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How Germany became the centre of the most advanced industry of its day

In 1550 Spanish court records show that the Augsburg armorer Kolman Helmschmied was paid an advance of 2,000 ducats for a full armour for king Philipp II. The final price for this piece was 3,000 ducats. At the same time Raphael could charge at max 170 ducats for an altarpiece. Even the Renaissances’ best paid artist, Michelangelo received just 3,000 gold florins for the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Armour, along with tapestries, were the most valuable artworks of the 15th and 16th century.

That was just one set of armour made for the most powerful monarch of the time. But what about the thousands of soldiers he commanded, did they have armour? Oh yes they did. Not quite as sophisticated and certainly not as decorated, but they did. And where did these thousands of helmets and breast and back plates come from? From the same places where their prince’s fancy metalwork came from, from Nürnberg and Augsburg. Their swords came from Passau and Solingen and their firearms from Suhl.

How come these mostly southern Germn cities became the armories of Europe whose output clad the armies that fought the never-ending wars of the 15th, 16th and 17th century? How did they supersede Milan, the centre of weapons production in the preceding century in terms of quality, scale and availability, and create a tradition of metalworking and entrepreneurship that lasts until today?

That is what we will look at in this episode.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 202 – Arms and Armour which is also episode 17 of Season 10 “the Empire in the 15Th Century”.

In 1550 Spanish court records show that the Augsburg armorer Kolman Helmschmied was paid an advance of 2,000 ducats for a full armour for king Philipp II. The final price for this piece was 3,000 ducats. At the same time Raphael could charge at max 170 ducats for an altarpiece. Even the Renaissances’ best paid artist, Michelangelo received just 3,000 gold florins for the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Armour, along with tapestries, were the most valuable artworks of the 15th and 16th century.

That was just one set of armour made for the most powerful monarch of the time. But what about the thousands of soldiers he commanded, did they have armour? Oh yes they did. Not quite as sophisticated and certainly not as decorated, but they did. And where did these thousands of helmets and breast and back plates come from? From the same places where their prince’s fancy metalwork came from, from Nürnberg and Augsburg. Their swords came from Passau and Solingen and their firearms from Suhl.

How come these mostly southern Germn cities became the armories of Europe whose output clad the armies that fought the never-ending wars of the 15th, 16th and 17th century? How did they supersede Milan, the centre of weapons production in the preceding century in terms of quality, scale and availability, and create a tradition of metalworking and entrepreneurship that lasts until today?

That is what we will look at in this episode.

But before we start the usual thanks to our great patrons whose unwavering commitment keeps this show advertising free. And you too could bask in the soft glow of the appreciation of your fellow listeners by signing up on historyofthegermans.com/support. This week we send our warm regards to Pete H., David S., Annette F, Luis, Louis, Daniel, Stephen G. and Christian G., , , who have already done so.ardy, whose upcoming book you can find in the book recommendations, and Eamon M., whose generous help at historyofthegermans.com/support keeps the enjoyment coming.

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And with that back to the show

I am approaching this episode with no small amount of trepidation. I know that several of you have a strong interest in arms, armor and fighting technique. And some are taking their passion so far as to learn and apply these techniques in real life as y kids would say. In other words, there are some serious experts here who will catch me out mercilessly when I am getting things wrong.

I on the other hand cannot really distinguish between a rapier and a broadsword. My interest in the topic of arms and armor is purely from a history and economic history perspective. So. if you are looking for a deep dive into the different types of armor and weapons, how exactly they are used, you will be disappointed. I did look for a podcast that I could direct you to if that is what you were seeking, but am afraid I could not find it. There is however a whole world of YouTube videos out there that do a brilliant job at explaining things.

What I can do though is give you an idea how the economics of this business worked and why this amazing industry cluster in southern Germany came to be.

That being said, I will start with a very brief rundown of the development of arms and armor in europe before we go into the question why Nurnberg, Augsburg, Passau and later Suhl and Solingen became the dominant manufacturing hubs for land-based arms and armor.

Armor is as old as human combat. To win a fight you first have to survive it. Hence every time a new weapon was developed, it was immediately followed by the invention of a way to deflect it. And every deflective tool was immediately followed by the development of a new offensive weapon, which created a new tactic to diffuse it and so forth and so forth. Knightly amour as we find it in every half decent museum had its predecessors in ancient Greek helmets, the ornate breastplates of roman emperors and the scale armour of the Persian cataphract.

What interests us here is the armour and arms in europe since the Middle Ages, which followed the same pattern. Every new form of arms and armour is a reaction to a new threat posed by an enemy with a superior technology.

When this podcast started in 919, that threat were first and foremost the Magyars, horse archers who could attack swiftly and release their composite bows on their enemies. And the response of in particular Henry the Fowler, king of East Francia was armored knight on horseback.

This armour consisted mainly of chainmail, rather than plate. This was helpful against Magyar arrows and even more against swords. Swords at the time were too brittle to be used for stabbing. Instead, early medieval warriors were slashing at their enemies, a move chainmail could deflect.

Chainmail never went away and was used for centuries thereafter. However, as external enemies had been defeated and the Europeans moved on to fight each other, military tactics changed.

The preferred weapon alongside the sword was the spear or lance. Up until the 12th century European warriors used their spears in the same way as we see Native Americans using them in Westerns, i.e, overhand or by thrusting them forward.

The first shift in fighting technique was implemented by the Normans. These guys were, to use a technical term, nutters. So far, armored cavalry had used horses as transport to get close to the enemy where they would be lobbing their spears or slashing their swords before returning back to the line to get a new spear. The Normans came up with the idea to use the horse as a weapon. So, instead of turning around after the spear had been launched, they simply kept going at full tilt into the midst of the enemy forces.

I might have told this story before, but a few years ago I went to see the Palio in Siena. And before the actual race, the carabinieri stage a full-on cavalry attack with swords drawn around the course. I do not think I have ever seen anything more terrifying. Anna Komnene, the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Alexios Komnenos said about these nutters in 1148: “A mounted Frank is unstoppable – he could smash through the walls of Babylon”. End quote.

And that was before they employed the couched lance, aka the kind of fighting with lances we know from medieval tournaments. That came in the very late 12th and early 13th century. Fighting with a couched lance means that the lance is held under the Achsel and retained by various kinds of contraptions. The impact of a couched lance on an opponent is roughly factor four of the impact of a lance thrusted or thrown.

This shift in tactics drove a vast number of changes. The focus is now not just on get close to the enemy and then apply whatever weapon one has at hand, but it is all about the speed and the force of the clash between opponents. Getting this right is tricky, seriously tricky. It requires years and years of training. Which is why they invented tournaments at exactly this time. It is to hone their skills in a comparatively safe environment.

When attacking, the knight will aim his lance at three potential targets, the head, which is extremely hard to hit, but would have a catastrophic impact on the adversary. The shield or body, which is a bigger target, but is a lot less likely to do catastrophic damage, or the horse, which leaves the enemy unharmed but would result in an immediate removal of combat capacity.

Chainmail provides very limited protection in this kind of warfare. As we go through the 12th into the 13th and 14th century, new forms of protection emerge. The head is the first to get covered in more sophisticated helmets of varying construction. Breastplates are developed that are supposed to deflect the impact of the lance and finally the horses are getting covered in iron.

The efficacy of a couched lance can be improved if the butt is attached to some form of rest. That rest could be integrated into the breastplate, allowing the rider to use more of his body to deliver the impact. Hence, we find all sorts of attachments to the breastplate that holds the lance.

Couched lance combat has a couple of drawbacks. It is quite inaccurate and a knight who has missed his target will find himself in the midst of the enemy forces, or worse, is unhorsed and needs to continue fighting on foot.

By the 15th century that has become seriously dangerous, but in line with improvements to armor, sword technology had also advanced. They are now often made of steel, which is harder and less brittle than iron. Swordsmen can now not only cut, but they can also thrust without having to fear their sword will break in two. Which is another nail in the coffin of armour purely made of chainmail.

Gradually plate armour covers more and more of the body. Legs and the back are getting covered and by the mid to late 15th century we arrive at the kind of armour we can see displayed in all their grandeur in the Metropolitan Museum, the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna, the Royal Armouries or one of my favourites, the Wallace Collection.

Even though infantry becomes more important on the battlefield during the Hundred years’ War and firearms show their enormous power in the Hussite Wars, plate armour is still produced and used in vast quantities for almost 300 years thereafter. Because it was still effective.

For one, the absolute top end quality plate armour could sustain the impact of a musketshot, but more importantly, firearms remained one shot weapons well into the 19th century. Hence a phalanx on armoured riders could still run down a line of arkebusiers busy reloading their weapons. Therefore, military tactics developed that combined firearms with pikemen and heavy as well as light cavalry well into the 17th century.

