, raiders and other unpleasantness.

What they ended up with now would be come known as the Cologne Confederation, a true league of cities. Something that was actually prohibited by imperial law, but in 1367 nobody north of the Main River cared much about the emperor.

The resolution issued at the end of the assembly was exceptionally detailed to avoid these internal squabbles that happened after 1362. Every city committed to a specific number of ships and soldiers. An elaborate system of taxation was set up that closed the loopholes in the previous export tax regime. They set the dates and places where and when the armada should assemble.

What sets the Cologne confederation further apart is the last clause. This agreement was not made just for this campaign but was to remain in place for 3 years after the conclusion of the war. As it happened the Cologne Confederation was prolonged several times and held until 1385.

To ensure full cooperation between all the cities, the months following the deliberations were taken up by negotiations with those cities that had not participated in the general assembly in Cologne. Every single city of German merchants from the Gulf of Finland to the mouth of the Rhine agreed to enforce the blockade and support the campaign.

The Teutonic knights signed up as well and the enemies of Waldemar made firm commitments that this time, they would actually fight.

The only significant player in the northern theatre that sided with Waldemar was Haakon VI, king of Norway and son in law of Waldemar. Haakon had married Margaret, Waldemar’s younger daughter. The elder one was married to Henry of Mecklenburg, brother of the king of Sweden and son of the Duke of Mecklenburg.

The allies were getting ready for war and the Hanseatic cities were even sending embassies to the pope, the emperor and other powers far and wide to gain approval for their plan.

The only one who appeared completely unconcerned by all that activity was Waldemar himself. He left Denmark literally at the time the Hanseatic fleet set off for Seeland. Waldemar’s plan was to gather allies amongst the princes of Northern Germany. For that purpose he had taken along vast amounts of cash and whilst abroad demanded more to be sent to him.

I do not want to spread conspiracy theories about long dead Danish heroic figures, but this looks to me more like Waldemar knew exactly what was going on, did a quick calculation of the odds and smart cooky he was, scarpered with as much cash as he could carry to retire on the French Riviera.

In the absence of their military and political leader, Denmark did not stand a chance. The counts of Holstein and the Danish insurrectionists took Jutland, King Albrecht of Sweden reconquered Skane. The Dutch cities attacked Waldemar’s ally, the king of Norway who caved almost immediately.

The Hanseatic fleet, led by Lubeck’s new Burgermeister, Brun Warendorp gathered as planned between the 9th and 16th of April 1368 at the Gellen off the island of Hiddensee. From here they sailed to Copenhagen. The city fell on June 16th, its defences flattened, and the castle taken over as the headquarter for the next phase of operations.

In cooperation with the Swedish allies all castles along the eastern shore of the Oresund fell. Only the mighty fortress of Helsingborg, the site of the terrible defeat of the Hanse in 1362 held out for almost another year.

In November 1369 a delegation of the Danish royal council led by Henning von Putbus, the lord of the island of Rügen came to Stralsund to sue for peace.

This, the second naval campaign of the Hanseatic League had been a complete success. 

Putbus and his colleagues knew that the war was lost for good but hoped that by negotiating with the Hansa directly, they could avoid the complete annihilation of Denmark. Remember that barely 25 years earlier the kingdom had been divided up between the Swedes, the Holsteiners and the rebellious nobles and the king lived in a hovel on Lolland. And these guys are still around, are the allies of the League and intent to go right back to the situation before the recovery that had started in 1340.

The stakes for the Danes could not have been higher. And their fearless leader, Waldemar, dawn of the Danish kingdom, was nowhere to be seen. Probably a good thing, because what happens next is a masterclass in diplomacy only matched by Talleyrand recovering France’s role as a major European power at the Congress of Vienna.

Sadly no image of Henning von Putbus survived

Putbus needed to split the enemy alliance. And to do that he had to play on the fundamental differences in his opponents’ objectives.

90% of what the Hanseatic League cared about was commerce. The cities had no interest in acquiring and then administering large territories. Politically they had had only one big concern, they did not want to see the emergence of a dominant territorial power in the Baltic.

On the flipside, the kings, princes and lords who had allied with the Hanse were 90% focused on politics, namely on the acquisition of territory. Commerce was something they cared little about.

The Hanse’s fear of an all-powerful king in the Baltic was entirely rational. Such a ruler could roll back the various trading privileges the merchants had patiently acquired not just in the Kontors but also in the hinterlands of the cities, in Sweden, in Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Denmark and Holstein. Worse, the cities themselves were in a precarious situation as most weren’t free imperial cities but still nominally subjects of a territorial lord.

That is why in 1340 the Hanse supported Waldemar against the mighty Count Gerhard of Holstein and the Danish nobles and once Waldemar had become dominant in 1360, turned against him. Following the defeat of the Danes, the power that caused the most headaches for the Hanse was the duke of Mecklenburg and his dynasty.

Albrecht II had been duke of Mecklenburg since 1329 which made him the theoretical overlord of Rostock and Wismar. He had married Euphemia of Sweden and in 1364 he had managed to put his son, Albrecht III on the throne of Sweden. Albrecht II then married another one of his sons, Henry, to the eldest daughter of Waldemar Dawn, and they had a son, confusingly also called Albrecht, this one taking the number IV.

In other words, if Waldemar was completely taken off the board, the family of the old duke of Mecklenburg were to become kings of Denmark, Sweden, Norway on top of being Dukes of Mecklenburg. That was a distinctly uncomfortable prospect for the Hanseatic League.

What made it even more uncomfortable was that the Mecklenburgers immediate objective was to take full control of Skane and its herring market. Meanwhile the Holsteiners insisted on the acquisition of territory in Jutland, making them even more of a threat to the important trade route from Lübeck to Hamburg.

Putbus saw this rift between the allies and began to systematically exploit it. Since the allies had agreed not to sign a peace treaty with Denmark unless all parties had agreed, the Danes proposed to negotiate secretly with the Hanse. The moment the cities decided to listen the alliance was broken.

Putbus then offered the Hanse all the commercial privileges they could possibly want, but none of the political concessions the Mecklenburgs and Holsteins were after. That was a major sacrifice that would deprive the crown of a significant chunk of income, but it meant that the crown of Denmark would continue to exist.

Specifically, the Danes were prepared to grant the following:

  • Free trade in Denmark and Skane for all Hanseatic cities that had joined the Cologne Confederation in exchange for a modest fixed tax.
  • That Merchants gain the right of salvage. It was so far common practice that if a vessel suffered damage and sank, any goods that could be rescued were property of the territorial lord. This was changed, allowing a merchant to salvage his own goods.
  • Third, the great herring market in Falsterbo came under more or less direct control of the Hanse. The cities were given individual plots of land, the Vitte, where they could maintain their business. They were allowed to trade from ship to ship, in all merchandise, wholesale and retail and could use their own barges and wagons for transportation, even could sent their own fishing fleet.
  • And fourth, the German merchants in Denmark were allowed to form their own communities, elect their representatives and exercise justice.

To back up these privileges and to allow the cities to regain the moneys lost, Putbus handed over the four great fortresses on the Oresund, Helsingborg, Malmo, Skanoer and Falsterbo for a period of 15 years. The Hanseatic League was to keep 2/3rd of the toll on all shipping going through the Oresund. And finally, the Danish council promised to make the election of a new king of Denmark dependent upon the consent of the cities.

In return Waldemar could return to his throne and Denmark would not be dismembered. Even Skane, at this point occupied by Albrecht of Mecklenburg, the king of Sweden, was to come back to Denmark.

These concessions granted the Hanseatic League a monopoly in the Baltic trade. Holding the Oresund castles meant they could block any foreign traders from getting into the Baltic Sea.

The wide range of privileges in the herring markets made it virtually impossible for anyone, including the locals to compete. And they were given the keys to the kingdom of Denmark.

In 1370 these clandestine discussions were brought into the open when Putbus arrived with 25 of Denmark’s most important nobles in Stralsund to sit down for final negotiations.

This meeting was all for show, since the terms had been agreed weeks if not months earlier.

The last obstacles were obviously the consents of the allies, the Holsteiners and in particular the Mecklenburgers. The Holsteiners could seemingly been bullied into accepting the terms. Long gone are the days of the mighty count Gerhard.

The Mecklenburgers were a bit more difficult. The agreement was quite obviously aimed against them. The duke would later claim that no attempt was made to gain his consent. But there was no real pushback. Sweden even handed over Skane to the Danes and Hansards.

What forced their hand was unrest in Sweden as the supporters of the exiled king Magnus conspired against Albrecht of Mecklenburg, a topic we will return to soon.

The fact that the Mecklenburger had to accept the peace of Stralsund shows how much the power of the Hanse had increased since the time of the Black Death. The league was now a serious European power. The confederation of Cologne had forged them together into an entity that could quickly raise a powerful navy able to project power anywhere in the Baltic and the North Sea. And as grain providers of last resort, they held a sword over the heads of even the mightiest kings, princes and lords.

Next week we will talk a bit more about this period when the League is riding high.

Great success does not always mean that life become more comfortable. The rise in Hanseatic power and their excessive privileges makes many kings and princes uncomfortable. In 1388 three of the most important powers in Northern Europe, England, Flanders and Russia challenge the Hanse simultaneously. If you want to know how that plays out, join us again next week.

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 just to remind you, the sub-podcast The Hanseatic League is still running. So if you want to point a friend or relative towards the History of the Germans but want to avoid confusion, just send them there. The Hanseatic League is available everywhere you can get the History of the Germans.

And last but not least the bibliography.

