Hamburg

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Our history of the Hanse has come to an end, not with a bang but with a whimper. Of the things that have remained we have already talked a lot, the ideal of the honourable Hanseatic merchant, the cultural and political links to Scandinavia and the stories. The stories of the famous pirates, Klaus Störtebecker and Hans Benecke, the heroics of the wars fought with Denmark and the antics of Jurgen Wullenwever.

But there is something that reminds us of the days when traders speaking low German fed Europe fish, beer and grain. And that are the cultural achievements, the town halls, weighing houses and stores that became symbols of civic pride, the artists whose works adorn churches and palaces across the Baltic sea and last but not least the brick churches that shaped the way these cities still appear..…let’s have a look.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 127: The Art and Culture of the Hanse.

Our history of the Hanse has come to an end, not with a bang but with a whimper. Of the things that have remained we have already talked a lot, the ideal of the honourable Hanseatic merchant, the cultural and political links to Scandinavia and the stories. The stories of the famous pirates, Klaus Störtebecker and Hans Benecke, the heroics of the wars fought with Denmark and the antics of Jurgen Wullenwever.

But there is something that reminds us of the days when traders speaking low German fed Europe fish, beer and grain. And that are the cultural achievements, the town halls, weighing houses and stores that became symbols of civic pride, the artists whose works adorn churches and palaces across the Baltic sea and last but not least the brick churches that shaped the way these cities still appear..…let’s have a look.

And since podcasting is a most unsuitable medium to talk about visual art, I have added a few images to the episode webpage which you can find at historyofthegermans.com/127-2

But before we start it is my privilege to thank all the patrons who have signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website, historyofthegermans.com. Your help is much appreciated. And for those of you who are still on the sidelines, come and join. You can become a knight of the realm for the price of a cappuccino per month, equally stimulating, less calorific and much more prestigious. And here are the names of four amongst your number who have already taken the plunge: John C., Ole S., Luis-Felipe M. and Edward B. Thanks you guys so much.

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Now back to the show. The Hanse ended officially in 1669 with the last Hanseatic diet. But for centuries afterwards the cities of Hamburg, Lubeck and Bremen were the caretakers of the remaining tangible possessions of the institutions, specifically the Kontor Buildings in London, Bruges and Antwerp. The three cities would also maintain joint embassies and consulates abroad and after the unification of Germany in 1871 maintain a Hanseatic representation in Berlin that lasted until 1933.

Thanks not only to this cooperation but multiple other factors, the three cities weren’t integrated into territorial states until the 20th century when Lubeck became part of Schleswig-Holstein. Hamburg and Bremen are still city states with their own state government and a seat in the Bundesrat, something the other great free imperial cities, Frankfurt, Nurnberg, Augsburg and Cologne to name just a few, did not achieve.

So, in a way one of the legacies of the Hanse is the existence of the city states of Hamburg and Bremen. But beyond the political, what is left today?

Let’s start with the language. One of the defining factors and some of the glue that kept the Hanse network together was the common language spoken by merchants from Novgorod to Bergen, Low German. As you may have noticed by now, I am no linguist and every time I comment on this topic, I find myself in hot water. So, I will not go into a detailed analysis of Low Middle German, Low Saxon and Low Franconian. There were clear differences between these languages/dialects but one important point was that they could understand each other easily, much more easily than they could understand people living south of a line from Cologne to Frankfurt an der Oder who spoke a version of High German. Whether this linguistic gap was a function or a cause for the great rift between the Emperors and the Saxons that dominated the 11th to 13th century, I am not qualified to comment on.

Low German-speaking area before the expulsion of almost all German-speakers from east of the Oder–Neisse line in 1945. Low German-speaking provinces of Germany east of the Oder, before 1945, were Pomerania with its capital Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), where east of the Oder East Pomeranian dialects were spoken, and East Prussia with its capital Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), where Low Prussian dialects were spoken. Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) was also a Low German-speaking city before 1945. The dialect of Danzig (Danzig German) was also Low Prussian.

Low German was not only the language of the common people, but also the language of business and of law. Since most of the Hanse cities on the Baltic had adopted the law of the city of Lubeck, the court cases were held in the dialect of that city. Likewise, the cities who had adopted Magdeburg Law often adopted that dialect for their legal procedures.

In the 14th century Low German, in particular the version spoken in Lubeck, replaced Latin not only in the local courts but also as the language of diplomacy and politics. The records of the Hanseatic diets had originally been kept in Latin. But from 1369 onwards, i.e., from the time of the victory over the Danish king Waldemar Atterdag, the Hanse kept their records in Low German. Not only that, the Hanse was in such a powerful position, it could insist on the use of Low German even in correspondence with the Scandinavian rulers and the Flemish cities. This transition to the common tongue instead of Latin happened somewhat earlier in the Hanse than for instance in France, where Francois 1 declared French the official language only in 1539. Why that is we can only speculate. One reason may be that many city officials who had spent their life trading, simply never learned enough Latin. Equally, some of the smaller Hanse cities could not or did not want to pay for a scribe proficient in Latin. And finally, the church and its Latin-speaking clergy played a much smaller role in the world these men and women inhabited than they did in the rest of Europe.

Low German may have become the language of business, law and politics, but did not gain much traction as a literary language. Most of the literature of the time, like the Minnelieder and chivalric Romances were written and read in Middle High German. The one literary works that gained national significance was Reineke Fuchs, the story of the wily fox who escapes from an ever-mounting pile of evidence of his wrongdoings by framing his archenemy, Isegrim the wolf. The story of the clever fox is just one iteration of a well-known tale that goes back the Aesop and the Roman de Renart in the 13th century and continued well into the Fantastic Mr. Fox. But Reinecke Fuchs was the most successful version in the German lands and after translation into High German was even picked up much later by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Reynke de vos: Incipit der Lübecker Inkunabel von 1498

Really great literature from the Hanse cities came in the 20th century, to name just the giants, there is the Mann family, Thomas, Heinrich, Erika, Klaus and Golo probably the most gifted literary family in the German language. Gunther Grass you already met. Wolfgang Borchert is another one of my favourites. I could go on. They all wrote in High German.

Though the belletristic literature wasn’t exactly the late medieval Hansards cup of tea, history was. From very early on the cities or the patrician societies sponsored writers to record the past of their cities, which is why we have a fairly uninterrupted record of historic events all throughout the Middle Ages.

The use of Low German in commercial and political communications declined almost exactly in line with the decline in the influence of the Hanse. In part that was due to the Lutheran church that emphasised Luther’s translation of the bible into high German and from 1530 published all church communications in high German. At the same time the southern German traders like the Fugger took an ever-larger role as counterparts to the Hanse merchants and they insisted on High German. The reforms of the imperial administration and legal system by Maximilian I and Charles V shifted the legal language to High German. Finally, the Renaissance led to a revival in the use of Latin.

By 1631 even Lubeck had changed the language of its announcements to the general population from Low German to High German. Low German became the language of the lower classes whilst the patricians and university educated professionals spoke High German. The same process took place in the Hanse cities along the Baltic Coast, in Gdansk, Riga, Tallin and East Prussia. Since the late 19th century efforts have been made to rehabilitate Low German. Authors write in the language and one of Hamburg’s largest parks is called Planten un Blomen, a forthright description so characteristic for Northern Germany.  Today Low German or Plattdeutsch is recognised as a regional language and submissions in low Germans have to be accepted by courts and authorities.

Plamnten un Blomen – Hamburg

A rather unexpected element of Hanseatic culture was a love for chivalric romances and their heroes. As we mentioned before a couple of times, the patricians despite most of them being in trade, saw themselves the equals of the knights and lower aristocracy. They did engage in aristocratic pastimes like hunts and tournaments. Moreover, they did get very fond of the nine great heroes or nine worthies. This is rather motley crew comprising three heroes of antiquity, Hector, Alexander and Julius Caesar, three chivalric heroes of the Old Testament, Joshua, David and Judas Maccabaeus, and finally three Christian heroes, King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon. Nobody can explain what drove this choice, but we find them most beautifully depicted in the Hansa hall of the Rathaus of Cologne and the Beautiful Fountain in Nurnberg.