The other important factor is that armour is not just a military tool, but also fashion. I took part in the Wallace Collection’s summer school about arms and armour this year and the curator Keith Dowen and the armourer David Edge compared renaissance armour to modern day cars. A spectacular armour, like the one OttHeinrich of the Palatinate or emperor Maximilian would wear, was like driving a customised Ferrari or McLaren. These were status symbols that combined performance at the outer edge of what was technically possible with beauty and bling. These were, along with tapestries, the by far most expensive luxury goods in any princely household.

This is an audio show, so it is simply impossible to describe some of the most astounding pieces made in the 15th and 16th century, but I can completely see why some people put Helmschmied, Lochner, Negroli, Wilhelm von Worms and Konrad Seusenhofer on par with some of the great renaissance painters. And that is at least what their contemporaries believed. As I mentioned, in 1550 Colman Helmschmied  charged the Spanish court 3,000 dukats for a full armour, whilst Raphael at the absolute height of his fame commanded 177 dukats for an altarpiece. In other words, you could get 15 Raphaels for one Helmschmied.  

There would be lots and lots more to be said about the functionality and decoration of armour in the 15th and 16th century, but this is not what we are here for. The question we want to answer is why the most magnificent machines or war and masterpieces of art were produced in Nurnberg, Augsburg and Innsbruck and at the same time, why these, together with Passau and later Suhl and Solingen, became the Arsenal of Europe, the place you went to when you needed to equip 5,000 cavalry in a hurry.

Each of their stories is slightly different, and since we have done Augsburg recently, let’s focus on Nurnberg first.

To make armour, in particular to produce it at scale and at the desired level of quality, there are a couple of basic things that are needed.

Water is crucial. To hammer a sheet of metal into shape was extremely labour intensive. Armourers used water mills to drive hammers to first grind the metal ore and then to flatten the steel. Watermills also drove polishing wheels used to smooth and polish armour and to sharpen swords. But crucially, to produce high quality is steel is all about heating the metal to the right temperature. Watermills drove bellows that pushed a consistent level of oxygen into the forge, keeping the temperature steady, In the case of Nurnberg, the Pregnitz was diverted across multiple mill canals that powered water mills throughout the city, not only for armourers but for all sorts of other trades as well.

The next thing an armourer needs is charcoal for the forge, and again it has to be charcoal of consistent quality to keep the temperature steady. . Nurnberg was famously surrounded by poor soil, one of the reasons Barbarossa had granted them free imperial status in the first place. And that soil was therefore still covered in forests, ideal for producing the valuable charcoal.

Then they need iron ore. Thanks to the rapid expansion of all sorts of mining activities during the 14th and 15th century, there were multiple sources of iron ore or iron ingots accessible to Nurnberg artisans. But one mountain held and still holds Europe’s largest deposit of the most valuable iron ore, an iron ore that was already marginally carbonized called Siderite or FECO3 to give it its scientific name. That mountain is the Erzberg in Styria, the ore mountain. Do not get that confused with the Erzgebirge, the Ore Montains on the border between Saxony and Bohemia. This is the Erzberg in Styria. Styria was under Habsburg control and once the Habsburgs became emperors, the empire’s foremost cities, like Nurnberg, Augsburg and Passau had ready access to this valuable ore. And mining was and is a capital intensive business. Where could capital to run an open cast iron ore mine come from – correct, the bankers of Augsburg and Nurnberg, who happened to also be the guys who bankrolled the armourers.

Transport infrastructure was crucial. There is no point making vast quantities of helmets, breast plates and gauntlets and then not being able to deliver them to the customer who is readying for war. When Nurnberg was founded, it was not at the crossroads of any major roads. But by the 15th century, the city had bent Europes flow of goods to its will. New routes have been established that all went through Nurnberg. The Via Imperii that comes down from Stettin on the Baltic then through Leipzig goes all the way to Rome via Venice intersects here with the Via Regia that links Krakow with Paris. Other routes link Nurnberg to other key nodes like Prague, Augsburg, Vienna and Regensburg. By 1500 the city on the Pregnitz sits like a spider in the middle of central Europe’s trade routes. On top of that, Nurnberg merchants held trading privileges with 70 cities across the empire and beyond, making their wares materially cheaper than their competition.

To speak business strategy for a moment, another factor that leads to the development of industry clusters are demand conditions. In an ideal scenario, there is already some major local demand for the product that gets the industry to enough scale to compete internationally. This why a lot of the latest tech is developed in larger domestic markets like the US and China, rather than say, Belgium.

I guess you know where we are going with this. These last 15 episodes have introduced you to a veritable plethora of local conflicts, the Mainzer Stiftstfehde, the seemingly never-ending Bavarian wars of succession, the fight for the Low countries and these are only the ones I selected for being the more juicy and meaningful ones. The Holy Roman Empire in the 15th century was a never-ending rigmarole of armed conflicts between princes, princes and cities, cities and emperors and any other combination thereof, plus there were the larger wars, the ones against the Hussites and ever more importantly those against the Ottomans.

So, domestic demand was not a problem armourers needed to worry about unduly.

Nurnberg’s lead in arms and armour manufacturing kicked off with a rather mundane-sounding invention, mechanised wire drawing. The very first wire-drawing mills in europe opened in the city in 1368. Long, uniform metal wire is produced by pulling metal rods through successively smaller dies. As you can imagine, this was brutally hard to do by hand. Using waterpower to deliver a consistent amount of pull made the process infinitely faster, cheaper and delivered a much higher quality product.

The wire drawing process was one of Nurnberg’s most closely guarded secret. Master wiredrawers had to be Nurnberg citizens, they weren’t allowed to leave the city or take apprentices from abroad. The secrecy around this process was materially tighter than it was on the armourers themselves.

Having access to large quantities of cheap, uniform wire gave Nurnberg an initial leg up in the armourers’ business, since chain mail consists, yes of wire. The Nurnberg chainmail became famous for its strength and durability, it gained its own brand name, the Nürnberg Ringpanzer. Yes, I know you have been waiting for me to say the word Panzer on the podcast for ages, and here it is.

Wire drawers were not the only metalworkers in Nurnberg. One of the city’s main exports were on the one hand rather mundane things like knives, scissors, spoons, basins and funnels, but on the other side there was also a long tradition of producing high-end mechanical works. Regiomontanus, who we met last week, alongside his theoretical mathematics and astrology tables, also produced precision instruments for astrology and navigation. And he was by no means the only one. Nurnberg became famous for the compass or is it compasses they produced. Reading glasses were another speciality. And then, further up the artisanal food chain were the various kinds of gold and silversmiths.

But what of the armourers themselves. How did they become – together with those in Augsburg and later Innsbruck and Greenwich – the foremost producers in Europe.

I think three factors were crucial here, competition, specialisation and co-ordination.

Master armourers in Nurnberg were only allowed to employ two assistants and one apprentice. That prevented the establishment of large, dominant producers. These small producers were in constant competition with each other for lucrative orders. Other than in most cities, large orders did not have to be passed through the guild who would distribute them equally amongst the different masters, but would be given to merchants. The merchants would choose who to subcontract to, based on their reputation for quality, reliability, speed and price.

This competitive pressure spurred the armourers on to constantly strive for improvement. One of the key criteria for the quality of armour and swords was the balance between hardness and flexibility. Steel could be hardened by quenching, aka first heating it up to a high temperature and then rapidly cooling it in cold water followed by tempering, a second round of heating but followed by a very slow cooling process. The trick was to find the right balance between initial temperature and length of the quenching and tempering that hardened the steel but not letting it become brittle. Getting this right involved a whole lot of experimentation and required to improve temperature control of the forge. The latter depended on the quality of the charcoal and the consistency of the air blown into the fire. The German armourers kept tinkering and tinkering with this process until they got it right. Their main competition, the armourers of Milan had chosen to protect flexibility by quenching their steel in less conductive liquid, like oils. That prevented brittleness but failed to achieve the hardness desired.

Alan Williams from the university of Reading did analyse two pieces of late medieval and early modern armour made from similar steel for its metallurgical properties. He concluded that the Italian armour from 1570 scored 183 on the Vickers hardness scale, whilst the German piece scored 514 on the same scale. In other words, by the 16th century, German armourers were producing armour 3 times harder than the North Italians who had dominated the market in the early 15th century.

The other thing that made armour great were the mechanics of it. A full armour was supposed to weigh no ore than 25kg to ensure the knight could get up and continue to fight once unhorsed. So, the harder the steel got, the thinner and lighter it could be, which in turn meant more and more of the body could be protected without exceeding the weight limit. And these parts of the body that could now be covered, the legs and arms are full of these complicated connecting bits we call joints. And to be able to fight, the joints need to remain able to move. The German armourers developed sliding rivets and ingenious articulations that let a knight move freely inside what was essentially a metal exoskeleton. Again, master armourers constantly competed with each other to produce ever more elaborate versions of these complex mechanics.