For this episode I again relied heavily on:

The Peace of Stralsund by David K. Bjoerk, in Speculum, Vol. 7 No.4 (Oct. 1932) The Peace of Stralsund, 1370 on JSTOR

Erich Hoffmann: Konflikte und Ausgleich mit den Scandinavischen Reichen in Die Hanse, Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos, herausgegeben von Jürgen Bracker, Volker Henn and Rainer Postel

Philippe Dollinger: Die Hanse

Rolf Hammel-Kieslow: Die Hanse

By the end of the 13th century the key foundations of the Hanseatic League are laid. The trade routes that connect the Baltic to Western Europe are largely under the control of merchants who had come from Northern Germany and settled along the Baltic shore. Four great Kontors in Novgorord, Bergen, Bruges and London have been set up. The cities that make up the League, from Tallin to Cologne have gained city laws, built their walls and selected their city councils.

We are now entering the Calamitous 14th Century, a time of war, spiritual disorientation, plague and deteriorating climate. These four riders of the apocalypse devastate formerly flourishing lands and cities across Western Europe, delivering a sucker punch that brings 300 years of economic expansion to a screeching halt. But, as they say in Asterix, “all of europe is occupied with the challenges of the 14th century. Well not entirely. There is a corner of the world where a league of merchant cities is heading for the zenith of its economic, financial and military power…”

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 115 – The War with Denmark Part I

By the end of the 13th century the key foundations of the Hanseatic League are laid. The trade routes that connect the Baltic to Western Europe are largely under the control of merchants who had come from Northern Germany and settled along the Baltic shore. Four great Kontors in Novgorord, Bergen, Bruges and London have been set up. The cities that make up the League, from Tallin to Cologne have gained city laws, built their walls and selected their city councils.

We are now entering the Calamitous 14th Century, a time of war, spiritual disorientation, plague and deteriorating climate. These four riders of the apocalypse devastate formerly flourishing lands and cities across Western Europe, delivering a sucker punch that brings 300 years of economic expansion to a screeching halt. But, as they say in Asterix, “all of europe is occupied with the challenges of the 14th century. Well not entirely. There is a corner of the world where a league of merchant cities is heading for the zenith of its economic, financial and military power…”

Before we get into this fascinating subject it is time to do my little plea for support again. As the History of the Germans has grown and grown these last two years, it has also taken up more and more of my life. That is great for me, because I massively enjoy doing this, but it is bad news for my cash balance, since all that fun keeps me from other money generating activities. I have been offered a not insignificant boost to my income if I were to allow advertising in the show, an offer I have rejected.

Which means the podcast remains advertising free and even more dependent on the support from my lovely patrons. I really appreciate the support you guys provide and am extremely grateful. And if anyone of you who is not yet a patron and wants to bask in all that appreciation and gratitude, you can do so by signing up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website, historyofthegermans.com/support. All that from the price of a chocolate Croissant per month which isn’t even good for you. And thanks a lot to Brian W., Ian R., Richard K. and Pietya who have already signed up.

I guess it is time we re-anchor this story on the timeline. These last episodes we did look at how the various major trading routes of the Hanse got established and how they each developed during the 12th, 13th and 14th century. By and large I tried to get each of these stories to the middle of the 14th century which I think has worked out more or less, which means the podcast has now -after a mere 115 episodes officially progressed into the late Middle Ages – Yipee!!

That is sadly the last outburst of joy you are going to hear about the Calamitous 14th Century as Barbara Tuchman called it in her most famous book, the Distant Mirror. I know that her take on the period has suffered a lot of criticism over the years, and that some of her assessments are no longer standing up to historical scrutiny. But still it is an exceptionally well written book and some of her elementary notions about the 14th century are still valid.

To summarise it, the 14th century was not great.

It was particularly not great of you were French. The Hundred-Years war kicks off in 1337 and brings death, famine and misery to Northern and South-Western France. What kept the devastation going for so long was the combination of England’s superiority in open battles and her complete inability to hold on to the territorial gains in a country many times larger and many times richer than itself. The unending conflict created mercenary troops that roamed the land even during periods when the parties were at least officially at peace.

Meanwhile the transfer of the papacy from Rome to Avignon and hence under the control of the French monarch was seen as a travesty by contemporaries. Things got worse when Saint Caterine of Siena – famous for an obsession with blood and Jesus’ foreskin – galvanised public opinion to the point that pope Gregory XI returned to Rome. Once arrived the pope promptly died, resulting in a schism where the cardinals in Avignon and those in Rome each elected a pope. Attempts to resolve the situation by making both popes stand down and elect a new one resulted in three competing popes.

We may not regard this as overly concerning but for the medieval mind that was a catastrophe. Choosing the wrong pope could result in being cast down into the sixth circle of hell trapped in flaming tombs. You may find yourself in august company, for instance Frederick II is supposed to reside here, but it still sounds quite uncomfortable.

Overshadowing all this was the great scourge of the 14th century, The Black Death. It first appeared in Europe in 1346, brought in most likely by Genoese traders who had picked it up during the siege of their colony of Caffa in Crimea (pronounce Kri-moia). Allegedly the besieging Mongols had brought the plague from central Asia. When their soldiers had succumbed to the disease their corpses were trebucheted into the town to force its surrender. Caffa unfortunately resisted the siege and the returning Genoese distributed the disease across the Mediterranean.

The Black Death is caused by the bacterium Yersinia Pestis, a fact that was only discovered in 1894 by two scientist operating independently, the Frenchman Alexandre Yersin and the Japanese bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburo. In 1898 it was discovered that the main vector of transmission were fleas who moved between rodents and humans.

The effects of an infection with Yarsinia Pestis is devastating. There are three types of Plague the bacteria causes. The most famous is the Bubonic Plague that manifests in bubuoes, a swelling of the Lymph nodes mainly in the groin and the armpits.

But there are also the Pneumonic Plague and the Septicaemic Plague which have less obvious symptoms, which is why we hear of people dying literally mid-sentence. 30-60% of those affected by Bubonic Plague die if left untreated whilst 100% of those who catch Pneumonic or Septicaemic Plague do not make it. Fun fact about Pneumonic Plague, you do not need a flea for that. Simple inhalation of a respiratory droplet of a patient with Pneumonic Plague can result in infection and guaranteed death.

Today plague is less of a problem if identified early and treated with antibiotics, but in the 14th century nobody knew about the miraculous attributes of Penicillium Rubens and so the only effective way to manage the disease was quarantine. And even that often failed, as the vectors were fleas, not humans.

How many died is a subject of debate, which is unsurprising since there was no census of the population before and after. I get the impression that most calculation revert back to the contemporary estimate of 1/3rd of the population.

But the impact varied considerably between different places. Milan was less affected than Tuscany, though why that was is not obvious. More obvious is the fact that Communities that live in close proximity, in particular monasteries were very heavily affected. Often 80-90% of the brothers and sisters perished. On the other hand, the elites who had the ability to flee into the countryside, like the 7 young women and three young men in Bocaccio’s Decameron, appear to have had a mortality of only about a quarter.

For our friends, the Hanseatic League, good news was it took 3 years from the first reported cases in Messina in Sicily until the disease took hold in Scandinavia and another year to make it to Poland.

But when it came, it came with force. In 1350 the city Council of Bremen ordered to list the names of everyone who had died from the Plague and collected 6,966 names. Add to that an estimated 1,000 unknown corpses and assuming the city had about 12,000-15,000 inhabitants at the time, more than half fell victim to the disease. Hamburg reported the death of 12 out of its 34 bakers, 18 of its 40 butchers, 27 out of its 50 civil servants and a staggering 16 out of 21 members of its council. Similarly, Lübeck, Wismar, Reval and Lüneburg reported death rates of 30% and more amongst the members of their city councils.

To top of the horrors of the 14th century, the constant warfare, the spiritual disorientation and plague there was climate change. The great medieval warming period is coming to an end. Instead of a constant tailwind to its economic progress, Western Europe now has to deal with a consistent headwind that will peak in the little Ice Age between 1600 and 1800.

Food security was already on the edge before the cooling period started as we have seen when we looked at the great eastern migration from the population centres in Flanders, Holland and the Rhineland, but what we have now is a society that is constantly just one bad harvest away from wide-spread famine.

I guess we can conclude that the 14th century is a pretty bad time to be alive.

I was in France on Holiday this summer and on the way down we stopped in Beauvais, a city of 50,000 just north of Paris. The reason to stop in Beauvais is its absolutely heart stopping cathedral. It is Frances tallest cathedral with a Nave that rises 47m above the ground. To put that in context, Milan cathedral has a 45m high nave, Notre Dame in Paris rises 35 metres, Winchester a mere 24 metres. And even more astounding, the Nave of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome built centuries later also falls 1m short of this medieval skyscraper. But here is the rub, the church was never finished. The combined effects of plague and the 100 years war devastated the rich cloth industry of the town and there was never enough money to complete the edifice. Where the main part of the church should have been built stands the 10th century old cathedral looking positively tiny next to its ambitious intended replacement. Little illustrates so clearly both the immense economic growth during the so-called static Middle Ages and the abruptness with which it came to an end.

But hey, for once, we find ourselves on the lucky side of history. Sure, the citizens of the great Hanseatic cities did not escape the plague, bad weather, wars and the papal schism, but they did work through it a lot better than the beaten-up citizens of Beauvais.

The reason the Hanseatic cities got through the challenges of the 14th century are manyfold. The first one is that apart from losing some money on the crowns of Edward III, their involvement in the 100 year’s war was almost zero.

The same seems to have applied for the schism. The Empire and Scandinavia stuck largely with the Roman pope and hence there was less of the uncertainty that prevailed in the Western half of the continent where territories moved back and forth in their obedience and guidance about what to believe changed around all the time. I did try to find a reference to the schism in the secondary sources on the Hanse I am using and found a absolutely nothing.

Which gets us to the plague. Obviously, the fact that millions of customers had died, that their own cities had been depopulated and that many farms were running out of farmhands weren’t good bits of news.

But there were mitigating factors. Cities remained attractive, if only because they offered relief from servitude if you could hold out inside for a year. So many serfs and free peasants moved into the empty houses of the plague victims in the cities. We find that by the end of the 14th century the Hanseatic cities have regained their population size from the pre-plague times.