9 gute Helden im Hansasaal des Rathauses Köln

One of those, King Arthur seemed to have struck a particular chord with the citizens of Prussia. The cities of Danzig, Elbing, Riga and Stralsund all had Artus Courts where the patricians met and pretended they were the knights of the round table. Chivalric heroes were pressed into service as defenders of citizens’ freedoms. Reinold of Montauban, one of the four sons of count Aymon became the patron saint and defender of Dortmund whilst statues of the mighty Roland proliferated from Bremen across the Hanse world.

Chivalric heroes were pressed into service as defenders of citizens’ freedoms. Reinold of Montauban, one of the four sons of count Aymon became the patron saint and defender of Dortmund whilst statues of the mighty Roland proliferated from Bremen across the Hanse world.

Reinoldus – patron saint of Dortmund

Painting and sculpture is something that rarely comes to mind when talking about the Hanse. Many great museums in Germany are today in the cities that had once been the capitals of powerful princes with huge budgets for representation, rather than in places dominated by sober merchants. Berlin, Munich, Dresden inherited and then expanded these princely collections. Others like Cologne and Nurnberg had been made centres for the great national collections in archaeology and art. But Hamburg, Bremen and Lubeck do not often feature on the bucket list of art lovers. A bit unfairly I have to say since for instance the Kunsthalle in Hamburg houses very interesting exhibitions.

That does not mean that there weren’t some astounding artist active during the heyday of the Hanse. Like everywhere in Europe the congregations in the Hanse cities did their utmost to fill their churches with great pieces of art. Wooden sculptures and monumental altarpieces were their preferred donations. There are a few names of artist we know, like Bertram of Minden and Master Francke from Hamburg. If you want to see works by the latter, there are some in Hamburg, but the largest, most complete work is in the Finnish National Museum. It got there because it was in a small church in a place called Kalanti, today part of modern town of 14,000 people that I cannot pronounce. Seemingly Kalanti was a large enough trading post in the 14th century to order a piece of art from a Hamburg master.

The greatest of these Hanse artists was probably Bernt Notke (1440 to 1509). He had travelled extensively, learning his craft in the Netherlands and in Italy, where he got heavily influenced by Mantegna. He set up shop in Lubeck stayed in Sweden for 15 years where he became the master of the royal mint before returning back to Lubeck. His works can be found in many Hanse cities, including in the church of St. Mary in Lubeck. But again, if you want to see his masterpieces you need to take a ship or plane. Though he was a renaissance artist he remained in many ways wedded to medieval themes and imagery. That is most visible in the Totentanz or Dance Macabre. A Totentanz is a motif that had emerged after the Black death and shows the whole of society from the emperor down to the lowly peasant dancing with grinning skeletons, reminding the viewer that the worldly joys of beauty, health and wealth are temporary and that the grim reaper is waiting for us all. Exceedingly cheerful I know. But Notke manages to depict the skeletons with so much verve and joy, one is almost compelled to join them in their pogo. There used to be two versions, a short one with 13 figures in Tallin and a 30 metre long and 1.9m high high freeze in the Marienkirche in Lubeck.

The Lubeck version had already deteriorated badly by 1701 and was replaced with a faithful copy that was much admired. In 1942 the authorities had a wooden cover built to protect the image against bomb damage. The Royal Air Force attack on Lubeck was the very first of the WWII bombing raids and the city was ill prepared. In particular the use of firebombs was unexpected. As the firestorm raged through the Marienkirche, the wooden cover caught fire and the Danse Macabre came to its long prophesised end.

Fortunately Notke’s greatest work survived World War II and it isn’t in Germany either. It is the altar of St. George in the church if St. Nikolai in Stockholm, the Storkyrkan. I have only seen pictures of it and if I ever get a chance to go to Stockholm this is #1 on the list. Commissioned by the Swedish regent Sten Sture who had made a solemn promise to honour St. George before the battle of Brunkeberg. That was the battle that threw out king Christian I of Denmark and led to the collapse of the Kalmar Union. Episode 123 if anyone wants to refresh your memory.

The battle of Brunkeberg was a hugely important event, but hey did Notke do it justice. Depictions of St. George are one a penny in European art, but I have not seen one before where St. George is sculpted in Wood, and including horse and Plinth is 20 feet tall, his sword raised, his horse rearing up in fear before the dragon. And what a dragon it is, not one of those cute little salamanders you normally see cowering at the feet of the saint, ready to be pierced by some dainty lance. No, this is a real dragon, a terrifying monster whose gargantuan mouth could easily swallow a horse’s head in one gulp. The animal has captured the lance and only a well-placed hit with the sword raised high can save St. George and the damsel in distress who praying nearby.

This was made at the same time as the much more famous early equestrian statues of Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice and Gattamalata in Padova but as Wilhelm Pinder said, it stands up to them as their Nordic counterpoint.

As amazing the St. George is, or seems to be, given I have never seen it in the flesh, painting and sculpture isn’t the most important legacy of the Hanse.

When we think of the great artistic achievements of the Hanse, we think of the humble brick and what could be created with it.

Now before we go into the whole topic of brick gothic, let us not forget that the Hanse comprised more than the towns on the Baltic and North Sea. The inland cities of the Hanse, Cologne, Dortmund, Muenster, Soest, Braunschweig did not build in brick, but in stone and boy did they create some amazing things. The city of Cologne is proud of its history as a free city and conveyed that pride in its town hall and the Gurzenich, a sort of party house with the largest dance floor in the Empire. And since the citizens of Cologne are a sensible bunch, they put a market hall on the ground floor. Muenster too has an impressive Rathaus dating back in parts to the 13th century and famous as the place where the peace of Westphalia was negotiated.  Dortmund has one of the oldest town halls amongst the stone-built cities, and Brunswick one of the most beautiful.

The cities in what art historians called the Hausteinzone or quarried stone area differed not just in terms of material from the brick-built cities from Riga to Bremen. The inland cities were much older than the Hanse cities east of the Elbe River. Not all have roots as deep as Cologne, but Brunswick, Muenster, Soest and Dortmund date back to the conquest of Saxony and featured Romanesque cathedrals and palaces that had already shaped their structure when the Hanse got going.

The cities of the brick-zone, with the exception of Bremen, did not have much if any stone buildings in the 12th century. Some were entirely new settlements like Riga and Tallin or grew up alongside Slavic settlements like in Danzig or Stettin. That left the merchant elite with carte blanche to build cities that reflected their idea of beauty and functionality. And by coincidence, just as they got going, a new architectural style was created back at the Abbaye of St. Denis in France, Gothic. And what added to the sense of consistency in the Hanse cities was that the Gothic style largely persisted well into the 16th century, after which many of these places declined in wealth and importance precluding major rebuilding projects.

The Hanse cities were often planned as rectangles with a market square in the middle. And that market square was to be fronted by a town hall, offering a place to trade, to meet your fellow citizens and to engage in politics. Most often the actual city hall was built on the first floor above the cloth hall whilst the cellar held the wine stores.

The Rathaus in Lubeck became the blueprint for many other brick-built town halls. It initially consisted of two separate comparatively modest buildings, one was the cloth hall and the other a place for social and political gatherings. These two buildings were connected and given a new joint facade. In the 14th century a new wing was added on the eastern side of the market square. And then in the 15th century a further extension was built, and all of that was built in brick.

One of the important things to know about brick is that it is a terrible material if you set your heart on decorating your brand-new town hall with statues, capitals and gargoyles. Brick just cannot really do that.

But still they did want some decoration and came up with a unique way to impress the importance and wealth of their city upon its visitors. They created monumental facades before the actual buildings that also reached well above the level of the roof line behind, serving no other purpose than decoration. The architects designed large round or pointed gothic openings that they then decorated with quatrefoils, rosettes or more intricate designs. They added finely chiselled gables and columns to add even more decoration. Stralsund is probably the most successful of these designs.

Beyond the town hall, we find similar features on other public buildings like the weighing houses, exchanges and city stores for salt, grain etc. And then the city’s merchants and artisans would compete to have the most impressive guildhall on the best spot on the market square.

But overlooking all of these were the churches. And that is another way in which the Hanse in the north differs from most cities. With the exception of Bremen there is no mighty cathedral that exceeds all other churches in size and splendour of decoration. Even in the cities that had their own bishop like Lubeck, Riga or Tallin, it was the parish church funded by the merchants that was the largest, the most sumptuously decorated and the one featuring the tallest tower.