Apart from competition, the other reason German armourers got so good was specialisation. To become a master armourer, the apprentice had to produce his masterpiece, i.e., a piece of armour that showcased his skills and that was of such quality it passed muster with his fellow armourers or the authorities. And depending what kind of piece it was, a helmet, gauntlet, sword or breastplate, this became the only product the newly minted master armourer would be licensed to produce. Those who made helmets were not allowed to branch out into breastplates and vice versa. So the new master would make say helmets on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, He would make helmets In January, February, March, April May, June, July, August September, October, November and December, Helmets this year, next year, the year thereafter and from then on to the day they either died or got bored and left. Dead or bored, he would get better and better and better at it. This is what business people call the economics of experience. And economics of experience are so much more powerful than the better-known economics of scale. Any, even the smallest improvement in the way helmets are made apply to all subsequent helmets until the next round of improvements appears, which again brings the process up again further, and so on and so on.

Radical specialisation was something happened across all kinds of trades in Nurnberg. Nurnberg registered 114 individual artisan guilds. They for instance differentiated between makers of “rough” wire, makers of fine wire and makers of silver-plated wire.

Which gets us to the third reason artisans from Nurnberg and Augsburg churned out such astonishing product, co-operation.  A full suit of armour consists of dozens of components, helmets, plates, mail, gauntlets, swords and so forth. Each of these were made by different master artisans. And when it came to the top end luxury armour, the kind of stuff emperor Maximilian paid almost as much for as pope Leo X paid Michelangelo to paint the Sistine chapel ceiling, a whole lot more trades got involved. There were the silver and goldsmiths doing the decorations. When we see armour today, it is mostly polished into a bright shining silvery colour. And quite a lot of armour was indeed polished to that colour, requiring a polisher to do that work. But some, maybe even most armour, was colourful. One process was called blueing, where the metal was burnished until it achieved a peacock blue colour. The Wallace collection holds a piece of armour they believe was originally blue with contrasting shining silver-coloured elements. Other may have been straight up painted. What exactly they painted on this armour is largely lost because the Victorians decided that all and every knight was one in shining armour – no space for fancy-coloured fighters.

The great artists of the time, Albrecht Durer and Hans Burgckmaier too got involved. They designed armour for their clients and painted them wearing it afterwards. 

So, who co-ordinated all these trades. It seems that for the top, top end armour the superstars of the industry, the Helmschmieds, Lochners and Seusenhofer most likely had control of the project and chose their suppliers and decorators.

When it came to the commissioning of vast quantities of what is called munitions armour, i.e., armour designed to be worn by simple soldiers on campaign, the coordinators were usually the great merchants. This again was one of the unique advantages of places like Augsburg and Nurnberg. The great mercantile  houses, the Fuggers, Welsers, Imhofs and Tuchers had the contacts to the imperial and princely courts to secure orders of such magnitude. And not only that, they would also offer to provide financing to the prince and emperor. And on the other side of the bargain they would also provide finance for master armourers to build up stock after having financed their suppliers as well.

Holding stock was extremely capital intensive. But it could come off spectacularly. Having 500 helmets in stock when the duke of God knows where is finding himself in a bit of a pickle, commanded a massive premium over helmets that arrive when the duke’s capital is already burning. Which is why having five hundred helmets available for pick-up wasn’t something unusual in Nurnberg in the 16th century.

And these helmets were not just available, they were also of predictable quality. Nurnberg was somewhat unique amongst the free imperial cities in as much as the patricians had broken the power of the guilds. After a failed uprising, the council had taken over much of the guild’s role, including the supervision of quality standards and the branding. Wares that met the standard set by the city council, i.e, the merchants who bought and sold the merchandise,  were branded with the letter N.

Quality control is what saved the German makers of arms and armour from the fate of the much more famous makers of Damascus steel. True Damascus Steel was undoubtably superior to the European product. Still the Mughal emperors on the 17th century preferred European blades from Solingen. Why? Damascus steel is hard to get right. Abd it did not come from Damascus or any other specific place, but from all kinds of places all over the East. There was no central authority that controlled the quality of the end product. So lots and lots of producers were manufacturing what they called Damascus Steel, some of it was of stounding quality, but much of it was not. And nobody could tell which was which. The brand deteriorated.

At the same time the town of Solingen developed its own steel making process and kept such tight control over the quality, that the name Solingen until today stands for top quality knifes, worldwide.

This combination of skill, branding and finance is what made in particular Nurnberg the go-to place for massive orders. The only place to that could match it in terms of mass output were the Habsburg armouries emperor Maximilian established in Innsbruck. He had brought several famous armourers from Augsburg and Nurnberg to Innsbruck. What these artisans did there was on the one hand create spectacular luxury armours for the emperors, but the other, more important function was to arm the imperial armies. And free from the shackles of the guild regulations in Augsburg and Nurnberg, huge workshops could be set up that exploited the resulting economics of scale.

Whilst Nurnberg focused more on volume production, Augsburg took an almost unassailable lead in making the world’s finest luxury armour. Augsburg had already established itself as the home of Europe’s foremost silver and goldsmiths. These guys now brought their skills into the world or armour. Go into any museum of armour and look at the star piece in their collection, it will almost inevitably come from Augsburg.

Ok, that is not 100% right. The museum will likely also hold a astounding looking Italian armour from Milan or Brescia, from masters like the Negrolis or the Messaglias. These are wonderous contraptions covered in elaborate decorations mimicking mythical animals or modelled on ancient Greek or Roman styles. They sparkle in the sun and look fantastic when the emperor enters a city on triumph. What they are pretty useless at, is protecting the wearer against even the most feeble blow from a sword.

Which gets us to the last reason why the centre of armour production shifted from Milan to Southern Germany. And the answer is the third most powerful force on the known universe after compounding and human stupidity, pot luck. Arms manufacturing needs war, but it is important that it is the right amount of war. And Northern Italy in the late fifteenth century got the wrong amount of war. The so-called Italian wars that pitted France against the Habsburgs, the Italian states against each other and the papacy pitching in at various points, these Italian wars were a disaster for Italy.

Machiavelli in the last chapter of the prince appeals to Lorenzo de Medici quote “Italy, left almost lifeless, waits for someone to heal her wounds, to put an end to the sackings of Lombardy, the extortions and plunderings of the Kingdom [of Naples] and of Tuscany, and to cleanse the sores that have festered for so long.”. Whilst Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo created the greatest artworks the world had ever seen, the Italian cities they worked were regularly sacked and their industries smashed. And one of these industries that could not keep up in these conditions was the Milanese armourers.

The success of the German armourers did not just produce their own industry cluster. The metalworking industries in general were all cousins. A city known for armor often produced other metal goods: cutlery, tools, machinery, clocks, scientific instruments, you name it. In 1621, of the 3,700 master craftsmen in Nuremberg, about 600 worked in ironwares. The techniques used for one product often fertilized another. The skill to draw fine wire (for mail armor or for strings and cables) helped in making mechanical clock springs. The ability to cast cannon and mix alloys informed bell-making (Nuremberg and Augsburg both cast huge church bells). And the presence of gunsmiths and metal engravers in the same city led to some cross-pollination – for instance, the beautiful engraving and etching seen on luxury firearms and armor was often done by artists who also worked on printing plates and fine art. It’s not a stretch to note that the city that printed the Nuremberg Chronicle and built the first pocket watches (the famous “Nuremberg eggs” by Peter Henlein) was the same city exporting the best mail shirts and muskets. The cultural flowering of Nuremberg in that era – the “centre of the German Renaissance” – was enabled by its prosperous crafts economy of which arms-making was just one pillar.

Nothing lasts forever though. The downfall of the great southern German cities did not come with the gradual decline of the use of armour. That was compensated by their equal prowess in the production of firearms, both handguns and cannon and all kinds of sophisticated instruments.

What broke them was the wrong amount of war, aka the 30 years war. Nurnberg stayed neutral  and was protected by powerful fortifications, but their markets had been wiped out by the end. Moreover, their customers, the emperors and princes began introducing standing armies using standard equipment. State-owned arsenals were able to deliver these cheaper and more efficiently than the fragmented master armourers. Nurnberg and Augsburg declined and it took until the industrial revolution before they gradually came back to life.

Nevertheless, some elements of the early success of German industry in Nurnberg and Augsburg survive to this day. The Mittelstand, the backbone of the German economy consists of comparatively small, family-owned businesses that have risen to global leadership in their field through fierce competition, extreme specialisation, co-ordination and quality control.  