There was another, probably the only beneficial impact from the plague and that was a sustained shortage of labour, in particular farm labour and menial labour in cloth manufacturing and other manufacturing jobs. That meant the cost of labour increased significantly. There are various studies looking at data in England and France that suggest an increase in wages by somewhere between 30 and 50%, most of which was in real terms.

Daily wages in England by decade. Humphries & Weisdorf

That wage increase caused huge headaches for landowners who petitioned the local rulers to freeze wages. But even where that happened, such rules prove unenforceable since labourers simply scampered off. So real pay levels were going up, allegedly for the first and only time in premodern history.

That is good news for workers, but it is also great news for long distance traders, specifically for the Hanseatic Merchants.  Their main export products were food, in particular grain and fish. Before the plague only the cheaper grain was sold to labourers whilst the other goods went to burgers and the rich. After the plague, once these poor labourers had a few more pennies in their pockets, could they buy some fine Baltic Herring and wash it down with an even finer pint of Einbecker beer – best in the world.

And even for the luxury products, beeswax, pelts, Flemish cloth and wine, the market wasn’t seemingly so bad. The dramatic surge in religious devotion after the plague should have led to a surge in demand for the finest Beeswax from Novgorod to appease an apparently enraged deity.

And the rapid demise of many rich men and women caused a rapid redistribution of wealth. These newly minted millionaires were oh so well aware of the fragility of life. And since the plague came back in regular intervals many thought best thing to do was to spend it all as long as one is still alive.

It is in the middle of the 14th century that fashion in the true sense emerges. This is when we see proper tailoring for the first time. Until now most expensive dresses were essentially robes with straight seams and a lot of adornment. Now we see curved seams that allow the creation of tight-fitting trousers and shirts.

A French chronicler writes that around the year 1350, i.e., immediately after the first wave of the Plague, that quote “men, in particular, noblemen and their squires, took to wearing tunics so short and tight that they revealed what modesty bids us hide.” 

Hanseatic merchants did not only bring the cloth and the knowledge of how to create this new look to Scandinavia and Northern Germany, they also brought the fur needed to line the elegant coats worn over their Cotehardie, the body-hugging upper garment.

Finally, what really made the Hanseatic Merchants indispensable was in the times when things got tough. A bad harvest could easily tip the cities of Flanders, Northern France or England into outright famine. The hinterland of the Hanseatic cities, even though their production is likely to have declined due to labour shortage and the deteriorating climate, still produced a surplus above local demand. And that surplus became a lifeline during the regularly occurring outbreaks of famine.

Bottom line is that the 14th century was by no means a time of decline and desperation for the Hanseatic League. It was in fact the time when it reached the zenith of its power, wealth and influence. They turned a challenge into an opportunity to use my most cringeworthy management consulting speak.

All these smart ways to keep your head above water and avoid the pitfalls of the treacherous 14th century did however rarely feature in the histories of the Hanseatic League I read as a child.

What I found there were the heroic deeds of the men of Lübeck, Rostock and Wismar fighting a war at sea against the mighty king of Denmark, Waldemar Dawn. A lot of swords clinging and daring raids by gallant apprentices seemed a lot more exciting than the economics of grain.

And these things happened. But the way they came about say a lot about the way the merchant princes of the Hanse thought about war and how that so fundamentally differed from the way their royal and ducal neighbours perceived it.

The neighbours that matter most to the Hanseatic League were the power centres around the Baltic, foremost the Kingdom of Denmark, but also the strengthening kingdom of Sweden as well as that of Norway. And on the southern shore we have the Teutonic Knights, the dukes of Pomerania and of Mecklenburg, the margrave of Brandenburg and the counts of Holstein.

Though Denmark was nominally the largest, richest and most powerful of them, the century between 1241 to 1340 was one of decline and almost complete disintegration of the kingdom. The successors of the two great Waldemars, one called Abel and then various Eriks and Christophers, displayed a truly astounding level of infighting, murder, recklessness and incompetence.

Waldemar II’s eldest son king Erik IV Ploughpenny was murdered when he was a guest at his younger brother Abel’s house.

King Erik IV Ploughpenny

So, Abel became king but lasted only a year and a half before he was killed by a rebellious peasant who was reluctant to pay the increased taxation.

King Abel

The next brother King Christopher I lasted 7 years but spent most of it in conflict with his nephew, the son of Abel. King Christopher I died unexpectedly after taking Holy Communion. Rumours were that he had been poisoned by an abbot in retaliation for his oppression of the church.

Christopher I

Christopher I’s son was king Eric V, called Eric Klipping, so called because of his habit to devalue the currency by clipping off a piece of the silver. Eric Clipping who had spent most of his early life as a prisoner of the counts of Holstein and the Margraves of Brandenburg started his reign by being captured and imprisoned by own his nobles. He continued his father’s conflict with the church and many of his nobles which resulted in him being murdered in 1286.

Erik Klipping

Next up is King Eric VI called Menved whose first act was to avenge his father’s death. He convicted a number of senior Danish nobles to exile and expropriation for the crime. The problem was that at least some of them might have been innocent, but more importantly that he let them live. They moved across to Sweden where they initiated a 30 year long guerilla war against king Eric VI that came with a side dish of piracy.

Unperturbed by this conflict, gallant King Eric VI tried to revive the dream of the two Waldemars to build a Scandinavian empire under Danish rule. He combined this ambition with a propensity for lavish expenditure, in particular for tournaments. One of those he held in Rostock under the eyes of the worried citizens who feared – with good reason – that the chivalric pursuit could at any moment turn into a bloody siege of the town.

Erik Menved

All of king Eric’s great adventures consumed a truly epic amount of cash. Taxation had risen all throughout this troubled period and was merciless. When a famine struck in 1315. King Eric refused to lower the nominal amount of tax to be paid resulting in a peasant revolt that cost even more to suppress than the outstanding taxes.  And a lot of the equally costly conflict with the church stemmed from the desire of the kings to collect taxes from the clergy.

When king Eric VI finally died in 1319 the crown went to his brother Christopher II who inherited a kingdom that was financially and morally bankrupt. Not only had the nobles and the church used the weakness of the various kings to establish themselves as the true masters of the kingdom, the constant infighting had also sucked in a lot of foreigners looking to take advantage of the chaos. This chaos by the way did not just engulf Denmark. Sweden and Norway too were riven with infighting and continuous succession crises.

There seem to have been two approaches for foreigners seeking a juicy chunk of Scandinavian territory.

One was the classic model of marriage alliances. That came usually with a dowry that could include important castles and lands in exchange for military support. Given that both Sweden and Denmark were at least formally an elective monarchy where legitimacy could be transferred through the female line, these marriage alliances had the added benefit of occasionally producing a viable contender for one of the Scandinavian crowns.

The three families that pursued this strategy most persistently and successfully were the dukes of Mecklenburg and Pomerania and the Margraves of Brandenburg. Pretty much all of the kings of Denmark I mentioned were married to daughters of these three or to another Scandinavian monarch’s offspring. This intermarriage within a relatively small pool actually added to the mess as it produced a near infinite supply of contenders on all sides.

The other approach was taken by the counts of Holstein. Though they too married their daughters into the royal families and took wives from there, their main approach was to offer military and financial assistance on credit, credit that was secured by mortgages. And these aren’t mortgages just over some bits of land, these were mortgages over whole counties or even duchies. 

Two Holstein Counts were most astute in this game. One was Gerhard III of Holstein Rendsburg and the other James of Holstein-Ploen. Having inherited comparatively small territories that had come about when the old county of Holstein was divided up, these two men seem to have been some sort of war entrepreneurs.

An early form of the Italian Condottiere of the 15th century who could raise and then rent out entire armies. King Eric VI was the Holsteiner’s best customer. Always fighting one war or another and hosting lavish tournaments, he ended up mortgaging more and more of his kingdom to the two counts.

Gerhard ended up with all of Jutland and Funen, whilst James gained Zeeland and the southern isles. If you know Denmark, that is pretty much all of it.

Seal of Gerhard III

Well, apart from Scania which at the time was still Danish, but not for long. The Holstein counts and the Danish magnates were quite happy with this situation and when Christopher II ascended to the ramshackle throne his brother left him, they made him sign a coronation charter that basically forbade him to do anything without their consent.

Christopher tried his darnedest to disregard these provisions and rebuild some royal power. So, the magnates and the Germans ousted him in 1326, formally raising one of the. King’s nephews to the throne, but de facto reigning without a king. This magnate’s republic did not work out too well as they all began squabbling amongst themselves.

Even the two Holstein counts got into a disagreement. That weakened the Danish state even more so that the peasants of Scania asked the Swedish king to assume control over them. Scania as you know is the territory on the eastern shore of the Oresund where the annual herring market takes place, the largest market for fish in a Europe that ate fish 140 days a year and the most important contributor to the coffers of the Hanseatic merchants.

Which is why they now get involved. The Oresund and the herring market in Scania is of crucial importance for the long-distance trade out of the Baltic.

One reason is the sheer scale of the Herring business. The other is geography. By the 14th century there were two established routes by which the goods from the Baltic could be transported westward to the important markets in Bruges and London. One was the land route via Lübeck and Hamburg. The other was to sail around Jutland which meant going through the Oresund. Keeping those lines open, safe and importantly avoiding high tariffs for the transit were of vital importance to the Hanse.

The way they achieved this so far had been through diplomacy. The Burgermeisters or mayors of the great Hanseatic cities as well as the other senior members of the city councils were experienced long distance traders. One of the skills they needed to get where they got to was negotiation. Knowing exactly what combination of price and conditions the other side could agree to was their second nature. They appreciated the importance of having more reliable and timely information than their adversaries and were able to think calmly through complex problems. Hence the time of the disintegration of the Scandinavian kingdoms was a walk in the park for the Hansards. They could play any side against any other in this game of three-dimensional chess and always walk away with improved trading privileges, lower taxes and promises of safe passage, be it from kings or from pirates or from kings that had become pirates or pirates that became kings.