The Hansards had a thing about having very tall towers. 125 metres seems to have been the standard to beat which keeps Lubeck, Riga and Tallin in the top 20 of highest churches in the world to this day, all taller than Salisbury Cathedral.  Allegedly St. Mary in Stralsund was even 151m high, which would have made it the highest building in the world until it was hit by lightening in 1549. These towers had a specific Hanse-related purpose. They could be seen from miles out at sea or downriver and as sailors returned from long journeys, they are cheered by this first glimpse of their hometown.

Brick architecture remained a key identifier of Hanse architecture, even though many masterpieces of brick gothic like Chorin monastery or the Teutonic Knights castle in Malbrok had little or no connection to the Hanse. When Hamburg reconnected culturally and architecturally with its Hanse roots, they chose visible brick to build the Speicherstadt and then in the 1920s developed an architectural style called Brick expressionism that gave us the Chile Haus, that rises like a curved red ocean liner out of the mass of houses near the Elbe.

It is this reconnecting to the Hanseatic traditions in the 1880s that did not only materialise in the architecture of Hamburg.

When Georg Sartorius sat down in 1802 to write the very first modern history of the Hanse, he did so because he sought refuge from the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, believing that nothing could be further from contemporary politics that this “half-forgotten antiquity”.

But he was quite thoroughly wrong. As a faithful listener to the History of the Germans you know that right around this time historians and pseudo historians began combing through Europe’s past in the hope of finding some German hero stories that could be woven into a new national narrative.

And what could be better than a story of a maritime empire that once controlled the Baltic Sea, beat the Kings of Denmark and England in war and left behind magnificently romantic cities. Quickly the Hanse, that famously had nor organisation, no army and, crucially, no desire to go to war when it could be avoided, was painted as an expansionist united maritime power that rivalled the English and French and was only prevented from conquering the new world by the lack of a strong German state.

Now I initially wanted to go into this in a lot more detail. But as it happened, I may have secured an interview with the person who has literally written the book about the perception of the Hanse in the 19th, 20th and now the 21st century. So, I do not want to forerun this interview, which may come out in mid-December.

And that gets me to the plan for the next Season, the Teutonic Knights. I will probably need as usual 2 to 3 weeks of preparation for that. That might mean no episodes until the end of November, except for maybe some short pieces on little gems I came across along the way.

And just to keep you guys excited about coming back, let me tell you what comes after the Teutonic Knights. We will get back to the chronological narrative. We will resume the story of the Holy Roman empire where we left off, at the death of Konradin. We will wade through the blood-soaked decades of the interregnum that brings one Rudolf von Habsburg to the throne, just in time for him to gain his family the duchy of Austria with well-known consequences. But before the Habsburgs get to settle on the imperial throne for good, history has granted us the Luxemburgers, Henry VII, Charles IV and Sigismund, fascinating figures who shaped Europe from their capital in Prague. I hope you will come along for the journey.

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Bremen was geographically and politically quite different from the other cities, ploughing its own furrow. In response the other Hansards did not trust the citizens of Bremen. There is also the minor issue that Bremen sheltered a lot of pirates. Still as the Hanse declined politically, Bremen took on an ever-larger role until becoming one of the last three Hanseatic Cities that kept that long-dead medieval relic plodding along until the late 19th century. A story of rebellion, stubbornness, piracy and emigration to America, I thought worth telling.

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Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 126 – A brief History of Bremen

The initial idea for this episode was to draw this season to a close with a talk about the art and culture of the Hanse. But then, when I started drafting, I realised that I have almost entirely omitted one of the great Hanseatic cities from our narrative, Bremen. And that isn’t right. One cannot have a 20 episode podcast series on the Hanseatic League and not talk about Bremen. But it wasn’t that I skipped Bremen on purpose. The reason Bremen barely featured in our narrative is that Bremen had a very ambivalent relationship with the Hanse.

Bremen was geographically and politically quite different from the other cities, ploughing its own furrow. In response the other Hansards did not trust the citizens of Bremen. There is also the minor issue that Bremen sheltered a lot of pirates. Still as the Hanse declined politically, Bremen took on an ever-larger role until becoming one of the last three Hanseatic Cities that kept that long-dead medieval relic plodding along until the late 19th century. A story of rebellion, stubbornness, piracy and emigration to America, I thought worth telling.

But before we start my usual plea for support. As you may have noticed the world of podcasting is changing rapidly. Even prominent podcasting platforms are shutting down, Stitcher recently and soon the #3 in the market, Google Podcasts. Listenership is getting concentrated amongst the two leaders, Apple and Spotify. Apple has just made changes to its podcasting app that caused me no end of difficulty. I also believe Apple’s algorithm drives traffic to the larger networks. Spotify, which is over 50% of my listenership heavily promotes its own shows. At the same time the social networks like Twitter where I find most new listeners are falling apart without a suitable replacement. All that makes it ever harder to reach people who may be interested in the podcast.

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Back to the show. When I said Bremen hadn’t featured much in the History of the Germans, what I meant was the city of Bremen, not its archbishops. Those we have met many times. In Episode 96 we talked about Ansgar, the 9th century archbishop of Hamburg who had to retreat to Bremen in the face of Viking raids.

From the 10th century onwards the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen kept clashing with the great Saxon nobles over the treatment of the Slavs on the other side of the Elbe. The archbishops wanted to convert them so that their bishopric could expand into Scandinavia and the Baltic States. The dukes and counts mostly just wanted to plunder. You may remember the story of Adalbert, one of Bremen’s most formidable archbishops and Gottschalk, the prince of the Abodrites in episode 101.

The reign of Adalbert in the 11th century was the highpoint of archepiscopal influence. He had been the almighty chief minister of Henry III and later the young emperor Henry IV. Adalbert had been offered the papacy by Henry III but turned it down, preferring to build out his archepiscopal see in Bremen and Hamburg. That ended in 1066 when the emperor had to dismiss Adalbert under pressure from his court, an event that led ultimately to a hardening of the imperial position, which led to the Saxon revolt which contributed to the Investiture controversy and Canossa, basically most of Season 2 of the Podcast.

After Adalbert it went sharply downhill with the archbishops of hamburg-Bremen. They kept faith with the imperial side during the wars between the Saxon nobles and the emperor and supported him in his conflict with Pope Gregory VII. That put them straight into the crosshairs of the dukes of Saxony. The dukes, supported by their friends amongst the Saxon nobles and even emperor Henry V constantly degraded the power of the archbishops. The archbishopric was at one point the metropolitan see for all of Scandinavia from the Faroer islands to Uppsala, but that ended when the pope elevated the bishop of Lund to archbishop. At which point the archbishopric had only three subordinate bishoprics, Oldenburg, Ratzeburg and Schwerin.

One last moment of hope came when Hartwig, the heir of the wealthy county of Stade became archbishop and proposed to make the archbishopric the heir to his fortune a story we looked at in episode 108. That could have made a huge difference to this archdiocese which was now by far the poorest and least significant archbishopric in the empire. But that was not to be. Henry the Lion coveted the lands of Stade and being best mates with the emperor Barbarossa, managed to expel Hartwig from his ancestral lands. And as a final nail in the coffin, the emperor also removed the three remaining suffragan bishoprics from Bremish control, handing them over to Henry the Lion.

That is the situation in the 12th century when the Hanse is getting going. Bremen, an ancient city is the seat and only possession of the poorest archbishop imaginable.

The archbishop may have become poorer and poorer in the 300 years from 900 to 1200, but the city and its burghers had prospered in the medieval economic boom.

Bremen is in a very attractive geographical position. It sits near the mouth of the Weser River, roughly 50 km from the North Sea. That sounds like a long way, but the river is still tidal down to the city which allowed even larger ships to come up all the way. Moreover, the city sits on the highest point of a 23km long ancient sand dune that gives it a mighty elevation of 15.2m above sea level. Not exactly alpine but given the vast marches between Bremen and the sea averaging an elevation of just 3.3m, the significance of this dune becomes clear. Bremen was one of the few places for miles around where your feet remained dry even in High Water.

The Weser is one of the three main German rivers going into the North Sea. The largest and commercially most important is the Rhine, which gave rise to the wealth of Cologne. The next significant is the Elbe which comes all the way from beyond Prague and through its various tributaries connects Dresden, Leipzig, Erfurt, Halle, Magdeburg, Berlin and Luneburg to Hamburg.