And this seems to me a good point to end our journey across the empire in the 15th century. There are many more topics we could have explored, the dukes of Brunswick and those of Pomerania, the involvement of Brandenburg in the wars between Poland and the Teutonic Knights, the silversmiths of Augsburg, the sword makers of Cologne and Passau. But 15 episodes in, it is time to move on. The next season will pick up when we last had a closer look at the Habsburgs, i.e., when Rudolf the Stifter invented the title of archduke. And take the story all the way to Charles V. I hope you will join us again when that kicks off in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime I will drop episodes from other podcasts I admire into the feed. Give them a chance. They are really good in their own way.

And do not forget, you can support the show by going to historyofthegermans.com/support and make a contribution. I have not much to offer, other than my heartfelt and for the most generous, eternal gratitude which should make you feel even more generous.

See you soon!

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How two Germans invented America

When you enter the great hall of the Thomas Jefferson building at the Library of Congress in Washington, the first exhibit you will be facing is their Gutenberg Bible. And it is one of the finest Gutenberg bibles around, one of only three surviving pristine copies on vellum. This was the kind of bible that was so expensive to produce, it bankrupted Gutenberg. When the Library of Congress bought it in 1930, they paid $375,000, roughly $7.5m in today’s money.

But this is not the most expensive piece in the library’s collection. That would a work by two Germans, Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann. And it is not even a book, but a map. Not a small map, it is 2.3m or 91 inches wide and 1.3m or 50 inches tall. And this map, printed in 1507 claimed to be:

A DESCRIPTION OF THE WHOLE WORLD ON BOTH
A GLOBE AND A FLAT SURFACE WITH THE INSERTION
OF THOSE LANDS UNKNOWN TO PTOLEMY
DISCOVERED BY RECENT MEN

And the authors wrote that the three continents known since antiquity, Europe, Africa and Asis, quote “have in fact now been more widely explored, and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be heard in what follows). Since both Asia and Africa received their names from women, I do not see why anyone should rightly prevent this [new part] from being called Amerigen—the land of Amerigo, as it were—or America, after its discoverer, Americus, a man of perceptive character.” End quote.

This fourth part, they said was “surrounded on all sides by the ocean”. And indeed, in the left lower corner we find a fourth continent, a thin, stretched thing, with few place names and a western shore that hints at the Peruvian bulge, unmistakably, South America and then to north of it a very indistinguishable blob of land.

This map, proudly displayed as America’s Birth Certificate, is full of the most intriguing mysteries. How did Waldseemüller and Ringmann know that the Americas had a western shore, when it was only in 1513, 6 years later, that a European first glanced the Pacific?

How did the name America stick though Amerigo Vespucci had never led an expedition, not even commanded a ship? But most of all, why was this first map of America drawn not by a Spanish or Portuguese navigator, but by two Germans in the employ of the duke of Lorraine, working in St. Die, which is as far away from the sea as one can get in Western Europe.

And then, more generally, what did the Germans have to do with the discoveries, the maps and globes that told the world about them? That is what we will explore in this episode.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 201 – Mapping the World, or how two Germans invented America, which is also episode 16 of season 10 “The Empire in the 15th century”.

When you enter the great hall of the Thomas Jefferson building at the Library of Congress in Washington, the first exhibit you will be facing is their Gutenberg Bible. And it is one of the finest Gutenberg bibles around, one of only three surviving pristine copies on vellum. This was the kind of bible that was so expensive to produce, it bankrupted Gutenberg. When the Library of Congress bought it in 1930, they paid $375,000, roughly $7.5m in today’s money.

But this is not the most expensive piece in the library’s collection. That would a work by two Germans, Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann. And it is not even a book, but a map. Not a small map, it is 2.3m or 91 inches wide and 1.3m or 50 inches tall. And this map, printed in 1507 claimed to be:

A DESCRIPTION OF THE WHOLE WORLD ON BOTH
A GLOBE AND A FLAT SURFACE WITH THE INSERTION
OF THOSE LANDS UNKNOWN TO PTOLEMY
DISCOVERED BY RECENT MEN

And the authors wrote that the three continents known since antiquity, Europe, Africa and Asis, quote “have in fact now been more widely explored, and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be heard in what follows). Since both Asia and Africa received their names from women, I do not see why anyone should rightly prevent this [new part] from being called Amerigen—the land of Amerigo, as it were—or America, after its discoverer, Americus, a man of perceptive character.” End quote.

This fourth part, they said was “surrounded on all sides by the ocean”. And indeed, in the left lower corner we find a fourth continent, a thin, stretched thing, with few place names and a western shore that hints at the Peruvian bulge, unmistakably, South America and then to north of it a very indistinguishable blob of land.

This map, proudly displayed as America’s Birth Certificate, is full of the most intriguing mysteries. How did Waldseemüller and Ringmann know that the Americas had a western shore, when it was only in 1513, 6 years later, that a European first glanced the Pacific?

How did the name America stick though Amerigo Vespucci had never led an expedition, not even commanded a ship? But most of all, why was this first map of America drawn not by a Spanish or Portuguese navigator, but by two Germans in the employ of the duke of Lorraine, working in St. Die, which is as far away from the sea as one can get in Western Europe.

And then, more generally, what did the Germans have to do with the discoveries, the maps and globes that told the world about them? That is what we will explore in this episode.

But before we start another big, big thank you to all of you supporting the show. Not only financially, but also with your emails and messages of encouragement. As you can imagine, solo podcasting can be a bit of a lonely pursuit and feedback, in particular your incredibly nice feedback, makes this so much more enjoyable.

And today we should appreciate Gijs C., Gary W., James M., Vincent V., Fabian S., Mike K., Joseph C., Duncan Hardy, whose upcoming book you can find in the book recommendations, and Eamon M., whose generous help at historyofthegermans.com/support keeps the enjoyment coming.

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And with that, back to the show

Maps have always exerted a huge influence on the human mind. I know that if I publish a post on social media with a map in it, it attracts two or three times the audience of my usual posts.

Mapmaking might go as far back as 7000 BC when the neolithic inhabitants of Chatalhoyuk in Turkey painted a plan of their town and two distant volcanos onto the walls of a house. The British museum holds the oldest known world map, the Babylonian world, a map that dates back to 600 BC. The story on how that had been identified as a map is one of the BM’s best tales by the way.

Maps are not created equal. They do differ by accuracy, depth of information and most importantly, purpose. Political maps emphasise the borders of countries, states, counties, constituencies etc, geographical maps may look at features like mountain ranges and rivers, the distribution of mineral deposits or fertility of the soil. Sailor’s charts care about depth and maritime hazards and give no heed to what is on the land, unless it is a church tower or a lighthouse, whilst the Michelin guide divides the world up into places to eat, and those where better not to.

I guess after 200 episodes observing our protagonists, not just the kings and emperors, but also the monks, merchants and mercenaries criss-crossing the known world, I do not have to tell you that medieval people were anything but static.

Hence it is not surprising that they made maps. How many is hard to say, but there are several that have come down to us. Amongst Anglo-Saxons the mappamundi of Hereford cathedral is probably the best known, whilst the German equivalent, the Ebstorf map is the more famous here.

Being the History of the Germans, we obviously focus on the Ebstorf map. First up, it is huge, a circular image of the known world, 3.5m by 3.5m. Created around 1240, the original was lost in an air raid on Hannover in 1943, but we have several very detailed facsimiles.

For modern observers it is extremely difficult to get one’s bearings on this map. For one it is oriented towards the east, not the north. Then at the centre of the map sits Jerusalem. Asia makes up the top half, europe the bottom left and Africa the bottom right.  The mediterranean is a giant Tin the centre with Sicily in the shape of a heart. The three continents are surrounded by a thin band of one continuous ocean.

Where it gets even more confusing is when you look closer. The map is extraordinarily detailed. It comprises 2,345 entries, 845 pictures, 500 of which are buildings, the rest rivers, waterways, islands, but also 45 persons and 60 animals. And these are on the one hand comparatively modern cities and features like Antwerp, Riga and the Brunswick Lion. But then it also depicts buildings and cities that are known to be long gone, like the tower of babel, the lighthouse of Alexandria and Carthage. And then there are missing elements, like Cairo, the largest city Europeans regularly travelled to at the time, and instead it features entirely mythical locations, like the place where Alexander had imprisoned Gog and Magog and the earthly paradise, complete with serpent and apple.

So, what was this map for?

The map reflected the sum total of the historical, scientific and theological knowledge of the time, which meant whatever knowledge of the ancients had made it through. Pliny the elder was a particular favourite whose odd notions about the impact of the phases of the moon on the mental state of Monkeys and the like were perennial favourites. Biblical stories were of such great importance to the pious, they were considered contemporaneous, even if they had happened thousands of years earlier.