The diplomatic effort was always underpinned with the threat of boycotts and embargoes. Whoever failed to respond to the softly, softly approach could suddenly find himself cut off from grain supply or unable to sell their goods into the European market.

And as a means of last resort, the Hanse was prepared to go to war. But only ever as a means of last resort. That is not out of cowardice. These men are used to dangerous journeys and the need to defend your goods and rights with the sword. They simply believed that war was rarely a profitable undertaking.

As the legendary Lübeck Bürgermeister Hinrich Castrop put it: “it is always easier to hoist the banner of war but a lot more costly taking it down in honour”

Lübeck did go to war when they supported the German princes against Waldemar II in the battle of Bornhoeved, and they helped king Abel to get on the throne by providing soldiers. But this was always based on a cold and level-headed calculation of the odds of success. None of the “For the Honour of the Kingdom once more into the breach” nonsense their aristocratic neighbours engaged in.

The other cases when the cities went to war was to defend themselves against the territorial princes. During the time of King Eric VI expensive war efforts in Northern Germany his allies tried to subdue the cities of Rostock and Wismar by siege. These sieges ended regularly with truces under which the burgers would pay off the city lord and swear allegiance. But nothing really changed and when King Eric’s money ran out the cities reverted back to the status quo ante.

So, everything is alright as far as the Hansards are concerned until the 1330s. After the debacle in Scania King Christopher II makes a comeback. The magnates and the Germans decide they need a unifying figure for the state and call him back to the throne. Christopher tries again to be a real king and exploits the divisions between the two Holstein counts.

He gets defeated in 1331. In the post-war settlement he is allowed to retain the title of king but without any power. He ends his days in a small house on Lolland to live in, lonely and forgotten. In 1332 he died a broken man.

After that Denmark has no king. Christopher II’s older sons, Eric and Otto die around the same time from wounds received in battle against the Holsteins. So, Count Gerhard of Holstein-Rendsburg becomes the de-facto ruler of Denmark.

That is a situation the Hanse is becoming uncomfortable with. Gerhard III still controlled one shore of the Oresund as well as the territory through which the wares moved between Luebeck and Hamburg. He was at least theoretically able to cut off both of the major trade routes out of the Baltic.

The two cities of Hamburg and Lubeck are trying to keep things on an even keel and agree to maintain the peace with the mighty count. But secretly they are trying to undermine his position. They host Gerhard’s enemies inside Luebeck where they are looking for ways to topple the Holsteiners and rebuild the Danish kingdom.

It seems that count Gerhard had realised that his situation was ultimately untenable. The cost of suppressing the regular uprisings against his rule exceeded the income from Jutland and Funen. Then there is a third son of king Christopher called Waldemar. This Waldemar had secured the support of his relatives, the margraves of Brandenburg for his bid to return the dynasty which gave the rebellion a focal point.

Count Gerhard was a war entrepreneur and not an aristocratic Hurrah Henry. He realised that the game was up and entered into negotiations trading the restoration of the Danish Monarchy against a permanent cessation of Schleswig to the Holsteins. Before these negotiations were concluded, count Gerhard of Holstein, ruler of Denmark was killed by insurgents.

That paved the way for one of medieval Denmark’s political geniuses, the aforementioned Waldemar, younger son of king Christopher II to be elected by the Danehof, the Danish parliament as king Waldemar V.

Waldemar V “Atterdag”

Nobody expected much from the 20-year old who had lived in exile at the imperial court for most of his childhood and adolescence. He was considered so insignificant that the magnates did not even bother asking him to sign a coronation charter.

But he managed to slowly but steadily rebuild the Danish monarchy. He looked after the pennies and when he had enough, he paid off the mortgages his father had taken over Jutland and then Seeland. As his power grew, he could use not just carrot but also stick, forcing the bishop of Roskilde to hand over the castle of Copenhagen where he established his new headquarters. Copenhagen was an excellent base to impose tariffs on the shipping that passed the Oresund.

He sold Estonia to the Teutonic knights, raising more money to pay off more mortgages. Gradually the last Holstein positions on Zealand and Funen fell, until only southern Schleswig remained in their hands.

In 1354 Waldemar IV, by now called Waldemar Dawn, the man who brought a new day to the kingdom of Denmark gathered all the nobles and made them sign a charter whereby they gave up all the rights they had amassed since the time of King Christopher II. Denmark was back in the game.

In 1360 he used a succession crisis in Sweden to take back Scania. To secure his flank against a Swedish counterattack Waldemar dawn took his army to Gotland and took Visby.

Visby, a member of the Hanseatic League, still an important city that had played a crucial role in its early history. That is the point where the Hanseatic League cannot take it any longer.

They had initially welcomed the rise of Waldemar Dawn as a counterweight to the Holsteiners. And when his position became stronger and stronger, they tried to negotiate with him. In particular they needed him to lower the tariffs through the Oresund, where he by now had built several castles including the mighty Helsingborg.

But this was one of those situations that had no diplomatic solution. King Waldemar needed the tax income from the Oresund to fund his rebuilding of the Danish state. There was no similar source of wealth in the kingdom than this apart from the Herring market in Falsterbo he now controlled and taxed as well.  

On the other side, the Hanseatic League could not accept free Danish control of the Oresund that would allow Dutch and English merchants to enter and trade on the same conditions in Falsterbo and even across the Baltic.

By now the Hanseatic League had turned from an association of merchants to an association of cities. There was not much difference between the two models since most Hanseatic cities were pure trading cities where the other guilds were of secondary importance.

But it still marked a change when the Hanseatic cities came together for their first Hansetag, their first official gathering in 1356, then to debate the sanctions against the city of Bruges we talked about in the episode about Bergen and Bruges.

The next one was in 1360 where the Wendisch cities, Luebeck, Wismar and Rostock decided to take on Waldemar. They formed an alliance with Waldemar’s enemies, the Holsteiners, King Magnus of Sweden, his son King Haakon of Norway as well as the Teutonic Knights.

A fleet was to sail out of Luebeck in the spring 1362 towards the Oresund. There they were to meet up with Swedish troops and take one of the mighty new fortresses Waldemar had built to control most valuable source of income.

The man who led the expedition was Johann Wittenberg, the Bürgermeister of Lübeck. Six months later half the ships will have sunk to the bottom of the sea and Johann Wittenberg will lose his head.

How this first major war of the Hanseatic League could go so badly wrong is subject of next week’s episode. That is when we get properly into the clanging of swords and the ramming of ships. I hope you will join us again.

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 just to remind you, the sub-podcast The Hanseatic League is still running. So if you want to point a friend or relative towards the History of the Germans but want to avoid confusion, just send them there. The Hanseatic League is available everywhere you can get the History of the Germans.

And last but not least the bibliography. For this episode I again relied heavily on:

Erich Hoffmann: Konflikte und Ausgleich mit den Scandinavischen Reichen in Die Hanse, Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos, herausgegeben von Jürgen Bracker, Volker Henn and Rainer Postel

Philippe Dollinger: Die Hanse

Rolf Hammel-Kieslow: Die Hanse

If like many of you, you are listening to this podcast on your morning or evening commute and you happen to live in London, you may be one of the 20 million souls going through Cannon Street Station every year. Few of them will be aware that under their feet lay the vestiges of the great Hanseatic Kontor in London that goes back to 1176. If people know about the Steelyard, it is mainly through the portraits of merchants painted by Holbein between 1532 and 1536 at a time when the Kontor had only about 60 years left.

But there is a lot to tell about this now vanished building, its inhabitants and trade. It is a story of infighting between the various cities that were still to officially form the Hanseatic league, of trading privileges granted to fund first a crusade and then the hundred year’s war, and it is also a great opportunity to introduce the oldest, largest and richest member of the Hanseatic League, the city of Cologne.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 114 – The London Steelyard If like many of you, you are listening to this podcast on your morning or evening commute and you happen to live in London, you may be one of the 20 million souls going through Cannon Street Station every year. Few of them will be aware that under their feet lay the vestiges of the great Hanseatic Kontor in London that goes back to 1176. If people know about the Steelyard, it is mainly through the portraits of merchants painted by Holbein between 1532 and 1536 at a time when the Kontor had only about 60 years left.

But there is a lot to tell about this now vanished building, its inhabitants and trade. It is a story of infighting between the various cities that were still to officially form the Hanseatic league, of trading privileges granted to fund first a crusade and then the hundred year’s war, and it is also a great opportunity to introduce the oldest, largest and richest member of the Hanseatic League, the city of Cologne.

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 Thomas L. , Emily K., Benedek V. and Heinrich von P.  who have already signed up.

Last week we talked about the two Kontors at Bergen and at Bruges. The Hanseatic Counting Houses or Kontors are the most visible manifestations of the League, an organisation that had no common foundation treaty, no statutes, no administration (at least not until 1556), no army, no treasury and no seal. They are like the tip of the iceberg that points to the mass of interconnections below the surface. They were also one of the key reasons first individual merchants and then whole cities wanted to be part of this association.

Being admitted to the Kontor of say Bruges meant that you could now trade freely with other foreigners on the greatest exchange in Europe, you were protected from local justice, nobody could call you out for a trial by combat. And even more tangible you paid either no or much reduced tariffs on the wares you imported or exported and you could have them weighed by the Kontor, a place you trusted a lot more than the local scales.

There were in total four major Kontors, Novgorod, Bergen, Bruges and London. Beyond that there were others, for instance in Oslo or Smolensk, but they were either small or short-lived. Today we are going to talk about the one closest to our Anglo-Saxon listeners’ heart, the Steelyard or Stahlhof in London.