The Weser is the shortest of these three, less than half the length of Elbe and Rhine. But still the river connects some important medieval trading centres with the North Sea, namely Hannoversch Munden, Eisenach, Hameln, Minden, Hannover, Celle and foremost of all, Brunswick.

Being able to collect products from such a large hinterland, Bremen embarked on fruitful trading relationships with England, the Low Countries, Norway and Scotland well before the Hanse and Lubeck in particular got going.

Bremen traded in many of the wares other Hanse cities traded in. Grain, Wood and most importantly Beer were great exports going North. One of Bremen’s beer specialities was Grut-beer made without hops but with a variety of herbs, which made it stronger and more aromatic. Bremen was the first of the German cities that exported beer into the Low Countries. But that position did only last until the early 14th century when Hamburg took over. The difference was that the council in Hamburg maintained strict quality controls in beermaking, whilst Bremen did not. Unscrupulous makers of cheap beer eroded the Bremen beer brand. For the avoidance of angry mail, let me assure you that this problem has been resolved by now and Bremen hosts Becks, one of Germany’s most famous and most delicious brands of beer.

The Wine trade seems to have been of huge importance too. The Bremer Ratskeller, technically a restaurant in the vaults under the Rathaus but in reality one of the preeminent distributors of quality wine in Germany was first mentioned in 1342. One key export market for wine from Bremen was Scotland, a rather unexpected pairing.

In the other direction Bremen merchants brought fish from Norway and Denmark as well as cloth from England and Flanders up the Weser River into what is today Lower Saxony, Thuringia and Hesse.

One trade that would start much later in the 17th century was Coffee. Bremen had the first coffee house in Germany and still today some of Germany’s best known coffee brands like Jacobs, HAG and Eduscho come from Bremen.

So, in many ways Bremen was a perfect fit for the Hanse. Similar products and similar target markets in Flanders, England and Norway.

But in many other ways it wasn’t. Bremen was oriented on a North-South direction, similar to Cologne. The Hanse’s focus on the Baltic and the trade between East and West had little interest for Bremen. In fact, many of the Hansards provided unwelcome competition to the traders in Bremen.

Beyond the differences in economic conditions, the city of Bremen was also politically in a very different position. Bremen lay at the outer edge of the Hanse territory. The closest Hanse cities were Stade and Buxtehude, both more than 80km away. Instead, their neighbours were to the south the powerful dukes of Brunswick, the descendants of Henry the Lion. To the West and North were the Frisian chieftains and the counts of Oldenburg, powers who played little role in imperial politics but had a habit of devastating each other’s lands with a sheer incessant set of feuds.

The major flashpoint between Bremen and its neighbours was the control of the Weser River all the way to the sea. The city tried to reduce attacks on shipping in the river by first building castles along its banks. When that failed, they tried to wrestle the whole territory from their rulers, which made Bremen one of the few, if not the only Hanse city with serious territorial ambitions.

And the social structure is different too. The ruling families, at least until the mid 14th century were landowners and rentiers who had become rich in the service of the archbishops, not the successful merchants. In 1304/5 a first crisis was caused by the murder of a member of that city aristocracy. The subsequent feud ended with the creation of a new statute for the city that reduced the power of some of the Geschlechter, the great aristocratic houses. The story repeated itself in 1349 when an aristocrat accidentally murdered a merchant member of the council, creating another armed conflict that ended with the expulsion of another batch of aristocrats. The council is reorganised in 1308 and 1330 and now recruits from three separate groups, the first are members of the 30 patrician families, the second, the Meenheit, are representatives of the upper middle classes, the artisans and smaller merchants  and finally the Wittheit, a sort of assembly of experts.

And finally, there was still the archbishop, technically the overlord of the city.

These differences may explain why Bremen had been expelled from the Hanse on multiple occasions. The first time in 1285 when the Hanse was forcing the king of Norway to accept the privileges for the Kontor in Bergen. Bremen had been trading with Norway and exporting stockfish from before Lubeck was even re-founded by Henry the Lion. They hence saw no reason to support the Hanse interlopers in their embargo. Their calculation was that if they would support the Norwegians, they would gain all the privileges the other Hansards were trying to gain by force. Let’s just say it did not work out and Bremen took a long time to get back into the Stockfish trade.

One of the problems with a history of Bremen is that material and secondary sources are much thinner on the ground than elsewhere. Why that is I have no idea, but even the simple question of whether Bremen was involved with the Hanse after the expulsion of 1285 seems hard to answer.

If they were, they were at best a junior partner. But maybe they were just ploughing their own furrow for the next 70 years. Because the next confirmed interaction with the Hanse in in 1358 when Bremen is begging to be admitted back in.

In 1358 Bremen is on its knees. A whole host of night soil men had decanted their commodities over the heads of its unsuspecting citizens. 

It started with what should have been a routine affair. The old archbishop, Otto I was gravely ill and had left the administration of the archbishopric to his nephew, Maurice of Oldenburg. When Otto died in 1348, Maurice was duly elected by the cathedral chapter to get the title for the job he was already doing. But he wasn’t the only candidate.

Godfrey of Arnsberg, the bishop of Osnabruck also wanted to be archbishop and so he bribed the pope Clement VI in Avignon to make him archbishop, which he duly did. The city council initially supported Maurice of Oldenburg. But when Maurice was out of town on business, Godfrey came in and managed to get the city council to accept him.

As was entirely predictable Maurice returned with his supporters and besieged the city. The walls were strong, but the attackers were many. As the battle was waving back and forth, people started to complain about unusual symptoms. Many reported fever, abdominal pain and bleeding. Their skin and tissue had turned black and shortly after the first symptoms appeared, most fell over dead.

The Black Death had arrived. It raged much more ferociously on the Weser than in any other Hanse city. Somewhere between half and two-thirds of its 15,000 inhabitants perished. Warfare had to stop, and the two combatants decided that Godfrey would get the title and Maurice would get the job.

Once the plague had subsided the city needed to rebuild its population. The council therefore opened its gates to anyone, including serfs to come and live in Bremen as free men and women.

That sat increasingly awkward with the count of Hoya who had become archbishop Godfrey’s strongest supporter. The count whose lands lay south of Bremen was losing tenants and serfs by the busload, something he could ill afford since half of his labourers had died as well and the land lay fallow. So, he demanded, in the name of the archbishop, that the serfs and tenants were to be sent back to him. In an unusual act of mercy and compassion, or out of fear the city could simply empty out, the city council refused.

At which point the parties decide to resolve the problem of depopulation by resuming hostilities. Things do not go well for the city and Bremen loses a battle in which several members of the council are taken hostage. The cost of the war and the ransom for the captured councillors ruin the already fragile finances of the city.

In an attempt to restore their fortunes, the citizens of Bremen beg the Hanse for admission after having tried to go it alone for so long. They are admitted and the burghers are preparing to get ready for some much-needed uptick in trade activity.

But no, bad timing. Just as Bremen was joining up things in Bruges had hit boiling point. 1358 was the year the Hanse issued one of its embargoes against Flanders. Trade with one of Bremen’s most important markets had to stop.

The desperate Bremer merchants say sod this for a game of soldiers. So, they break the embargo. At which point the Hanse comes down on them like a ton of bricks. Stick with the embargo or you are expelled and blocked from all Hanse ports. So, they go along, join the embargo taking even more pain.

Meanwhile on the enemy’s side things aren’t going well either. The count of Hoya also spends a lot of cash on war and weapons, cash he does not have. So, he looks for help and finds it in the form of the duke of Brunswick. But the duke’s help has a price. You guessed it, that price is the archbishopric of Bremen.

The count had to get his ally Godfrey to surrender the archbishopric and pass it on to the son of the duke of Brunswick, Albrecht II. A deal is made, Albrecht is confirmed by another bribeable pope and hey presto, we now have three archbishops. Maurice, Godfrey and Albrecht. But thanks to the superior weapons of the duke of Brunswick we find ourselves in 1362 in a situation where there is only one archbishop left, Albrecht II. Albrecht II brokers a peace agreement between the count of Hoya and Bremen. The embargo against Flanders had ended in 1360. Everything should now be fine.

It should, but it wasn’t. The city was still broke from paying the ransom for the captured councillors. Hence a special tax was introduced to repay the debt.