There was a major devotional element here. The map shows that the world is a confined space, held together by Jesus Christ, who sees and hears everything from his vantage point at the top of the map.

What this kind of maps, the mappamundi, were utterly useless at was to guide a sailor from Venice to Constantinople and further on to the Holy Land. But we know that at the same time these were made, Venetian, Genoese, Pisan and Amalfitani sea captains carried crusaders and trading goods to the east and back. To achieve that they had what we have today, compass, maritime charts and pilot books. No, seriously. There are three maritime charts still in existence that were most likely produced around the same time as the Ebstorf and the Hereford Mappamundi, in the 13th century.

These maritime charts have no pictures of saints or exotic animals on them, nor do they share the wisdom of Pliny the Elder. These are utilitarian charts that tell you what course to steer and how far you have to sail to get from Palma de Mallorca to Palermo or from Ancona to Alexandria. It tells you where the submerged reefs and rocks are and where dangerous currents run. And they are pretty accurate, which is truly astounding as they did not use latitude or longitude to pinpoint locations.

And then there is the scale of the effort. The so-called Pisan map covers the whole Mediterranean and the Black Sea plus bits of the Atlantic. There are roughly 1,000 topographic sites named in the mediterranean part alone, and all of these are on the coast or in the water, making this an incredibly dense map.

Which begs the question how this information could have been gathered.

One option is that it was a compilation of regional charts, but given every region had different measurements for miles and feet, it would have required a standardisation down to the map’s reference mile, which was 1.25km. Not an easy task.

Some have argued that these charts were originally developed by Greek or Roman sailors and then copied and adjusted as trade routes changed and cities rose and fell. But there is no mention of maritime charts in Roman or Greek sources at all.

So, in all likelihood the makers of these maritime charts gathered the information from the ship’s captains who came in and out of their hometowns. Most cartographers were themselves retired seafarers which must have helped.

What bewildered me is that according to the almost unanimous opinion in the literature, the medieval navigators did not use a logbook or other form of noting down the position, course and speed throughout a voyage. This only came in during the 15th century when explorers ventured out to find the route to India. I find that incredibly hard to believe. The maritime charts did not feature latitude and longitude, meaning to determine a position the skipper would have to constantly check the angle and distance to at least two landmarks, which changed all the time. And once on the open sea, he would have to remember exactly for how long he had stayed on which course at which speed. Not impossible but just hard to believe. If there had been logbooks, they would have been a huge help to cartographers confirming the accuracy of their charts. But apparently, they could keep all of that in their heads.

Accompanying these charts were Portolans, something we would call today a pilot book. These are books guiding sailors through the entrance to ports, tell them what they will find there in terms of fresh water, provisions, facilities to make repairs etc.

They even new about compass variation, i.e., the fact that magnetic north and geographic north are not identical, and that this variation was not the same everywhere, and that it changed over time.

It is just mindboggling to think that they knew that but believed that bears cups would have to be licked into shape by the mothers.

As one can imagine, these two traditions of mapping the world started to coalesce in the great maritime republics, in Venice, Genoa and Pisa and the seafaring Iberian kingdoms. One of the most famous of these hybrid maps that combine the historic and theological content of a mappamundi with the accuracy of the maritime charts is the so-called Catalan Atlas, produced in Barcelona as a present for king Charles VI of France.

This map, created in 1375 not only incorporated the maritime charts of the mediterranean, but also new information about places, the ancients knew little about. Marco Polo had travelled to China in the late 13th century and a trade in Chinese silks developed rapidly thereafter that brought Genoese traders to the courts of the Mongol rulers and further into Mainland China. Their reports are included in the Catalan Atlas. The Canary Islands had been discovered in 1339 and its original population wiped out by disease and slaughter. So, they, i.e., the islands, not their inhabitants, too make it onto the map.

So far we have two mapping traditions that fused into one in the 14th century, the medieval Mappamundi that tries to educate about the way the world is or should be and the maritime charting tradition that cares about where exactly places are and how to get there.

And in 1397 a third technique for mapmaking appeared, or more precisely, re-appeared. In 1397 the emperor of Constantinople, Manuel II Palaiologos sent an ambassador to Venice, asking the western Christians for help in the defence against Ottoman attack. This ambassador, Manuel Chrysoloras would become one of the catalysts of the Renaissance. Chrysoloras was not just a diplomat, but a classical scholar, philosopher and teacher as well. Whilst his ambassadorship was a failure, and no soldiers came to Manuel’s aid, his cultural mission was a huge success.

He had brought with him copies of classical Greek works that had been lost to the west for centuries which he translated into Latin. He taught the intellectuals of Florence and Bologna to read Greek and published textbooks that were enthusiastically received. Within less than 100 years Greek, which had largely been forgotten, returned to the curriculum of the educated classes all across the continent.

Chrysoloras never returned to Constantinople but established a constant flow of Greek books going west. He died in 1413 en route to see the emperor Sigismund to discuss a suitable location for the Great Church council, that would ultimately be held in Constance (episodes 171-174).

Amongst the treasures he carried in his luggage was a work by Ptolemy, the 2nd century Greek mathematician. This work, the Geography would revolutionise the way maps were drawn.

If you put Ptolemy’s Geography into a search engine, it will inevitably show you a map. But there are no maps by Ptolemy that survived from antiquity. What was found in 13th century was a book with instructions on how to create a map of the world and 26 regional maps. And so in around 1295 Byzantine scholars created a world map from the instructions Ptolemy had left a 1000 years earlier.

The reason this worked was down to Ptolemy’s great invention, longitude and latitude. The medieval maritime charts did not show a long-lat grid that almost every modern map now features. What they showed were rump lines, connecting lines between points on the map that showed the course to steer if you wanted to get from A to B. These rump lines criss-crossed the map as commerce, not geography demanded.

Ptolemy’s genius lay in his realisation that to convey a three-dimensional object, aka Planet Earth on to a two-dimensional surface, aka a map, it required some form of projection. This was a minor problem when designing regional charts but became a huge one trying to depict the entirety of the known world.

And in this context, we need to clear up one constant misunderstanding. Very few people in the Middle Ages believe the earth was flat. From the days of the ancient Greeks, people knew that the Earth was spherical. The first globe was produced by Cratos of Mallos in the 2nd century BC and Erotosthenes had accurately calculated the circumference of the earth based on the difference in the angle of the sun between Aswan and Alexandria.

Fun fact, the term Antarctica goes back to the ancient Greeks. It means literally, land of no bears, being the opposite of the Arctic, which translates as “land of the bears”. Sadly, that had less to do with intrepid travellers checking out the fauna on the North Pole, but with the star sign of Ursus Major that hovers over the north.

Going back to medieval understanding of the spherical structure of the earth; emperors from Charlemagne onwards received an orb as a sign of their power over the entire earth, not a flat plate but. Medieval maps were circular, and for instance the one Al Idrisi produced for king Roger of Sicily in 1154 mentioned that the earth was a sphere as something that was common knowledge.

So, when Columbus set off to seek a route to India by going west, the concern was less that his ships would fall off the edge of the world, but that the journey would simply be too long to be survivable. Given the circumference of the earth was known, as was the eastward extent of Asia thanks to Marco Polo and other Italian travellers, one could estimate the distance from Seville to the Philippines or Japan at ~20,000 km or ~13,000 miles. Given Columbus ships were averaging 90 to 100 miles a day, the whole journey would be 150 days, well beyond the capacity to carry water and food of contemporary ships. Columbus got around that problem by mixing up Roman and Italian miles hence pretending the world was 25% smaller and by stretching China and Japan out further east than the reports warranted. In his pitch to Ferdinand and Isabella he claimed the distance was just 2-3000 miles. Some historians believe he did that deliberately. How he thought he would survive is then unclear. He may have hoped there would be islands along the way where he could find food, water and timber.

Ok, back to Ptolemy. Thanks to the curvature of the earth, two-dimensional maps will always get some dimension wrong, be it the surface area, the shapes, distances or direction. Which is why Ptolemy suggested to create globes, rather than maps. But he also recognised that Globes are difficult to produce and awkward to handle. So, he offered three types of projections, each with advantages and disadvantages. That question of projections is the content of Book I of Ptolemy’s geography.

The next 6 books contain 8,000 place names with their longitude and latitude, covering the whole known world from China to the mythical island of Thule, in the far, far north.

Ptolemy’s maps were a revolution, and copies were produced at a rapid pace. In 1409 the Geography was translated into Latin and as we heard in episode 172, was one of the central intellectual debates at the Council of Constance.