The Kontor in London goes back to the year 1176 when King Henry II of England declares quote: “Henry, by the grace of God king of England, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, count of Anjou to all his viscounts and baillies of London – greetings. I hereby allow the people of Cologne to sell their wine on the same market where the French wine is sold, and at a price of 3 pence per pint. And I prohibit anyone from hindering them or doing them any harm”. End quote.

In a second ordinance he grants them the right to set up their Guildhall where they themselves and all their wares should be protected. That guildhall is the steelyard.

And note that this privilege is not given to all the merchants of the Holy Roman empire or the Gotlandfahrer or the Hanseatic League, but only to the people from Cologne and only for their import of wine. I am not the expert on Cologne, that is Willem Fromm over at the History of Cologne Podcast.

But as an avid listener of the History of the Germans you are sure familiar with it. One of Germany’s oldest cities, a metropolis since the days of ancient Rome, Cologne in the 12th century was the largest settlement in the empire north of the Alps. Its citizens lay in almost perpetual conflict with their overlord, the archbishop of Cologne and had achieved a significant level of independence already. They would gain even more freedoms after the battle of Worringen in 1288 and by 1475 Cologne had become a free imperial city.

In 1259 the archbishop Konrad of Hochstaden granted Cologne the right of the Staple. That meant that any merchant who passed by the city was required to unload his goods and offer them for sale on its market. Given Cologne’s position along the North-South route from Italy to England and the East west route from France onto the Hellweg and further on into Poland and the Baltic, Cologne’s market was the place to find almost anything that was traded in Europe. Cologne merchants sat at the centre of it and thanks to right of the staple could become the intermediaries of Northern European commerce.

Apart from that role as a broker, they also brought in products from the surrounding areas. There was the steel produced in the Sauerland and the Westerwald they bought up for either further distribution or to be turned into swords and armour in the city itself. The great reliquary of the three kings attests to the quality of the gold and silversmiths in the region whose products graced churches in many parts of Northern Europe.

When you think of things Cologne is famous for today, it is Carnival and drinking copious amounts of the delicious straw-yellow beer called Kölsch. So, was that also one of the main exports? As it happens no. For two reasons, one is the obvious. Kölsch is served in small 200ml glasses because it goes off incredibly quickly. And the other even more compelling reason is that it only got going properly in the 17th century.

But alcohol is not far off the mark. The by far largest business of the merchants of Cologne was in what they called the wine of the Rhine. This was the mainly white wine not just from the classic Rheingau and Rheinhessen region between Bonn and Speyer, but included the valleys of the tributaries, the Ahr, Moselle, Saar, Ruwer and Main and even further upriver.

The largest supply actually came in from Alsace. Alsace wine was amongst the most popular across Northern Europe and the quantities were astounding. We hear that the region around Colmar produced as much as 100,000 hectolitres of the stuff in the 14th century. That is 13 million bottles. Today the whole of Alsace produces 150 million bottles, but one has to take into account not just improved agricultural technologies but also the fact that Europe’s population has grown by factor 15 since then.

The trade in wine was not only massive, it was also ancient. In 1878 workmen discovered an ancient Roman funerary monument in the village of Neumagen on the Moselle. The monument comprised two stone ships, each 3m long carrying barrels of wine. Scaled up these ships were about 17m long carrying 22 oars and 44 rowers. Given their size and shape, it is believed such a ship was suitable to transport wine not just on the Moselle and Rhine Rivers but even on the North Sea, which means that at least theoretically the export of Moselle Wine to England goes back to the 3rd century or even earlier.

The Cologne merchants had a stranglehold over the trade. They had established a purchasing model where they would themselves travel south to buy the wine and then ship the barrels up to Cologne and from there to the main export destinations, Flanders and England. But not only there. Cologne merchants are known to have shipped their wine all the way up the Baltic to Tallin, and in no small quantities.

German Wine from the Rhine was so popular in England, it compelled king Henry II to grant the merchants of Cologne royal protection and the right to settle in their own trading yard. That is hard to believe given that today German Wine is best known in England and the US for excessively sweet plonk branded Liebfraumilch or Blue Nun. Before World War I German wine, in particular the Riesling from the Rhinegau and Moselle was considered on par with Champagne, Burgundy and Bordeaux. Prices were similar if not higher. The prestige of German wine went through the roof when queen Victoria visited the town of Hochheim in 1850. German wine was called Hockeimer or just simply Hoch after the town in Hesse. If you read English novels from the 19th century, the upper-class protagonists are constantly drinking Hoch. But that came to an end during the World Wars as export links were cut and drinking German wine was seen as unpatriotic.

Nowadays the great wine critics, be it Jancis Robinson or Robert Parker will make a stand for German Riesling, but to no avail. In part that is for reasons of taste as the sweeter Auslese, Beerenauslese and Eiswein are simply not what wine drinkers prefer. But there are some spectacular crisp, dry Rieslings made all along the Rhine, Moselle and my favourite, the Nahe that leaves any similarly priced Sancerre in the dust. I am going to put a list of my favourite producers in the show notes. Try it, you will not regret it.

Nor did King Henry II regret his sponsorship of the Cologne merchants in 1176. The merchants of Cologne constructed their guildhall on the shores of the river Thames, one of the largest buildings in England entirely dedicated to trade. Henry II’s son, Richard the Lionheart granted them relief from all taxes and dues in exchange for fitting out three ships for the crusades, a deal of truly epic stupidity proving again that this favourite of English kings was a bit of a dunce.

The Cologne merchants were however not the only Germans that started to show up in England in the 13th century. When we talked about the Herring trade in Scania we mentioned that English traders who had come to the Oresund with the salt from the Baie of Bourgneuf and competed with the Hanseatic merchants. Their trade was quickly disrupted by the Hansards from Gdansk as well as the other cities along the Baltic shore who had no salt of their own.

These traders sailed down to Brittany themselves, picked up the salt and got in on the Herring trade, squeezing out the English. The same happened with the Stockfish trade of Bergen, which also been controlled by the English before 1284. Having pushed the English out of Scania and Bergen, the logical next step was to take over the entirety of their trade, bringing their products, including the beeswax and furs to the English ports on the eastern shore, to King’s Lynn, Boston, Yarmouth and Hull.

These men, called the Easterlings as they came from the east began eying up the lucrative privileges of the Cologne merchants. Getting in on the tax-free status the London steelyard had achieved would have boosted their net take home pay by quite a margin and would have helped to squeeze out the locals. Talking about the locals, the English merchants suffered badly from the German competition.

But still the royal authorities were keen to promote the imports of the luxury goods from the east and hence granted these new arrivals similar privileges to the Cologne merchants. It was the beeswax in particular they cared about. In 1266 the Hamburg and then the Lübeck merchants were granted the right to form their own trade associations and settle in England.

Meanwhile the merchants from Westphalia found their way into England as well which meant that we now have three different groups of German traders in England with ever so slightly different sets of rights and privileges.

This situation led to conflict between the different groups, in particular the old Cologne merchants and the Easterlings. The Cologne guys had the older rights and they worked on the basis of co-operation with their English neighbours, whilst the Easterlings were more aggressive trying to carve out a bigger and bigger share of the business at the expense of the English.

A resolution came about through the mediation by the Westphalians who had their hand in both the Rhine valley trade and the Baltic trade. In 1282 the three groups agreed to form a joint trading association, which they called a Hanse. The word Hanse originally described just an association of individual merchants who came together for a specific purpose. Quite similar to the word Commune in Italy.

It is only over time that Hanse became a term describing a co-ordination mechanism between several cities not just for one temporary purpose but for an infinite term. It is in these charters from 1266 and 1282 that the term Hanse first appears.

Whilst the Hanse as I have said before had no charter or institutions, the Steelyard in London had. Like the Gotlandfahrer and the Kontors in Bergen, Bruges and Novgorod, the Steelyard had its rules that all merchants in the Kontor had to adhere to. The Kontor had two Aldermen, one amongst the merchants who stayed at the Steelyard on a temporary basis, be it for a few weeks or a few years. And another Alderman who had to be a citizen of London whose role it was to maintain the link between the City and the Steelyard.

Other than in Bergen, the relationship between the Kontor and the city was cordial. There were lots of social interactions and many of the German merchants lived outside the Steelyard in their own houses. Fraternisation with the locals and even settling permanently and becoming a citizen of London and an English subject was allowed if not encouraged. Still the Kontor had to maintain strict discipline in particular amongst the young and mainly single male population who had come here for the Middle Ages equivalent of a gap year.

The Kontor took part on city life and took on the obligation to maintain and man the Bishopsgate, one of the main fortified gates of the city.

In 1303 another English king, Edward I tried to streamline the complex system of trading privileges and tax exemptions by introducing the Carta Mercatoria that allowed all foreign merchants to freely settle in the kingdom, trade with locals as well as other foreigners, be relieved of all duties and obligations and receive the protection of royal authorities in exchange for a massive increase in excise duties on wool and leather.

The locals who still had to pay all duties and provide all kinds of services to the king whilst being bullied by the bailiffs were unsurprisingly enraged by the huge favour shown to ruddy foreigners. Hence his much softer successor, Edward II had to recall the Carta Mercatorum.

Most of the rage was directed at the Italians whose importance in trade eclipsed the Hansards. That allowed the German merchants to stay under the radar and they continued to enjoy the grand privileges of the Carta Mercatorum. The next Edward, Edward III of Crecy and Poitiers fame was also a great fan of the German merchants. He kept granting them favours throughout his 50-year reign.

In return the Hansards helped him in what he needed most – money. Edward III’s hundred-years war was an unimaginably expensive undertaking. Edward III borrowed money all across Europe, mostly in Italy though. His biggest creditors were the Bardi and Peruzzi in Florence who lent him 210,000 pounds. But the Hanseatic merchants too were willing to chip in. Their financial muscle was much smaller than the great Italians, but they made up for it by focusing on sentimental value.