I guess we all know about what happens when special taxes are levied on the artisans and middle classes for projects that provide them with few or no benefits. If paying for the Stecknitz canal caused a large rebellion in Lubeck, guess what happened in Bremen when they asked the little people to pay the ransom for the moneybags on the City Council.  

The lower classes gathered together in what they called the Grande Cumpanien first to vent their grievances about the tax but that soon turned into demands to overthrow the 30 families, to have elected council members and just generally freedom!. On the morning of September 16, 1365 a large crowd assembled for a demonstration that quickly got out of hand. Leaders of the Grande Cumpanie raised the city banner and armed their followers. They broke into the homes of prominent council members, pushed and shoved them around and said very rude things about their mothers. But they did not apprehend or seriously harm anyone.

The retaliation of the patricians came swiftly. Remember that a wealthy city councillor lived a lifestyle not very different to a knight in the countryside. Most of them were trained in all the knightly arts, namely in the art of killing. These guys put on their armour, closed the gates and rode out to slaughter the insurrectionists – successfully as you would imagine. By the evening 18 leaders of the rebellion have been captured, convicted and executed.  The surviving insurrectionists fled in the night. Their possessions are seized and used to repay the city’s debt.

Ok, that was painful, but now things should be ok, right?

Ah, no, still not. There is our archbishop, Albrecht II, who turns out to be a bit of a bad egg. Albrecht’s biggest problem was that he liked to spend money, including money he did not have. Well, mostly money he did not have.

And the need for money made him do some odd things, including becoming a pirate. The archbishop had an accomplice, Johann Hollemann, the black sheep of family of Bremen patricians. Hollemann had been a successful pirate since the 1350s causing no end of problems for his hometown. But they couldn’t really do much about him since he lived in a fortified castle inside the city of Bremen and had lots of money and connections. Archbishop and noble pirate kept plundering ships that had taken the ground at low tide, claiming they were subject to salvage.

Given this level of financial urgency, archbishop Albrecht was very excited when the surviving insurrectionists from Bremen knocked on his door, a group that included his pirate buddy, Johann Hollemann. Together they came up with a plan to get hold of the city of Bremen and seize the wealth of its great patricians. The archbishop was to hire some mercenaries and Hollemann and the others would organise another uprising.

In the night of 28th to 29th of May the conspirators opened the gates to the archbishop’s soldiers. They quickly take the strategic positions inside the city. The Patricians had erected a wooden statue of Roland, the paladin of Charlemagne and by some warped logic the representation of the city’s independence. That statue was burned. And the usual murdering and settling of scores occurred. Now it was the turn of the patrician members of the Council to flee the city.

A new constitution was introduced that granted the artisans and their guilds the deciding vote in the selection of the members of the council. Bremen was to become a city ruled by the Middle classes under the benign overlordship of the archbishop-pirate Albrecht II.

That experiment in church-sponsored democracy was cut short. The exiled old council, much like their opponents had done only a few months earlier looked round for support. The Hanse immediately expelled the rebellious city. But Konrad of Oldenburg was the man to bring the old order back. After just 4 weeks, the regime of the lower classes, led by the pirate Johannes Hollemann collapsed. The Oldenburger’s army entered Bremen with the help of those who did not want to return under archepiscopal control. The insurrectionists were caught and killed on the spot. Johannes Hollemann was besieged in his castle in the city and once the soldiers had entered, they hanged him and his men in front of the house, or according to other accounts had him broken on the wheel.

Only after that does calm return to Bremen. The patricians accept that to avoid future rebellions the artisans and their guilds need to get better representation on the council. The archbishop Albrecht II is forced to give up most of his rights in the city, apart from a small district around the cathedral.

The role of the bishop in the city’s affairs diminishes even further when Albrecht II’s money problems compound after his capitulation. He offers rights like coinage and market rights as security for loans from the city. When he cannot pay back the city seizes these rights and mints coins until 1862.

And there is a final humiliation left for Albrecht II. In 1376 a member of his cathedral chapter claimed the archbishop was a Hermaphrodite. Albrecht II had to counter these claims by submitting to a public examination of his private parts, not something that increased his standing much.

The subsequent period of peace and independence from the archbishop brings about a huge improvement in the prosperity of the city. Bremen conquered the lands on the left and right bank of the Weser going down to the mouth of the River.

Its most famous monuments date from that time. The City Hall was built in 1405 to 1410. And obviously the mighty Roland, symbol of the city is rebuilt in stone. He looks straight at the front gate of the cathedral on the other side of the market square as a sign of defiance of the independent city from the archbishop. The merchants erect their guildhall, the Schutting on the market square. The current splendid building dates from the 16th century but there was a great assembly hall there since 1444.

Despite the economic improvement social tensions remain. Bremen’s history in the 15th and 16th century is punctuated with regular uprisings. In 1427 they kill their patrician Burgomaster which results in a renewed expulsion from the Hanse and even an imperial ban  that lasted until 1438.

The reformation came in 1524 and the city quickly converted. In 1532 Bremen saw a populist uprising similar to the Wullenwever episode in Lubeck but without the foreign policy lunacy that followed there. Bremen oscillated between Lutheranism and Calvinism for nearly 120 years. In 1563 Bremen declared for Calvinism and was expelled from the Hanse for it, but just 13 years later was re-admitted without having changed its religious position.

In 1599 Bremen begins the construction of extensive fortifications. The change in military technology required a fundamental rethinking of the way a city could withstand attacks. The works lasted all in until 1664 but by the time the 30-years war comes around, Bremen is one of the best defended cities in the German lands. In fact, the same is true for Hamburg and Lübeck. Thanks to these enormous walls and bastions the three Hanseatic cities survived the catastrophe largely unscathed. In fact even the inland members of the Hanse did manage comparatively well with the exception of Magdeburg that suffered one of the most famous atrocities of this brutal conflict.

But their survival wasn’t enough to revive the Hanse. Sweden and Denmark have become the dominant territorial states in what used to the naval monopoly of the Hanse. Many once great Hanse cities have accepted Swedish control, like Riga, Visby and Tallin. Wismar and Stralsund too were taken over by the Swedes, whilst Rostock was incorporated into Mecklenburg. The archbishopric of Bremen had become a duchy that was held by the king of Sweden, surrounding the city and incorporating Stade. Denmark stretched to Altona once a town outside the gates of Hamburg and now a part of the city. Many of the inland cities too have finally succumbed to the constant pressure from their territorial overlords, with Cologne and Brunswick the notable exceptions.

In 1629 the Hanseatic diet proposed that only three cities, Bremen, Hamburg and Lubeck were to represent the Hanse from now on. There were more Hanseatic Diets in the 40 years thereafter. In 1669 the last gathering took place.  At that diet no major decisions were taken. It is likely that most participants despite the gloomy atmosphere and meagre attendance realised this was the last time.

There was never a formal decision to dissolve the Hanse. It simply vanished from the political scene. The three cities, Bremen, Hamburg and Lubeck remained legally in charge of the Hanse assets, namely to Kontor buildings most if which were barely used and no longer held any privileges. Weird traditions continued. Lubeck would for example send an emissary to the now entirely empty beach where once the great herring market of Scania had taken place and declared the privileges of the Hanse of the Merchants of the Holy Roman Empire. Only the gulls were listening.

As for Bremen, the city found a new trading destination, the United States. From 1783 Bremen became the #1 port for ships going from Germany to North America. The main export goods were people. Between 1832 and 1960 about 7 million Germans emigrated to the US via Bremerhaven, the port Bremen had built on the mouth of the Weser. 

Bremen and Hamburg survived the tides of history as independent city states until today. That status changed only twice. During the time of the Napoleonic Bremen became part of the French department of the Bouches de Weser and Hamburg of the Bouches d’Elbe. And during the Nazi Regime Bremen and Bremerhafen were incorporated into the Reichsgau Weser-Ems whilst Hamburg was extended to become Gross-Hamburg.

Bremen the smallest of the German Länder maintains many of its historic traditions. The Haus Seefahrt is one of Europe’s oldest charities looking after retired captains and their wives and widows since 1545. They will hold the annual Schaffermahlzeit a splendid dinner for up to 500 people in the great hall of the Rathaus for the 480th time in February 2024. Standing at the windows the guests can see the mighty Roland that still staring defiantly at the gates of the Cathedral from where a higher authority once unsuccessfully tried to suppress the city’s independence. On the right they see the Schutting with the merchant guild’s motto embossed in gold – Buten un Binnen, Wagen un Winnen, away and at home we risk and we win.