What is interesting is how little the early copyist and publishers changed on these ancient maps. They showed the world, its roads and cities as it was in around 200 AD. Little heed was given to fact that in the intervening 1200 years many lands have been discovered or at least better understood, cities had vanished and new ones had emerged. Germany, an empty forested swamp in the 2nd century AD was now a thriving place full of cities and roads, as was Poland, the Baltic and Scandinavia.

In 1427 the Cardinal Fillastre, an important protagonist at the Council asked the Danish traveller Conradus Clavus to create and then add a map of Scandinavia using the Ptolemy’s system of longitudes and latitudes, which he did, adding Greenland and Iceland as a bonus. But that was the exception. Mostly people just copied the ancient maps and left them as they were.

So we end up with the scenario where we have on the one hand maps based on the medieval mappamundi concept but containing some very accurate maritime charts , the information gathered from the intensifying trade with the East, the Canaries, the Azores the Cape Verde Islands and the coast of Africa, whilst at the same time the leading intellectual lights used a hugely advanced mapping methodology to present even more massively outdated information.

It was a German, Donnus Nicolaus Germanus who was the first to fundamentally revise and improve Ptolemy in 1466. He translated or replaced the antique place names in Italy and Spain with modern names and a more accurate view of northern Europe. We know little about him apart from the fact that he was likely German given his name and that he worked in Florence and Rome.

In 1477 pope Sixtus IV ordered two globes to be produced by Nicolaus Germanus, one a celestial globe and one a terrestrial globe. We know that these globes were produced because there are bills preserved in the Vatican library and the marquise of Mantua asked for a copy to be produced in 1507. They were probably destroyed in the 1527 sack of Rome.

That made Donnus Nicolaus Germanus the first person we know for certain to have produced a globe since antiquity.

By now Gutenberg’s printing press had radically changed the way information was distributed. Maps became an important product for printers. Several Ptolemy-based maps were published in Italy and Germany in the 1480s. But as people compared them to the information contained in the maritime charts it became clear that Ptolemy, for all his innovative mathematics, was full of inaccuracies.

In 1489 Henricus Martellus, another German, produced a world map that applied the longitude and latitude system of Ptolemy on the latest geographic information available. And latest really means latest. Barthomeu Diaz had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in March 1488 and returned to Lisbon in December 1488. Less than 2 years later Martellus map shows Africa as being circumnavigable and even some shapes in the Indian ocean that were previously unknown.

Before we go further down the route of German mapmakers, we have to mention someone else, Johannes Müller from Königsberg, not Konigsberg in Prussia but Konigsberg in Franconia. Since Müller was already extremely common, he called himself Regiomontanus, the latinised form of his hometown. He was probably the most influential astrologer and mathematician in the generation before Copernicus. As you know I dabble in all sorts of topics, literature, art, architecture, theology, philosophy etc., but I draw the line at mathematics and linguistics. That is not something I know anything about, nor do I feel capable of talking about it. So, if you want to know about the Regiomontanus Paradox and his contribution to the development of calculus you will need to find another podcast.

But what I can talk about and what matters for our subject here is that Regiomontanus, alongside his mathematical works, produced a practical guide, the Ephemerides. These are tables showing the trajectory of astronomical objects, in particular the planets, their position, speed and direction of movement at specific time intervals. These tables are naturally useful to Astronomers, even more to astrologers, but absolutely crucial to navigators sailing into the Southern Hemisphere.

One of the features of the Southern hemisphere is that you cannot see the polestar anymore. The Southern Cross and Sigma Octantis are reasonable replacements, indicating South, but the Portuguese sailors following the African coast did not know that. What they could do instead is use the angles of the planets from their current location and time to determine where they were. And for that, they needed a reliable table telling them where the planets should be on that specific day and time. And that is where Regiomontanus came in. His tables, called the Ephimerides were more accurate and more detailed than anything else contemporaries had access to.

Regiomontanus developed and compiled these tables when he lived in Nurnberg in 1474. Nurnberg may not have a university that funded this kind of research, but what it had was a large number of rich merchants who combined commercial acumen with scientific curiosity. These men were happy to finance Regiomontanus’ efforts and the publication of his tables in 1474. These tables were a huge success and were still reprinted 300 years later. At least one copy made it to the university of Krakow, where a certain N. Copernicus drew some literally earthshattering conclusions using this data.

In the last third of the 15th century astronomy and geography were considered two sides of the same medal. They called it Cosmology. Regiomontanus did consider making maps and as we have seen some of the terrestrial mapmakers worked on celestial globes.

Add to that scientific endeavour the rise of the printing press and we can see why the great free imperial cities of the Holy Roman empire became a key node in the distribution of knowledge about the planet. Nicolaus Germannus modified atlas was printed in a luxury edition in Ulm in 1482, in 1486 Johannes Reger published a set of maps together with what he called a Registrum, which allowed to cross-reference all of Ptolemy’s placenames with the modern notations.

Over in Nurnberg, Hartmann Schedel compiled his famous Nürnberg chronicle which included two maps. One was a world map, a combination of Ptolemy’s geography and the weird and wonderful elements of the medieval mappamundi. The second map was something completely different. This was a map of Germany and central Europe, the very first ever printed. It used the longitude and latitude now familiar to cartographers, but where Ptolemy had shown just empty space and swampy forest, it presented the magnificent Hanseatic cities, the trading centres of southern Germany, Krakow, Warsaw and Gdansk, the capitals of the Baltic states and even Moscow and Lviv, but strangely not Kiev.

The man who produced that, Hieronymus Münzer, was another one of that circle of intellectuals that emerged in Nürnberg. He undertook a journey to Spain and Portugal on behalf of the emperor Maximilian to find out more about these new discoveries. This produced one of the most detailed descriptions of the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century.

Because of the quaint half-timbered houses and the lack of an overseas empire, the idea has taken hold that 15th, 16th and 17th century Germans spent most of their time at home whilst Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch and English set out to conquer the world. But nothing could be further from the truth. As we heard in the season about the Hanseatic league and about the Fuggers, German merchants were going almost everywhere. They connected east and west and north and south. They had representatives in Lisbon, Antwerp, London, Bergen, Riga, Novgorod, Cracow, Budapest and Venice. Much of the timber the Portuguese caravels were made of came from the forests of Prussia, their design a development based on the cog. The copper and silver they traded into India and China came from the mines and smelters of the Fuggers, Welsers, Hirschvogels etc. In fact, these metals were pretty much the only European exports the much more advanced societies of India, China and Japan were interested in.

Amongst the crews of the Portugues explorers who set out into the unknown in the 15th century were almost always Germans. They were hired to operate the artillery. Germany had become highly regarded for the guns they produced and the gunners who had trained to operate them. The Portuguese called them Bombardeiros Alemaes and hired them for most expeditions. In 1489 the Portuguese crown standardised its naval artillery to German-made bronze guns and their experienced gun teams. Of the 18 men who survived Magellan’s circumnavigation, one was a German, Hans de Plank or Juan Aleman.

Which gets us to the most controversial figure in the history of German cartography, Martin Behaim. So, before we go into who he was and what he did, there is one undeniable thing that is associated with him, the Erdapfel, the oldest terrestrial globe in existence today. As we know it is not the oldest globe ever made, that was the one created in the 2nd century BC by Cratos of Mallos. And it was not even the first one made after antiquity, that was the globe of Nicolaus Germanus in Rome.

All that being said, it is still the oldest Globe in existence. And it is intriguing in as much as it was produced in 1492, in other words just as Columbus was stepping ashore in the Bahamas.

Given timing this globe does not show the Americas and obviously neither does it show Australia or Antarctica. So, what did Behaim put in the space where America is? Islands, lots of them, some known, others invented. The Canaries and the Cape Verde islands, today the jumping off points for an Atlantic crossing west and the Azores, the staging post 2/3rds on the way back east were already known. But then he put dozens, even very large blobs all over the surface and gave them names like the Antilles and the island of St. Brandan. Japan ends up being more or less where Florida is.

The Germanische Nationalmuseum in Nurnberg that holds the globe says in its description; the continents are too big. But it would be more accurate to say the planet is too small. Which may be down to Behaim subscribing to Columbus’ view that the planet was a lot smaller than it actually is and hence sailing to China or Japan was feasible in one go.

Which also ties in with the purpose of the globe. It was obviously not something one was supposed to take on a voyage. It was certainly meant as a piece of decoration, ordered by the city council of Nurnberg to adorn their city hall. It conveyed the message that Nurnberg was at the forefront of intellectual developments, was plugged into the worldwide flow of information and had extraordinary artistic and mechanical skills. None of which was actually an exaggeration.