Edward III had pawned his large crown to the archbishop of Trier for 50,000 Ecu and the smaller crown of the queen for 10,000 to a consortium of Cologne bankers. When the creditors threatened to sell off the crowns of England to the highest bidder, the steelyard merchants stepped in and paid them off in 1344, saving the king from humiliation. We cannot see whether Edward paid them back, because in 1345 he defaulted on the huge loans from the Bardi and Peruzzi, creating the first international banking crisis, a crisis that allowed the Medici to rise from the second tier to becoming the world’s largest banking house and rulers of Florence.

By then the Germans in the steelyard wound down their lending operations, in part because of the risk, but also because the locals did not take kindly to seeing their tax dollars going offshore as interest payments.

By the 14th century the Hanseatic trade in London had expanded majorly from just selling wine, beeswax and fur. Their interest now lay in the growing cloth production of this sceptred isle. England had been the main supplier of wool to Flanders where the cities of Bruges, Ghent, Ypres as well as the northern French cities of Arras, Beauvais, Amines etc. had become almost industrial centres of textile production. Seeing the enormous wealth that could be made in cloth production and the fantastic cathedrals that could pay for, the industrious English wanted a piece of that pie.  

English cloth was cheaper than the prestigious product from Flanders and found a ready market in the Baltic and across the German lands. English cloth would receive an official lead or wax seal to indicate that it had been produced or dyed in England and that the relevant tax was paid. The process of attaching such a seal was called “stalen” in low German which is one of the reasons the German guildhall became known as the Stalhof in Low German and was then badly translated as steelyard into English and then retranslated into High German as Stahlhof with an “h”. There was some steel traded here, but that was almost certainly not the reason for the name.

King Edward III died in 1377 and with it the great supporter of the Hanse in London went away. Even towards the end of his reign relations between the Hanse and its English neighbours had deteriorated. The English may have been pushed aside by the Hanse in Bergen and Scania and had seen their king favouring foreigners, but they would not let that stand. A new generation of merchant adventurers was taking the Hansards head on, sailing into the Baltic themselves to buy and ship the eastern goods so desired back home.

This conflict will become a long and drawn-out affair that will test the unity of the Hanse itself. That and the other conflicts with Denmark and Flanders will form the centrepiece of the next few episodes when the League reaches the zenith of its power. For that to start you will have to be a bit patient. I am on holiday at the moment, so episode production has slowed.

I also notice that I am making very stupid mistakes such as proclaiming 7 times 12 is 72. Probably all for the better that I have left the world of banking. Normal service will resume in two weeks. But no worries, you shall not be deprived of Hanseatic content.

Next week an episode of the excellent Scandinavian History podcast will drop into your feed where Mikael Shankman discusses the Hanse from a Danish, Swedish and Norwegian perspective. I am sure you will enjoy that. See you on the other side!

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 just to remind you, the sub-podcast The Hanseatic League is still running. So if you want to point a friend or relative towards the History of the Germans but want to avoid confusion, just send him there. The Hanseatic League is available everywhere you can get the History of the Germans.

And last but not least the bibliography. For this episode I again relied heavily on:

Derek Keene: Guildhall and Stalhof in London,

Stuart Jenkins: Leben im Stalhof,

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

Philippe Dollinger: Die Hanse

Rolf Hammel-Kieslow: Die Hanse

Today we will talk about the Bryggen, the famous Hanseatic Kontor or trading post in Bergen in western Norway. Bergen itself was never a member of the Hanseatic League, but like The St. Peter’s yard in Novgorod, the steelyard in London and the Kontor of Bruges, the Bryggen in Bergen was a key element of the Hanseatic trading network.

The trade in stockfish from Bergen was never on the same scale as the herring trade off Scania or the trade in beeswax and furs from Novgorod, but it was an important springboard for members of the lower classes to join the long-distance merchants. And the way the Hanse was able to gain a stranglehold over the proud Vikings of Norway is a cautionary tale of failed macro-economic policies.

If you think the Norwegians are unique in falling prey to aggressive Hanseatic trade policies, think again. Even the mighty Bruges, the warehouse of the medieval world” was made to grant these merchants from the Holy Roman empire far reaching privileges. Some have considered these events as the beginnings of a long process of specialisation in Europe that condemned the East to become the giant breadbasket that fed the industrialising West. I doubt things are that simple, but let’s have a look at the different arguments….

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 113 – Bergen and Bruges. Today we will talk about the Bryggen, the famous Hanseatic Kontor or trading post in Bergen in western Norway. Bergen itself was never a member of the Hanseatic League, but like The St. Peter’s yard in Novgorod, the steelyard in London and the Kontor of Bruges, the Bryggen in Bergen was a key element of the Hanseatic trading network.

The trade in stockfish from Bergen was never on the same scale as the herring trade off Scania or the trade in beeswax and furs from Novgorod, but it was an important springboard for members of the lower classes to join the long-distance merchants. And the way the Hanse was able to gain a stranglehold over the proud Vikings of Norway is a cautionary tale of failed macro-economic policies.

If you think the Norwegians are unique in falling prey to aggressive Hanseatic trade policies, think again. Even the mighty Bruges, the warehouse of the medieval world” was made to grant these merchants from the Holy Roman empire far reaching privileges. Some have considered these events as the beginnings of a long process of specialisation in Europe that condemned the East to become the giant breadbasket that fed the industrialising West. I doubt things are that simple, but let’s have a look at the different arguments….

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 Peter M., John S., Emily F. and Matthew G. who have already signed up.

The city of Bergen is Norway’s second largest. It lies on the Atlantic coast in the west of the country. It is roughly on the same latitude as the Orkneys and the southern tip of Greenland. But thanks to the gulf stream, Bergen’s natural harbour remains ice free throughout most of the winter. Bergen is believed to have emerged as a trading city towards the tail end of the Viking Age. In 1070, the son of Harald Hardrada, king Olaf III, the Peaceful, officially established the city of Bergen.

What made Bergen particularly attractive were the fisheries in the Atlantic, all the way up the Norwegian coast and across to the Faroe Islands, Shetland, Iceland and even Greenland. This is where you could find cod, hake and halibut in abundance. This fish was preserved not by salting it, but by drying it in cold air and wind on wooden racks. Once dried the fish has a storage life of many months, if not years.

Like the herring, demand for this dried fish, commonly known as Stockfish, went through the roof as pious observation of church doctrines spread across continental Europe in the 11th century. And literally all the stockfish came through Bergen. Ever since the Viking age there were close trading links between Norway and the ports of England’s eastern shore, in particular King’s Lynn, Boston, Yarmouth and Hull.

The other port they sent their stockfish too was Bremen on Germany’s North Sea coast. Transport of the stockfish from Bergen was usually handled by the English and German merchants whose larger ships were more efficient on the journey across the North Sea, whilst the Norwegian, Orkney, Shetland, Faroer and Icelandic ships were much better suited for sailing the rough North Atlantic waters.

As Norway gained overlordship of the islands in the North Atlantic, Bergen became a political as well as an economic centre. The king of Norway and his court would spend long periods here and Bergen is often considered the capital of Norway, before it transferred to Christiana, modern day Oslo at the start of the 14th century. The products the merchants from England and Bremen brought to Bergen in exchange for the Stockfish were not just the usual staples of cloth and salt, but also increasingly grain and beer.

During the medieval warming period that began in the middle of the 10th century Norway’s population, like everywhere else in Europe had grown significantly. The riches brought in by the Vikings and then later by the trade in Stockfish gave population a further boost. That left Norway with a problem. The amazing fjords where cliffs rise straight out of the sea and the mountainous hinterland are stunningly beautiful but hard to navigate with a combined harvester. Though there were no combined harvesters in the 13th century, the problem was the same.

Cultivating enough grain to feed the growing population required far too much effort. Hence Norway came to rely on the regular import of grain and that other important foodstuff, beer. That grain and beer came initially from England and northern Germany. But as early as 1248 we hear that the king of Norway pleads with the citizens of Lübeck to send them grain to alleviate a serious famine. The Hansards had their foot in the door. In the following thirty years, two things happened. As we heard last week, the colonisation of the lands east of the Elbe and then east of the Oder River and finally into Prussia accelerated, creating a surplus of agricultural product, in particular rye, oats and barely.

At the same time the demand for fish across Europe kept growing and growing, enticing more and more Norwegians give up farming and take up fishing. In 1260 a desperate Norwegian king orders farmers to stay on their land and keep producing grain to maintain food safety. But to no avail. The rye, oats and barely that came in via the Baltic was simply much cheaper than the hard-won Norwegian harvests, even if accounting for the cost of transportation. The Norwegian farmers who obeyed the king’s demand were still squeezed out by the foreign competition.

Hence Bergen became ever more dependent upon imported grain. In 1284 the inevitable happened. The merchants from Lübeck and other cities along the Baltic shore felt mistreated by the Norwegian authorities in Bergen. And with some justification, since the Norwegian merchants and sea captains had lobbied the king to restrain the German interlopers. Things escalated when some enraged Norwegians attacked a Hanseatic ship.

After that representatives of several Hanseatic cities came together in Wismar and decided to place an embargo on any grain, beer, malt and flour to Bergen. Ships were posted in the Oresund and the other routes out of the Baltic into the North Sea. Any ship trying to bring embargoed goods to Bergen was to be captured, its load seized and the merchant who owned it fined. Initially it was only the Wendisch cities, i.e., Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, Greifswald, Hamburg and Lüneburg that agreed to the blockade. Riga, Visby and some cities along the North Sea joined in after the blockade had been announced.

Norway now turned to its other suppliers of foodstuff, the English harbours and the great city of Bremen. Bremen had a much longer relationship with Bergen than the other Hanseatic cities and may have hoped to get a leg up on its Baltic competitors in the Stockfish market. We are in the very early stages of the Hanseatic League and there was no such thing as statute or administrative infrastructure to this thing.