We may have reached the end of the Hanse’s history, but that is not yet the end of the series. You have been here long enough to know that the History of the Germans does not close a series with the demise of its subject. Everything in German history has an afterlife, and the Hanse is no exception. So next week we will take a look at the tangible and intangible remains of the Hanse. I hope you will join us again.

And as always let me thank all the patrons who have signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website, historyofthegermans.com. Your support is what has kept this show going for 2 and a half years and should keep us moving forward for many years to come.

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The last two episodes may have left you with a sense of gloom and foreboding about the great Hanseatic cities. But here is the counterintuitive fact, the Hanse may continuously loose political power and economic relevance, but the cities that make up the association are flourishing. Not all of them but some, Hamburg and Danzig in particular.

Why it is that the Hanse declines, but the Hansards are doing mightily well is what we are looking into this week. So let’s see….

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 125 – The Rise and Rise of Hamburg

The last two episodes may have left you with a sense of gloom and foreboding about the great Hanseatic cities. But here is the counterintuitive fact, the Hanse may continuously loose political power and economic relevance, but the cities that make up the association are flourishing. Not all of them but some, Hamburg and Danzig in particular.

Why it is that the Hanse declines, but the Hansards are doing mightily well is what we are looking into this week. So let’s see….

But before we start, I would like to thank all my patrons and those of you who have made a one-time contribution. It is not just the monetary generosity that I find so humbling, it is also how much you care about the podcast. The other day one of you, Michael B, an almost excessively generous patron sent me a book I would have almost certainly overlooked. This book, J.K. Dunlop’s history of Hamburg from 800 to 1952 was originally written for British officers stationed in Hamburg to help them familiarise themselves with the place they were now administrating. First up, the book itself is a fascinating artefact of that period, but it is also charming and written in a crisp and concise, almost military style I enjoy enormously. Quite a bit of it features in today’s episode. So, thanks so much Michael. And I also would like to thank Hajo G., Kristi S., Timothy K-H and Brian C who have kindly signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans.

Last week we left the Hanseatic League, or more precisely Lübeck the city that had so often taken the lead in the political ambitions of this merchant’s association defeated and humiliated. Its populist dictator, Jürgen Wullenwever had dragged the city into the wars over the Danish succession following the deposition of king Christian II. In that war Wullenwever had pursued an impossible objective, forcing the Danes to close the Oresund to all Dutch shipping, something no Danish king could ever grant. Without the Oresund tolls a Danish ruler would have been too weak to control his powerful aristocrats who for centuries had not only chosen their king, but also deposed a few of them.

Following his military and political defeat, Wullenwever left Lübeck and was quickly apprehended, not by a party to the conflict, but by the archbishop of Bremen and his brother the duke of Brunswick who had him tortured and finally executed.

After the defeat the reconstituted patrician council of Lübeck quickly made peace with the king of Denmark, the Protestant Christian III. That wasn’t quite the end though. Emperor Charles V had another go, supporting another candidate for the Danish throne. That conflict lasted until 1544 and ended with a peace treaty giving the Dutch free access to the Oresund. Lübeck did not get involved at all.

Lübeck made one last attempt at military dominance of the Baltic during the Nordic Seven year’s war or sometimes called the war over the three crowns. That war was a bust-up between the successors of Christian III of Denmark and Gustav Vasa of Sweden. Though formally fought over the question whether the king of Denmark could carry three crowns on his coat of arms, behind it stood a set of much more tangible issues. Ivan IV, known to us as Ivan the Terrible had, before he was consumed by paranoia and madness pursued a successful expansion policy that gained him most of Livonia. The Teutonic Knights who used to rule the territory were pushed back to just Kurland and its last Landmeister, Gotthard Kettler dissolved the ancient order of the Livonian Swordbrothers and became duke of Kurland as a vassal of the king of Poland.

Ivan the not yet Terrible had sponsored the city of Narva as his preferred harbour for the export of fur and beeswax. Narva had not been allowed to join the Hanse thanks to the opposition of Reval, modern day Tallin. Narva became a great success and Lübeck merchants travelled there instead of going to Tallin where they had been subjected to protectionist rules for the last century. At the same time Tallin sought protection from Russians and Lubeck under the mighty arm of Sweden so that when war broke out, Sweden seized 32 Lübeck ships.

Lübeck had to respond. It declared war on Sweden and tried to gather support amongst the other Hanse cities. But again, nobody followed suit, in part because Lübeck had supported the city of Narva over its fellow Hansards at Tallin. Seems you cannot call for Hanseatic solidarity when you have failed to live it first. Lübeck found itself again as isolated as it had been under Wullenwever.

Lübeck then had to double down and built the largest warships of its time, the Adler of Lübeck. 78m or 257 feet overall, 68 large cannon spread over three decks, made it one of the earliest ships of the line. But it did not help. When the ship was commissioned in 1567 the naval war had already gone terribly badly for the city on the Trave. Its main fleet including its flagship and the commanding grand admiral had been lost in a storm off Gotland. So, when the Adler was splashed it could no longer be deployed successfully. So, no shot was ever fired in anger. In 1570 the war was over.

In the peace agreement Lübeck got its trading privileges in Narva reconfirmed. But that wasn’t worth anything. Because in the meantime Ivan the Terrible had gone full on mental, killing people on a near industrial scale, which made it difficult for him to hold on to Livonia. Sweden conquered the province and took over Narva. At which point Lübeck merchants no longer held any special trading rights in commerce with what is slowly becoming Russia.

It is also the last time Lübeck embarked on any kind of military adventure.

For the Hanse as a whole the decline in the fortunes of Lübeck was a clear indication that the world had changed. They began to arrive at the correct analysis of why that was. Not the Dutch and English merchants were the problem, but the change in the political landscape. Other traders could count on the support of powerful states opening up trade routes and protecting their wares. The kings of England were sponsoring the Merchant Adventurers who received patents to form the Muscovy company, the Levant company and most famously the East India Company. The Dutch had the support of Charles V and the Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Russian rulers had shaken off the monopolistic powers of the Hanse. What the Hanse cities knew they needed was a powerful sponsor.

The natural supporter of what used to be the Hanse of the Merchants of the Holy Roman Empire would have been the emperor himself, Charles V and later his brother Ferdinand I. But both of them were Catholics which made them suspicious, and far away which made them ineffective. Denmark was close and its ruler protestant but having fought a war too many against Copenhagen made that impossible. Danzig kept proposing the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth whose territory kept growing and growing, but that was a long shot for Cologne or Brunswick.

Nothing came of this. Instead, the four lead cities, Cologne, Brunswick, Lübeck and Danzig did the next best thing. They gave up their ancient tradition of being a loose federation and became a real organisation. They initially agreed an alliance for 10 years but that was extended multiple times. The main tenets of the agreement were that each city would contribute towards a common budget that should fund the maintenance of the Kontors, joint provision of security for transports on land and at sea, dispensation of justice and if needed military retaliation against breaches of the peace.

And for the first time the Hanse was to be given its own bureaucracy. The role of the council of Lübeck as general secretary of the Hanse that calls the Hanseatic diets and sets their agenda was given to the newly created Syndicus of the Hanse. A Syndicus is an ancient Latin word denominating someone tasked with defending the rights of an association or organisation, but not necessarily leading it. In modern German parlance, a Syndikus is the general council of a company.

Most of the Hanseatic cities had a Syndicus whose job it was to represent the city in negotiations with other cities or in court, whilst the major political decisions were taken by the city council and the Burgomaster.

So, the role of Syndicus of the Hanse wasn’t designed to create a CEO, but to be a go-to person for foreign powers who would discuss issues that he could then propose to the Hanseatic Diet for resolution. The first Syndicus was Heinrich Sudermann, a merchant from Cologne. An excellent choice. He had the social standing necessary as his family was one of the great families of Cologne. His father had been Burgomaster. And he had the necessary qualifications. A Doctor of Law from one of the great Italian universities who had been on diplomatic missions for his hometown several times before.

Sudermann stayed in post for an impressive 35 years. Still his megaproject turned out to be a disaster. Having seen the Kontors in Novgorord and Bergen going under, Sudermann was intent on not letting that happen to the other two remaining ones, in London and Bruges.