But its main purpose was commercial. Like the Mapppamundis the globe is covered in text, but this text does not contain biblical events or spurious facts about exotic animals, it is about business opportunities. Where best to acquire rare materials, like pearls, precious stones, spices and luxury woods. It is here to entice the Nurnberg bankers and merchants to get involved in the financing of these journeys. It is first and foremost a spherical pitchbook.

So far, so good. A fascinating object from literally the year that changed history, and maybe a depiction of what Columbus expected to find when he sailed west, but why does it get almost everyone who writes about it so hot under the collar.

David Blackbourn in his excellent book “Germany in the World” describes the maker of the globe, Martin Behaim, as a “slightly raffish man of affairs” whose exploits are almost “grotesquely exaggerated”.

On the other end of the spectrum sits the polish historian Wojciech Iwanczak, who entertains the idea that Behaim held an important role at court and in the commercial world of Lisbon during the time of the discoveries. According to him, Behaim introduced Regiomontanus’ Ephimerides to the Portuguese and was appointed to the Royal council of navigational experts. Behaim might have participated in at least 2 journeys down south, one leading to the discovery of the Congo. Iwanczak even suggests Behaim may have known Columbus and might have shared his views on a journey west.

I initially wanted to design this whole episode around Martin Behaim, the great explorer, scientist and cartographer, a bit like I did with Johannes Gutenberg. But in the end, the evidence was all a bit too flimsy. It is a typical German story in as much that Behaim was pumped up relentlessly in the 19th century, streets and schools named after him, statues erected and even one of the oldest locomotives was named after him. The Nazis then went stratospheric, claiming Behaim had been the one convincing Columbus to sail west, then he had discovered Brazil before Cabral and had sailed around cap Hoorn before Magallan.

Which created the typical post-war backlash, where any claim to fame was dismissed on the basis of a lack of explicit contemporary sources until nothing was left than the story of a conman who died a pauper in Lisbon in 1507. And now everything is so convoluted and vague that even the Germanische Nationalmuseum, treads a careful balance not dismissing the previous storylines but being sufficiently vague not to get caught out. So here you go, Martin Beheim, explorer of far-flung lands and master cartographer, or exploiter of gullible city fathers, God only knows….

Which gets us now to the final piece, the map in the Library of Congress they call the Waldseemüller map and America’s Birth Certificate. At first glance it is just another world map, a larger one at 2.3m by 1,3m where Europe is based on the Ptolemy maps and the rest is based on maritime charts, Portugues and Spanish discoverer’s logs and reports of travellers to the east.

Where it differs is in the long stretchy landmass in the bottom left-hand corner that is surrounded by water and that bears a name that became familiar to all of us, America. In the copious notes the authors explain that they named America after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian navigator who went along on four or maybe only two voyages along the South American Coast, and wrote two letters home about it, letters that had been massively bigged up by publishers and had become early bestsellers.

What has confused scholars for centuries is how Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, the two makers of the map, could have known or could have guessed that America was a continent when most authorities, including Columbus himself, believed the lands re-discovered in the west were part of Asia. And to rule one thing out, Amerigo Vespucci had never claimed that America was a continent. He might have called it Novo Mundus, New World, but that is not the same thing.

And then comes the even more bewildering part. Not only is the positioning of South America fairly accurate, the map also shows the Pacific coast of South America with its characteristic bulge north of Chile. All that 6 years before Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the isthmus of Panama and became the first European to officially report the existence of the Pacific Ocean.

How this was possible is the kind of question that sells books by the wagonload and got the Library of Congress to pay $10million for a map.

So let’s take a look at some of the theories – I cannot do all of them because at some point I want to go to bed today, and so might you.

The simplest idea is that Waldseemüller and Ringmann had made it all up. They had Vespucci’s exaggerated reports of the discoveries along the Atlantic coast of South America and spiced it up by showing the continent surrounded by water. The key witness for this theory is Waldseemüller himself. In 1513 he produced another map that did not show a new continent in the West and did not call it America. In the explanatory note he said quote: “As we have lately come to understand, our previous representation pleased very few people. Therefore, since true seekers of knowledge rarely colour their words in confusing rhetoric, and do not embellish facts with charm but instead with a venerable abundance of simplicity, we must say that we cover our heads with a humble hood.” end quote.

But this admission does not mean they had just willy-nilly made up an ocean that nobody had even thought of. That would be very much out of character. Waldseemüller and Ringmann provide references for much of what they show, quoting sources, ancient and modern for the better-known regions and the records of travellers for the parts of Africa, eastern europe and Asia not well known to the ancients.

And there is a further aspect. The two mapmakers had been hired by duke Rene II of Lorraine to create these maps as a prestige project. The duke wanted to impress his peers by setting up a humanist school in his duchy, and that humanist school had to produce something that would be widely respected as a great piece of scholarship. If Waldseemüller and Ringmann had consciously been making things up, they would have made their duke the laughingstock of europe, which could get very uncomfortable.

There is a variation of that theory which has to do with the size of the world they show. Waldseemüller and Ringmann’s map is in the main based on Ptolemy’s geography. In fact, both authors had initially been hired to produce a revised version of the book, rather than to draw up maps. It was only when the fake letters by Vespucci circulated in Europe that they decided to create a map instead.

But where their map differs dramatically from other maps based on Ptolemy is in scale. This is one of the earliest maps that assumes 360 degrees for the circumference of the earth, rather than the 270 degrees for instance Behaim showed. In other words, Waldseemüller and Ringmann believed or knew that the Earth had a circumference of 40,000km. And they knew the distance from Europe to the Caribbean and South America. At which point the cartographers had to make a choice. Either they assume that Asia stretches all of the way to the Caribbean and east coast of South America. That would make it a landmass that covers 50% of the Planet. A continent of that size did not match up with what Marco Polo and other travellers had reported. So, the only logical conclusion was that there must be an ocean between Asia and the newly discovered lands; admittedly a very bold assumption, but a justifiable one.

Dr. Martin Lehmann from the University of Freiburg took a closer look at the political environment in which the map was created.

As I mentioned, Waldseemüller and Ringmann worked for duke Rene II of Lorraine, a prince on the western edge of the Holy Roman empire at a place called St. Die. St. Die is roughly 100km from Strasburg and 80km from Nancy, in other words, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, hundreds of miles from the Sea and even further away from Lisbon, Cadiz and Seville.

Since the map is correct in many respects, there is at least a theoretical option that it was based on information from voyages that had been kept secret. Which leads straight to the question how such incredibly valuable secrets could end up in the hands of two guys hired by a mid-level prince in a dark forest? Makes no sense, or does it?

Spain and Portugal were in a fierce competition, not over who could find America, that was not interesting at the time, but over the route to India and even more important, the route to the Spice islands of Indonesia and the Philippines. Being able to obtain these spices at source would cut out the middlemen, aka, India, the Silk Road and Venice, and the enormous margins that paid for the palazzi on the Canale Grande. In this race to get to the Malaka islands, the Portuguese travelled eastwards, whilst the Spaniards, who were a lot later to the game, travelled westwards. In 1494 the two sides agreed the treaty of Tordesillas that is often described as Spain and Portugal dividing the world between themselves. But that is not quite true. What Tordesillas said is that Portugal had the exclusive right to sail eastwards and Spain was free to seek their fortune in the west. May the best man win.

So, both sides were racing to the same spot, roughly 1200km north of Australia. Which means neither side wanted the other side to know what they were up to. That is why very few maps were published in Seville, Lisbon or Cadiz where the explorers made landfall and the best information about the new discoveries could be obtained. Both the Spanish and the Portugues surely produced maps, but they were only made accessible to the select few. And they kept voyages secret. For instance, it is widely believed the Portuguese knew about Brazil before the official discovery in 1500.

But all that secrecy had its drawbacks. This was a winner takes all race. Both sides wanted to send as many fleets as possible in the hope that at least one of them makes it through. It was a venture capital approach which needed venture capitalists willing to share some of the costs and risks of the voyages. This was the 15th century equivalent of the streaming wars, the race for AI leadership or the rush to dominate the ride sharing industry.

And where were these financiers? With the Italian banking houses in decline, it was the Southern German mercantile firms, the Fuggers, Welsers, Imhoffs, Tuchers etc., that were the obvious business partners for the Iberian kings. But if you wanted to get them on board, you needed to lift up the skirt a bit. That is the reason Martin Behaim was allowed to put a fairly detailed map of West Africa on to his globe, information that almost certainly came from Portugal.

And that could also explain the astounding accuracy of the Waldseemüller Map. If the Portugues had information about the West coast of South America and would have wanted to share it, they would probably have used someone in the German lands. But I personally find it hard to believe they had managed to sail up the whole of the west coast of South America to Panama and then made it back, all before 1507. And what for, this was the route they had ceded to the Spanish. And the Spanish are unlikely to have furnished the information, since they would have insisted on naming the continent after Columbus, not Vespucci.