The merchants would refer to themselves as Gemeine Koopman or common merchants who traded under the protection the Holy Roman empor.  They would use use the privileges that were given to the emperor. As the empire declined, privileges were granted to cities or associations like the Gotlandfahrer. But who could claim them was rather vague. In the 1284 Bergen crisis some sanctions had to be imposed on Bremen for breaking the blockade.

So the merchants of the Wendisch cities excluded the citizens of Bremen formally from all privileges that the Gemeine Koopman enjoyed across Europe, in particular in Bruges, London and Novgorod. I am not sure I completely understand the legal basis of this move, but it did work in practice. That was the first exclusion from the Hanse, a “Verhansung” of a whole city. Bremen, as we will find out, will remain an odd one out for quite a long time. Despite Bremen breaking the embargo and the English harbours doing their best to keep Bergen supplied with essentials, the Hanseatic League did win.

Norway capitulated, paid damages and granted the German merchants far reaching privileges. These included the right to trade freely in all of Norway south of Bergen, they were freed from almost all taxes and tolls, could transport all products on their own ships and were allowed to set up a permanent establishment in Bergen. That put them into a position far superior not only to the other foreign merchants but to the Norwegians as well. Backed by the threat of another embargo, the Germans expanded their position well beyond the official privileges.

They moved into retail, bypassing the local traders. They bought land and estates in Norway taking over the production of other export products such as butter and meats. The one thing they did not do was trying to trade north of Bergen and on the Orkneys, Faroes, Shetlands, Iceland and Greenland. One theory is that they left it to the Norwegian fishermen because they were better at sailing across the stormy Artic seas.

But that is not completely convincing since ships from Gdansk and Prussia sail to Iceland in the 15th century. It is more likely that they realised that there was a limit to what the Norwegians were willing to endure. They had a lot less concern for the men from England and Bremen. They were ruthlessly squeezed out as their trading cost were much higher thanks to the taxes and tolls they still had to pay.

The Hansards took over the their trade routes and bring the Stockfish to the harbours on the eastern shore of England. There they would load up with wool they would sell in Flanders where they would pick up cloth going back to the Baltic. By the end of the 13th century the Hanseatic merchants, led by the association of Bergenfahrer in Lübeck, had a monopoly on stockfish in Europe.

And that monopoly was managed out of the Tyske Bryggen, the Bridge of the Germans, a historic harbour district in Bergen. In this district the Hanse built in total 30 merchant yards. They were constructed on a plot 10 to 20m wide and 100m long. There was a representative large house facing the harbour and behind it a courtyard with smaller 3-story houses and a storage facility at the end. Each of these merchant yards had about 90 rooms providing accommodation and storage facilities for almost 2,000 people. Given Bergen’s total population was just 10,000 the importance of this community becomes is quite apparent. The traders who came to Bergen were a rough lot.

Firstly, they were all men. No women were allowed on the Brygge. In particular there was to be no fraternisation with the locals. The Hanseatic cities who controlled the Kontor from afar were very worried that the merchants in Bergen would integrate into the local society, marry Norwegian women and over time turn Bergen into an independent merchant city.

These constraints meant that most of the inhabitants of the Bryggen were young, unmarried men, taking this as their springboard for a career in the world of long-distance trading. As I said before, the trade in Stockfish was much smaller than the herring trade. Not only was it less profitable, Bergen was also a hardship posting beyond the celibacy thing. The weather is famously challenging with 200 days of consecutive rain not uncommon and the winters are long and dark. Bergen became the place where young, ambitious men without family backing would have to go.

They would usually join a partnership with an established merchant. The young and ambitious guy would put in the labour and live in Bergen, whilst the other partner would put in the capital to get the business going. Profits would then be shared 50/50. If things went well the young entrepreneur would return from Bergen after a couple of years with sufficient capital to either send someone else to take his job on the Bryggen or expand to become a merchant across multiple trade routes.

Given that the Bergen Kontor was one of the few established routes to progress into the citizenship of the great trading cities, the young men of Bergen protected it against an influx of the spoiled scions of the great families. And the way they did that was through a challenging initiation rite, the Bergen Games that took place around Pentecost. All new arrivals on the Bryggen had to undergo three trials.