Bruges was the one that looked most at risk. Trade in the city had declined sharply since the end of the 14th century. Many of the foreigners who had made Bruges such an important centre of trade had moved to nearby Antwerp. That also included the Hanse merchants.

Despite this shift the Hanse kept insisting on the continued existence of the Kontor in Bruges. The reason was that in Bruges the Hanse had received and was able to maintain a vast set of privileges, whilst in Antwerp they had few such rights. But the economic reality was such that trading in Antwerp even without special conditions was a lot more lucrative than seeking clients in the declining town of Bruges. And as oversight from the Kontor was a lot laxer in Antwerp than in Bruges, the more entrepreneurial traders flaunted the rules openly, setting up trading businesses together with their Dutch colleagues.

Sudermann believed that to rebuild the power of the Hanse in Flanders, they needed to move to Antwerp. And not only that. The Hansards had to be forced to live together in a Kontor as they had done in Bergen and Novgorod, so that discipline could be restored. Only with discipline could the Hanse force the powers in Antwerp to grant them new privileges, as the leaders of Bruges had done in the 14th century.

So Sudermann had an enormous trading Kontor built, near the harbour of Antwerp. The Kontor covered 5000 square metres, its façade stretched for 80 metres, it allegedly had 365 windows, 23 storage rooms, 133 luxury bedrooms, 27 cellars plus communal dormitories, dining halls and several kitchens. The plan was that all Hansards active in Antwerp were to live here at the Kontor, tightly supervised by the aldermen. But take-up was limited. Many of the Hansards in Antwerp had moved there permanently, had married and bought property. When asked to move themselves and their families into the new building, they refused, preferring to be excluded from the Hanse privileges.

Still some Hansards did agree to move in and Sudermann felt that things might eventually work out after all..

But already by 1566 when the Kontor was under construction, the first signs of religious trouble appeared. A wave of iconoclasm overshadowed the grand opening. Antwerp shifted towards Calvinism which brought about a sharp response from King Philipp II of Spain, now overlord of the Low Countries. In 1576 the Spanish troops sacked the city. In 1584 the city was besieged again, in 1585 the Schelde river was blocked by the Protestant Netherlands which further reduced the amount of trade going through it. Because of the declining commercial activity, the Kontor could not service the debt taken on when it was built. In 1591 a special tax was levied on the cities to pay off the debt. Still the Kontor gradually emptied out. It was still owned by the Hanseatic cities of Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen when Napoleon restructured Antwerp harbour which left the building surrounded by water on all sides. It became a warehouse and later barracks. In 1893 it burned down and what remained was removed. In May 2011 the Museum am Stroom opened on the site, displaying the art and culture of the port and city of Antwerp.

For Sudermann the failure of the Kontor in Antwerp was a major setback. That was followed shortly after by the closure of the Stahlhof in London. The English had been enraged by the lack of reciprocity in the trading relations with the Hansards. The German merchants had been insisting on their privileges that dated back as far as the 12th century, giving them free access to the English market. Meanwhile the English traders travelling into the Baltic were hindered at every junction. As the Tudor monarchy consolidated power into a more modern state, these medieval oddities became harder and harder to take. One of the few acts of the short reign of Edward VI, the son of Henry VIII was to recall the Hanse privileges. A few months later his sister and successor, Mary I, bloody Mary readmitted the Hansards but only on paper. The merchants were still being harassed. The Hanse responded with a trade embargo, but could not make it stick, so the situation remained challenging for the remaining Hansards in England.

When fellow protestant Elisabeth I came in, the situation improved a bit, but then the Kontor’s support for England’s allies in the Netherlands was lukewarm, so that Elisabeth resumed her predecessor’s position. The English merchants started trading through the town of Emden, which wasn’t a member of the Hanse. Hansards who wanted to sail to England had to do something, so first Stade and then Hamburg signed an agreement with England, letting the Merchant Adventurers in.

Sudermann tried to keep the Hanse together and form a unified front against the English, but to no avail. He tried to force Hamburg to call off the deal with the English, but the organisation was no longer able to enforce such kind of discipline internally. Nor could they stop Elbing and the Danzig to open their doors.

Lübeck obtained a decision by the imperial court that the English had established an illegal monopoly in the Baltic. Oh, the irony! The English took one look at that and at the probability of emperor Rudolf to leave his cabinet of curiosities in Prague to fight them on the beaches and laughed heartily. Going one further, as they pursued the Spanish back into Cadiz in the year after the Spanish Armada, they burned 60 German ships before Lisbon.

Now the emperor orders the Merchant Adventurers expelled from Germany sanctioning anyone who harbours them with the imperial ban. Elisabeth I reacts immediately, she throws the remaining German merchants out and seizes the Stahlhof. In 1598 the Hanse privileges in England end for good. The Stahlhof is returned 20 years later but never recovers.

As far as the great Kontors and trading privileges in the main international ports are concerned, the Hanse is finished. Their internal organisation may be tighter and more efficient than in the past, but fewer and fewer cities are prepared to pay the levy to fund it. For what? There were few benefits when travelling abroad. And even when trading with other Hanse cities, they did no longer provide much preferential treatment to their fellow members. As we go forward, the Hanse keeps shrinking until the very last Hanseatic Diet in 1669.

This all sounds terribly depressing, doesn’t it. Lost wars, closed Kontors, aggressive Dutch and English competitors, dwindling finances. All these Hanse merchants must have walked around with their heads in their hands bemoaning their lost fortunes, right?

As it happened, they did not. Sure, the fall of Hanseatic power in the Baltic is unlikely to have been something that cheered them up. But on the other hand, business was great. Not just great, really, really great.

One of the reasons for that was the same reason that led to the fall of the Kontor in Antwerp and the loss of the Stahlhof – the Eighty Years war. What was the Eighty Years war you may ask, that is if you are neither Dutch nor Belgian. In that latter case you probably know very much what the Eighty years war was.

Fun thing about the 80 Years’ War, nobody can agree when it actually started. One date could have been the Beeldenstorm the iconoclastic uprising in Antwerp that interrupted the construction of Sudermann’s great Antwerp Kontor. It was definitely under way in 1572 when Dutch rebels against Spanish rule captured the undefended port of Den Briel in South Holland.

The 80 Years’ War or the Dutch Revolt as it is also called was the long and arduous struggle of the Low Countries against the government of the Habsburg Netherlands. Habsburg rule had become unpopular due to its push for centralisation, curtailing the ancient privileges of the cities, its demands for taxes and the local governors aggressive drive to keep the Netherlands in the Catholic Faith.

At the end of this war the Low Countries were divided into the Spanish Netherlands, broadly speaking modern day Belgium and the Dutch Republic, modern day Netherlands.

The war breaks down into two phases, the first was from these unknown beginnings to a truce in 1609. The truce lasted 12 years. Hostilities resumed and continued alongside or as part of the 30-Years’ War. It ended in 1648 with the peace of Westphalia that also ended the 30-Years’ War.   

The Dutch Revolt completely changed the structure of Northern European trade. The rebellious Dutch provinces fought a war for survival on two fronts. One was the military struggle, the other the economic struggle.

Militarily the Spanish kept besieging one city after another. If they succeeded, they sacked them, most famously Antwerp in 1574, if they did not succeed, they devastated the surrounding territory. The Dutch side was gaining the upper hand roughly 30 years in when Maurice of Orange reformed the army and created modern warfare.

All that was great and heroic, but the foreign merchants who preferred not be caught up in sieges or having their goods plundered by unpaid soldiers left Antwerp. As the war continued, the Dutch cities tried to hit the enemy where it hurt most, in its wallet. A large part of the wealth of Habsburg Spain came from the spice trade the Portuguese had opened up when they sailed around the cape of Good Hope. That is where the Dutch now directed their ships, the spice islands of Indonesia. These are the beginnings of the Dutch East India Company, the first joint stock company in the world and a source of enormous incomes, making it the other reason why these few provinces on the edge of the sea could fend off the greatest empire Europe had seen since the Fall of Rome.

