What is the Hansa?

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

The answer he got was not very satisfactory:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer he got was not very satisfactory:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what is the Hanse?

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

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

But pretty much everything else was different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the factual bit.

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

In the 19^th 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 14^th century the Hanse trade changed. Up and coming merchants were still criss-crossing the Baltic with their own wares. But established merchants would settle down in one place and trade across multiple markets. They would buy space on one ship going to Novgorod, on another going to Bergen, whilst buying goods coming in from Narva or Stockholm to be forwarded to London.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jahnke, Carsten: Die Hanse | Reclam Verlag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, if you want to protect your fellow listeners not just from the delights of Doge Coin but also from my singing voice, become a patron of the show at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or make a one-time donation at historyofthegermans.com/support. Let’s all thank Carl, Vivian R., Matthew and Niclas who have already signed up.

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 14^th 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 14^th and 15^th 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 13^th 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 14^th 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 14^th 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.

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.

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.

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 18^th 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 14^th 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.

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 16^th 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.

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.

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 19^th 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.