The first were the “Water Games” where the novice was thrown into the harbour and every time he resurfaced and climbed into a boat, he would be beaten mercilessly with twigs. That he had to do three times. In other sources it was said that the man was keelhauled three times, which I do not believe as that tends to be rather deadly. The second game was called the Castle Game. That involved a mock trial at the end of which the rookie was sentenced to a serious beating. That was handed out in a tent and the musicians were ordered to bang their cymbals to drown out the screams. After that the black and blue novice would return to the table and had to sing a cheerful bawdy song, preferably without spitting out too many of his remaining teeth. The last game was the Smoke Game. There the trainee was lowered into the chimney of the communal kitchen or into a barrel where a fire was lit. Often times the young man’s colleagues would look for fuel that made the smoke even more biting and painful. Whilst the delinquent is gradually being asphyxiated, he has to answer silly questions. If answers deemed not sufficiently amusing the torture was extended until the good sense of humour returned. The vast majority of participants survived, but they made sure that much embellished stories of the horrors circulated amongst the overindulged sons of the great burghers of Lübeck, Rostock, Wismar and Hamburg, leaving Bergen firmly in the hands of the great unwashed. What did not help in keeping discipline amongst this rough lot was that the Brygge was effectively extraterritorial. In 1370 king Haakon VI of Norway sent a list of complaints to the diet of the Hanseatic cities. He complains that whenever one of the men of the Bryggen had committed a serious crime, for instance murder, the Hanse would move him out of Bergen on their ships, thereby frustrating royal justice. Specifically the merchants had attacked the royal bailiff and made him do their bidding. They had broken into a monastery, abducted one of the royal servants and had him beheaded. When accused of the crime they bullied the bishop of Bergen to absolve them of the crime, threatening to burn the bishop’s hall and the whole city. Bergen by the way was built in wood and burned down quite regularly, the last time in 1955. No wonder the Norwegians tried to get rid of the Hanse merchants. But the stranglehold over the food supply tightened ever further. After the Black Death killed a large proportion of the population, local food production tanked even further, deepening the dependency on the cheap grain from the Baltic. They also established a credit system, offering the fishermen a part of the pay for their fish upfront in exchange for both interest and a fixed price for their product. The latter cut them out of any profit resulting from upward price volatility. In the mid-15th century tensions escalated to the point that the German merchants cut down the royal bailiff, the bishop and 60 Norwegians before burned down a monastery, all that without the king of Norway being able to do anything about it. The Hanseatic cities that formally set the rules for the Bryggen tried constantly to rein in the excesses and it is likely that they did succeed, at least sometimes. It is hard to conceive that the community in the Bryggen could have existed in a constant state of conflict with the city around it. There are stories of positive interactions between merchants and Norwegians, in particular with the fishermen. We also find Norwegian women being put in the wills of Hanseatic Merchants, suggesting the prohibitions weren’t quite as draconically enforced. The reign of the Kontor in Bergen came to an end when it got under almost sole control of the city of Lübeck. Other cities like Gdansk felt excluded from the trade in stockfish and opened up their own trade routes to Iceland and the islands. Once the solidarity of the Hanseatic cities had collapsed, the threat of an embargo disappeared. The King of Norway allowed direct trade outside Bergen and the city’s central role in the trade of Stockfish ended. The burghers of Lübeck sold their merchant’s yards to their apprentices or Norwegians and over time the Bryggen stopped being the Tyske Bryggen, the Bridge of the Germans, but just the Bryggen. Formally that name change happened in 1945 after the German troops that occupied Norway had left, but that is a story for another time. And if you want to find out what a Hanseatic Kontor looked like, you have to go to Bergen where it still stands, a Unesco World Heritage site. Bergen and Novgorod were not the only Kontors the Hanse maintained. There are two more, Bruges and London. Let’s talk about Bruges first. Bruges is today one of the great cultural destinations of Belgium. People walk through the picturesque alleyways, admire the canals and the market square with its towering Belfry before taking a look at the Beguinenhof. What they often fail to realise is how unbelievably important Bruges was in 13th century. It was the true centre of the commercial world north of the Alps. It was the place where Scots and Englishmen brought their wool, Dutch and Frisians brought cattle, merchants from La Rochelle and Bayonne delivered wine. All Iberian peoples were present, Basques, Navarrese, Castilians, Portuguese bringing iron, fruit and again wool. In 1277 a fleet from Genoa arrived, opening up a direct trade route between Italy and Northern Europe via the Atlantic coast. Moreover, the Italians brought with them the emerging art of finance. The great banking houses of Venice, Genoa and later Florence set up shop in Bruges, accepting and issuing letters of credit and bills of exchange. A bourse was opened in 1309, one of the first of its kind. There entrepreneurs could raise funding for audacious trading adventures from other merchants or from the representatives of the great banking houses. If you look at the Arnolfini Portrait in the National Gallery, you can see one of these Italian bankers who had settled in Bruges. He may wear a silly hat and awkward posture, but underneath it is a man as shrewd and as ruthless as any New York hedge fund manager, and he did pretty much the same things, buying and selling participations in enterprises, funding start-ups and helping to buy out retiring merchants, just with an abacus instead of three blinking computer screens. Unsurprisingly the Baltic Hanse was keen to be present in this epicentre of European trade. They brought in their herring, stockfish, grain, beer, copper, pelts, butter, beeswax and ash needed for the weaving process. At the same time they could find literally anything medieval artisans and farmers could produce. All kinds of luxury goods from the Mediterranean could be picked up and sold on to some Swedish count or Teutonic Grand master. But mostly they were interested in Flemish woollen cloth that had become the most desirable kind of textile across Europe. In 1252 the countess of Flanders offered the German merchants to set up a physical Kontor in Damme, the harbour of Bruges. It would have been a place very much like the Bryggen in Bergen and the Peterhof in Novgorod. A place for the Hanseatic merchants to stay when in Bruges, to store their wares and buy and sell goods. But that did not work out as either the citizens of Bruges pushed back or the Hansards went too far in their demands. Still the countess granted the merchants from the various cities of the Holy Roman empire wide-ranging privileges, including to be exempt from trial by combat, not to be made liable for the debt of other Hanseatic merchants and to be exempt from the lex naufragii, which allowed the locals to seize all property washed ashore after a shipwreck. They were also given lower tariffs on their goods and the right to maintain their own weighing scales at the harbour in Damme. The community of the Gemeine Koopmans, the Common Merchants grew at the same breakneck speed as the city of Bruges expanded in the 13th century. Initially it was the men from Bremen who had been welcomed for their beer, but soon the Lübecker and Hamburger overtook them. Though they did not have their own separate yard, there were two streets named after these cities suggesting that many of them congregated in designated inns or yards. And this where we encounter more of the inland members of the Hanse. We have already heard that Dortmund was crucial in the early development of Lübeck and the Gotlandfahrer, as were Soest and Münster. These Westphalian cities lay along the Hellweg, an East-West link between the Elbe River and the Rhine. Many Baltic goods travelled down that way to bring say herring to the faithful in Nuremberg. Equally goods from the south like wine from the Rhine and Moselle valley travelled north along this road. Where it hits the Rhine the city of Duisburg beame a major inland harbour which at least during my childhood was the biggest inland harbour in the world. Today that is apparently Nanjing in China though that could also be classified as a seaport. Though Dortmund is initially the most important of these Westphalian Hanseatic cities, there is another massive one that takes over from the 13th century onwards, and that is Cologne. But today is not the day to discuss Cologne, that will be next week. But suffice to say that Cologne too was closely involved in the trade with Bruges. The city I want to talk about in this episode is my favourite city in Germany and the place I still feel most at home, and that is Hamburg. Germany’s second largest city is also one of the older ones beyond the Limes, the ancient Roman defensive wall against the Germanic tribes. Saint Ansgar, the Apostle to the North was posted to the Hammaburg in 834 and built a wooden church there. Over the centuries that followed the city remained a modest outpost despite its formal role as a seat of an archbishop. The local Abodrites as well as Danish Vikings burned the settlement multiple times. And even when Lothar of Supplinburg and Henry the Lion defeat the Slavic tribes that did not mean that Hamburg was safe. Various Saxon noblemen burned it as late as 1138. The counts of Holstein had become overlords of Hamburg in the 1120s but most of their focus was on developing Lübeck. Only once they lost Lübeck to Henry the Lion and failed to get it back after the duke of Saxony had fallen did they focus on Hamburg. In 1188 do they establish the Neustadt, the new Town built on the site of the former ducal castle. It is again settlers from Flanders and Holland who make up the first inhabitants of the city. Hamburg claims that it received a wide range of freedoms and privileges from the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1189. It is now firmly established that this letter is a fake, which does not stop the Hamburgers from celebrating the date of its issuance as their annual Hafengeburtstag or harbour anniversary. Whether the fake was a deliberate attempt to gain rights the merchants of Hamburg never possessed or was just meant as evidence of rights they did possess either legally or by tradition is in equal measure unclear as it is irrelevant. By the mid 13th century Hamburg acted like a free imperial city setting its own laws and jurisdiction. But Hamburg was at the time a minor city within the League. Its purpose was mainly to act as the North Sea harbour for Lübeck. The Hanseatic merchants preferred landing the goods from Scania, Sweden and Novgorod in Lübeck and then transport them overland or by river to Hamburg from where they would then be shipped to Bruges or London. That explains the importance of Hamburg merchants at the Kontor in Bruges. And that gets us back to the role of the Hanse in Bruges. The local merchants became increasingly irritated by the foreigners gaining ever more privileges in the city. It was the counts of Flanders who granted them these rights which often came at the expense of the locals. Tensions between the two groups rose, not dissimilar to what happened in Bergen. The German and Spanish merchants claimed that the locals disrespected their rights, whilst the people of Bruges said that the foreigners disregarded the obligation only to sell to citizens of Bruges. The latter was quite important. As long as the citizens of Bruges could prevent the foreigners from trading directly with each other, they could make a very decent living just by standing in the middle drawing a margin from both sides. In 1280 the conflict burst out into the open. The Hanse and the Spaniards sat down with the count of Flanders and gained the right to move their staple to Aardenburg, 20 km east of Bruges. What that meant is that these traders were allowed to bring their goods to Aardenburg and sell them there to whoever they wanted, basically cutting out the citizens of Bruges. That was a high stakes game. Because it wasn’t just the citizens of Bruges who lost out in this. Since not all wholesalers operating in Bruges had moved to Aardenburg, there was a lot of trading the Hanse merchants could now no longer access from their new location. It was essentially an embargo that went two ways. In this conflict the question is, who has more to lose. The Hanse merchants needed to find new buyers replacing those who did not dare to upset the citizens of Bruges by coming to Aardenburg. Ad they needed to find a way to buy cloth from the great Flemish weaving towns, including Bruges, for resale in the Baltic. If they could not bring the cloth, competitors could bypass them and unwind the whole Hanseatic trading system in the Baltic. What it boiled down to was not just a question of stubbornness and discipline, but also a question of whether either side could find substitutes. I.e., could the Hanse merchants find other places to sell their grain, beer, herring, beeswax and furs and buy cloth directly in Ypres, Ghent and elsewhere, whilst for Bruges the question was how desperately do they need the products from the Baltic. An initial analysis suggests that Bruges should be in a stronger position. They are the world’s trading centre. Losing the margin on some significant trade volumes could be painful but not devastating. Whilst the Hanse was staring down the barrel of not being able to procure the most important good sold in the North, woollen cloth from Flanders. If the embargo persisted, the discipline amongst the various Hanseatic cities deprived of this important supply should quickly fall apart. Still, the Hanse prevailed. The citizens of Bruges caved within mere months and agreed to a wide range of further concessions, including the big one, they allowed the Hansards to trade directly with other foreigners. Why did Bruges cave? The sources do not say and my trawling through the secondary literature was also unsuccessful. My hypothesis is that the most powerful argument of the Hanse was grain and beer. Flanders was not quite as dependent upon Baltic supply of grain as Norway, but it did need to bring in provisions from abroad, be that England, Northern France or the Baltic. Baltic grain was rye, oats and barley which featured mainly in the diet of the poor. Rich people ate wheat bread. So when the Hanse cut the supply of the foodstuff of the lower classes, there was no simple way to replace it with other product at a similar price. The city councils in the Middle Ages weren’t democratically elected representatives of all the inhabitants of the city. They were usually comprised of the Patrician upper classes and new members were co-opted by their peers, not elected. In other words, they were the representatives of the city oligarchy tasked with preserving the existing social order. As a consequence they lived in constant fear of uprisings. Flanders in particular was regularly convulsed by strikes and uprisings of the weavers who toiled in huge almost industrial facilities. Fear the embargo could trigger an imminent hunger revolt of the city’s underclass seems to have forced the council’s hand, overriding the more long-term challenge to the Hanseatic trade system. Given this embargo had been so successful, the League would use the same technique again in 1307/09, 1358/60 1388/92 and 1436/38 and was successful in all these instances gaining new privileges every time. Bruges may today be one of the lesser known trading posts, but was in reality the by far most important Kontor of the Hanseatic League. Whilst I am sure winning the fight with Bruges’ city council was celebrated across the Baltic as a great success and many a brick gothic cathedral bears witness to the economic gains made by the burghers of Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock, Gdansk, Riga, Tallin and so many more. But some economic historians believe that this deal had serious negative implications for Eastern Europe. The export of grain funded the import of manufactured goods, in particular cloth which meant there was little point and also little chance for a manufacturing industry to emerge in the great Hanseatic cities. And it is indeed true that few if any of the Hanseatic cities developed a manufacturing capability beyond brewing beer. The Hanse was a trading system designed to ship commodities from east to west and bring back higher value goods. By establishing export routes for grain and other commodities the Hanse helped to first establish and then sustain the great agricultural estates in Poland, Prussia and the Baltic states. And these estates kept a small class of landowners, often of German extraction in power, suppressing entrepreneurship and democracy. At least that is the argument. Do I buy that? It is certainly an interesting way to explain the split of Europe in the 19th century into an agricultural east and an industrialised West. But then there are many other factors that help or hinder the emergence of innovative economies. The rule of law, absence of military conflict and access to capital to name a few. And one can argue that is exactly what the Hanseatic League provided in its cities, the rule of law, safety from military attack and access to capital. So I am not yet convinced we can blame the Hanseatic merchants in the 13th century for Russian autocracy in the 19th. This is not the last time we will hear about the Kontors in Bruges and Bergen. But we are done for today. Next week we will look at the most famous of the Hanseatic Kontors, the Steelyard in London. I hope you will join us again. 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 just to remind you, the sub-podcast The Hanseatic League is still running. So if you want to point a friend or relative towards the History of the Germans but want to avoid confusion, just send him there. The Hanseatic League is available everywhere you can get the History of the Germans.

And last but not least the bibliography. For this episode I again relied heavily on:

Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz: (3) Rules of Inclusion, Rules of Exclusion: The Hanseatic Kontor in Bergen in the Late Middle Ages and its Normative Boundaries | arvids alvea – Academia.edu

Carsten Mueller Boysen: Die Deutsche Bruecke in Bergen in Die Hanse, Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos, herausgegeben von Jürgen Bracker, Volker Henn and Rainer Postel

Philippe Dollinger: Die Hanse

Rolf Hammel-Kieslow: Die Hanse