For our Hanseatic cities, this reset of the political environment was a huge boon. Both the Dutch and the Spanish had a near inexhaustible demand for things like wood, ash, tear, flax, metals and saltpetre to build their ships and cannons and make sails and gunpowder. All of this could be got from the Hanseatic cities, in particular from Danzig. As a neutral party, Danzig could supply both sides. And it was now part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which stretched all the way from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea, encompassing some of the most fertile lands in Europe.

Which gets us to the other great business, food. As the climate was hurtling towards the true depths of the Little Ice Age, grain became a hugely important commodity. And again, Danzig was in pole position to supply the world with the wheat, rye and barley of Ukraine and Poland that came down the Vistula River.

What made it even more lucrative was that the Dutch were restrained from taking the grain much beyond their homeland. Grain that used to travel to Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean on Dutch ships was now transported on Hanse ships because as neutrals they were allowed to enter these ports. The Spaniards even ordered their Italian allies not to accept grain from Dutch traders during a major famine. Which created a situation where the grand duke of Tuscany and even the pope had to send embassies to Hamburg and Danzig to purchase much needed grain. Trade with the Mediterranean increased rapidly throughout the late 16th end early 17th century mainly bringing down grain, metals and wood and returning with wine, spices and luxury goods. The trade gained such an extent that Hamburg established an admiralty to protect their ships from North African pirates. They had to set up a special budget to buy the freedom of Hamburgers who had been captured and enslaved on the barbary coast. One captured Hamburg captain converted and spent his life as a Muslim pirate called Murat.

The good relations between Hamburg, Lübeck and Danzig with Spain and Portugal meant they could sail even further with Several Hamburg merchants establishing trade with Brasil.

The scale of the expansion of trade is truly impressive. In 1497, the earliest year we have a complete record, 795 ships passed through the Oresund. It stays around the 1,000 number for the first half of the 16th century. Then it rises quickly. During the period 1557 to 1569 the average was 3,280, by the 1590s it had increased to 5,036 journeys and by the end of the century peaked at 6,673 more than 9 times the number of ships than a century earlier. Part of the increase in the number of journeys were advances in marine technology. The Dutch had invented a new type of ship, the Fluite which could do two journeys from the Netherlands to the Baltic and back in one year. And then these ships were much larger than they had been in the 15th century. Economically the Hanse had grown at least factor 5 during this period of its political decline.

What had also changed was the composition of the Hanse cities. During the heyday of the Hanse in the 14th and 15th century the cities were populated by merchants speaking Middle Low German. The cities were happy to take in people from other Hanseatic cities and give them citizen rights, but they did not grant those rights to traders they regarded as foreigners. In particular not the English, Portuguese and Italians.  The Dutch were also seen as foreigners even though at least in part lived in the Holy Roman empire, some of whom had been members of the Hanse in the past and they spoke Middle Low German.

By the middle and late 16th century the picture had fundamentally changed. Portuguese and Italians who had fled the war in the Netherlands had found refuge initially in Cologne. But that lasted only a relatively brief period, so they moved north to Hamburg, which despite being a Protestant city was happy to accommodate them. The same was true for the Dutch who not only travelled to Hamburg and Danzig on their swift freighters, but they also settled in these places.

And finally, there are the English. The Merchant Adventurers sponsored by the Tudor monarchs had been searching for a safe port on the German coast. Emden had been their first base but when the ancient port of Stade on the Elbe River allowed them in, they took the opportunity to get closer to the main waterways and roads south. They stayed in Stade for 20 years but after the defeat of the Armada the city of Hamburg who had so far been hesitant opened its doors to the English, even if that meant heavy repercussions from Lübeck and other Hansards.

The English did not only bring the now dominant English cloth to Hamburg for further distribution, the friendship with England also meant Hamburg merchants could ship their goods through the channel, even goods going to Spain or the Mediterranean. Other Hansards had to take the Northward route over the top of Britain and west of Ireland to escape English privateers in the channel. Going round Britain and Ireland is not fun as anyone who ever did the Round Britain and Ireland race can attest.

Foreign merchants in Hamburg were free to trade on exactly same terms as the locals. They could form companies with other merchants. There were no guilds that restricted certain routes to its members. They were free to practice their religion. 

Not everyone shared Hamburg and Danzig’s attitude towards foreigners. The official Hanse policy, shaped by Lübeck remained strongly protectionist, insisting that guests could only trade with approved local intermediaries, could not create companies with Hansards and had to leave after a prescribed period of time. Some cities tried to enforce these protectionist policies, others like Hamburg and Danzig ignored them.

As the Eighty Years war comes to an end in 1648, the great economic boom that had lasted almost its entire length came to an end. Merchants from the United Provinces were free to sail and trade with everyone again. And thanks to the success of the Dutch East India company they had become the dominant maritime power in Europe. And as that happened, the routes down towards Iberia and the Mediterranean were again serviced by the Dutch making life harder for the Hansards.

It was in particular Lubeck traders found it hard to adjust to these changed conditions. They had kept up with Hamburg and Danzig during the 80 Years’ war. They had founded a guild of Traders going to Spain that had excluded foreigners from taking part. This had prospered but was now caught in a struggle for survival.

Lübeck, always the largest city in the Hanse now fell behind Hamburg and Danzig in terms of population. Hamburg, which had 15,000 inhabitants in 1500 grew to 50,000 by the beginning of the 17th century, making it Germany’s largest city bigger than Cologne and Lubeck.

Its merchant fleet became larger than any other thanks to the addition of many Dutch shipping firms who had relocated to the Elbe. It built mighty warships to protect its convoys. Its foreign traders, in particular the Portuguese had made Hamburg the centre of trade in sugar and spices. The Italians and Portuguese established commercial banks clustered around the Lombardsbruecke. A bourse was opened in 1558, in 1619 the Hamburger Bank became its central bank modelled on the Bank of Amsterdam 10 years earlier.

In 1609 the council of Lubeck accused Hamburg before the Hanseatic Diet that “barely a 100th of its trade is in the hands of its own citizens, but handled by the Dutch, the Southern Germans, French, Portuguese, English and others.” In 1609 Lubeck reconfirmed its right of the staple, requiring everyone trading through his harbour to offer their wares to Lubeck merchants and only to buy from Lubeck merchants. This ordinance remained in force for 150 years, at the end of which Lubeck had become nothing more than Hamburg’s harbour on the Baltic in the same way 300 years earlier Hamburg used to be Lubeck’s harbour on the North Sea.

Trade, as it happens is one of the few things where 1 plus 1 is 3. To say it with good old Adam Smith:  “In general, if any branch of trade, or any division of labour, be advantageous to the public, the freer and more general the competition, it will always be the more so.”

Openness to competition and willingness to accommodate foreigners is why since the middle of the 17th century Hamburg is one of the richest cities in Europe. Today it has 1.8m inhabitants, whilst Lübeck which stuck to its protectionist approach until the very end has 217,000 a mere tenth of its rival.

Let me close with a quote I found in the book by J.K Dunlop. Dunlop had found letters by a certain Dr. Thomas Nugent, a fellow of the London Society of Antiquarians, who visited the city in 1766.

Dr. Nugent visited the English Merchant Adventurers at their “factory” as their counting house in Groningerstrasse was called. There he visited the factory’s bowling green, which was quote “situated near the new church of St. Michael’s in very good air, with a convenient house, surrounded with tall handsome trees, where they frequently meet for recreation and exercise. At the same place there is a regular weekly assembly at which the gentlemen and ladies of Hamburg intermix with those of the factory, amuse themselves with chit-chat, cards and dancing.” End quote.

Nothing illustrates better the Hamburg approach to foreigners coming there to trade than granting them an English bowling green next to the most significant new church in the city. The place where it used to be is still called Englische Planke, after the boards they had set up around the bowling green.

Next week I guess we will conclude our narrative. We will follow through to the last Hanseatic diet in 1669 and take a last look at what the Hanse left behind. The society it created, its culture and architecture. I hope you will join us again.

And as always I want to thank my patrons who have signed up on patreon.com/history of the Germans or have made a one-time contribution on historyofthegermans.com/support. Thanks so much. For sources for today’s episode please check the shownotes.

Bibliography:

J.K. Dunlop, Hamburg 800-1945, Published by the Anglo-German Club E.V.

Philippe Dollinger, Die Hanse, 6. Auflage, 2012

by on

A crocodile whose main body is concealed below the water?

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.

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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)

by on

Did Klaus Störtebecker even exist, and if so, did he matter?

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.