Which gets to the next twist in the theory. Let’s put yourself into the shoes of a Portuguese strategist in 1505/6. You cannot know whether or not the Spaniards are in with a chance to make the race. But if you could find a way to slow them down, that would certainly be worth something. What if you could convince the Spaniards that there was an enormous landmass and another Ocean between them and the spice islands. Maybe that could discourage them from sending lots of ships, and more importantly it could hold their investors up from funding these efforts.

And who could be a better vehicle to convey this message than a group of humanists locked up in a village in the Vosges mountains trying to impress their ducal sponsor. Like journalists at a minor newspaper, they were looking for the great scoop that would put them on the national news. So it may be that the Portuguese suggested to Waldseemüller and Ringmann that South America was surrounded by water, even though they did not know that for a fact. That may also explain why the letters published in 1503 and 1504 and attributed to Vespucci are unlikely to be by his own hand and are full of exaggerations and inaccuracies. It could be part of a larger sting operation.

But, as my father-in-law used to say, if it is a choice between cockup and conspiracy, 9 out of 10 times, it is just cockup.

Irrespective of whether Waldseemüller and Ringmann were duped or dupers, the name America went around the world. The original print run of their map was for 1,000 copies. The name America then shows up on the so-called green globe in Paris from that same year. Then again on the Jagiellonian globe of 1510 produced in Krakow. Johanns Schöner who was the owner of the only surviving copy of Waldseemüller’s 1507 map, includes America in his two globes. From there it meanders across Europe;  between 1520 and 1540 reprints and slightly revised versions of Waldseemüller’s map are published in Vienna, Paris, Strasburg, Basel and Zurich. Finally in 1538 Gerard Mercator, he of the Mercator projection, published a world map where he was the first to declare the existence of two continents, South America and North America. Once the term had been embraced by the foremost geographer of the time, despite vigorous objections from the Spanish side, the naming had become irrevocable.

There you have it; the name America came about because a bunch of German humanists stuck in the back of beyond either made up or were made to make up a continent that then actually turned out to be real. And people say that Bielefeld does not exist….

Thanks for listening. This was a bit of a long one and I apologize. I was carried away by far too many fascinating facts. But if you have listened all the way I guess you liked it too.

Next week will be the last of our deviations around the Holy Roman empire in the 15th century. What we will be talking about is Arms and Armor, the greatest of the German exports in the 15th and 16th century and beyond. Shah Jahan, the great Mughal emperor and the man who commissioned the Taj Mahal, counted 200 Firangi swords amongst his most valuable possessions. Firangi means foreigner, but originally Franks, meaning Franconians -not Frenchmen – since most of his steel blades came from Solingen. How Germany gained its reputation as the source of the finest weapons and amour around is what we will discuss next week.

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The Leipziger Teilung

When two brothers, Ernst and Albrecht of Saxony divided up their enormous inheritance that comprised Thuringia, Meissen and the electorate of Sachsen-Wittenberg, they not only undermined their power base as the de facto #2 amongst the imperial principalities and planted the seed for a conflict that would play a key role in the Reformation but they also laid the foundations for the modern Länder of Thuringia and Saxony.

And this division was not driven by the usual family feud but came after 20 years of largely harmonious government and a shared childhood trauma. Why they took, or had to take this fateful step, is what we will discuss today.

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Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 200 – Divide and Lose, the Leipziger Teilung, also episode 15 of season 10: The Empire in the 15th Century.

When two brothers, Ernst and Albrecht of Saxony divided up their enormous inheritance that comprised Thuringia, Meissen and the electorate of Sachsen-Wittenberg, they not only undermined their power base as the de facto #2 amongst the imperial principalities and planted the seed for a conflict that would play a key role in the Reformation but they also laid the foundations for the modern Länder of Thuringia and Saxony.

And this division was not driven by the usual family feud but came after 20 years of largely harmonious government and a shared childhood trauma. Why they took, or had to take this fateful step, is what we will discuss today.

And big thanks to all of you who responded to the question I asked last week about whether you enjoy going down the various rabbit holes that opened up as the empire fragmented. I was expecting a somewhat biased result – after all, anyone who was keen on a straightforward and more rapid narrative is unlikely to listen for two years in the hope such an acceleration may finally appear. But what I did not expect was that so many of you contacted me on various channels to tell me they enjoyed these deviations, even going so far as to describe them as the core and main value proposition of the show. So, no further debate, we will continue our meandering walk around the empire.

And since this is the 200th episode, instead of mentioning those patrons whose turn it is to have their names called out, I will today honour 11 patrons of the show who have been supporting continuously from as long ago as 2021 have hence made an outstanding contribution to the show. And so, in no particular order, I want to thank Margreatha H., Tom J., Misty A. S., Nathan S., Peter F., Simen K., Sherylynn B., Ed and Karri O., Nina B.R., Michael B., and Warren W. Normally I would say that you should bask in the warm glow of the admiration of your fellow men but ,sweating in 35 plus degrees heat as I guess many of you are as well, I wish you to be fanned over by thousands of fans…

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And with that, back to the show

If you are, like me, a huge fan of the tv drama Succession, you may imagine that disputes over the inheritance of great wealth are always a ballet of broken alliances, foul accusations and backstabbing that Shiv, Kendall and Roman performed to such utter perfection and ended with all of them losing.

But it does not always have to be like that to create an equally disastrous outcome, as it happened to Ernst and Albrecht the sons of Frederick, elector and duke of Saxony. To explain why they divided their lands and fatally weakened themselves, we need to get back to where we left off in the story off the House of Wettin in episode 107.

They had only just emerged from an all-out conflict between father and sons. This turned from family squabble to dominating political issue for the empire when king Adolf von Nassau concluded that the Landgraviate of Thuringia would be the asset that could propel his family from little counts to proper princes. Well, it didn’t. When it was all over, in 1307, the last man standing, Frederic the Bitten was confirmed as the lord of all the ruins.

His lands may have been broken, but they were extensive. The Landgraviate of Thuringia with its great fortress-palace of the Wartburg and the margraviate of Meissen where the cities of Dresden and Leipzig were rising. For the next hundred or so years, Fredrick the Bitten and his successors rebuild the economy of their devastated principality.

Friedrich der Gebissene

And they were very successful at doing that. As we mentioned in episode 107, their territory contained several silver mines that provided a big chunk of their income. And as their economic fortunes improved, they were able to acquire more of the adjacent territories, some by purchase, others by more aggressive methods.

They also played the grander political game very astutely. When Ludwig the Bavarian emerged victorious in his war of succession, they formed a marriage alliance with him, which they immediately ditched when Ludwigs fortunes declined, and the pendulum swung to the Luxembourgs under Karl IV. They then took full advantage of the complete collapse of imperial authority under Wenceslaus the Lazy and Ruprecht of the Palatinate. Net, net, the overall possessions of the house of Wettin grew by about a another third during that century. I could give you a list of all the little counties and lands, which would bore you to infinity and beyond, so I will instead put a map into the transcript you can find on my website: historyofthegermans.com. The link is in the show notes.

When we get to Sigismund and the Hussite wars, the House of Wettin became even more indispensable to the emperor. The Wettiner lands bordered the kingdom of Bohemia. Relations between the margraviate of Meissen and Bohemia had been close for centuries – they had traded both goods and blows, their rulers held lands either side of the borders and information and ideas moved seamlessly between the two. The university of Leipzig got its big break when Wenceslaus expelled the German speaking professors from the university of Prague.

The intellectual exchange also brought subversive ideas going round in the early 15th century. Several of Jan Hus predecessors, associates and followers had come from or gone to the margraviate of Meissen, most prominent amongst them Nicholas of Dresden.

As one can imagine that once the councillors of Prague’s Newtown had hit the pavement in 1419, the Wettins became extremely concerned these dangerous concepts could take hold in their lands too. To snuff it out at source, they enthusiastically followed Sigismund’s call for an imperial war against the Hussites in 1420 and 1421. How not so well this went you can hear in more detail in episodes 178 following. After a string of defeats, first before Prague, then at Kutna Hora and Nemecky Brod, the emperor Sigismund gradually handed over responsibility for the fight against the Hussites to the margrave of Brandenburg and the Wettiner. Most of the action between 1421 and 1433 was led by these two, including the devastating battle of Aussig, where in 1426 the whole of the Wettin force perished (episode 182 if you are interested).

This kind of effort demanded a reward, and that reward was a new set of titles for the House of Wettin – that of electors and dukes of Saxony.

In the Golden Bull of 1356 (episode 160) the emperor Karl IV had awarded the electoral vote of Saxony to the dukes of Sachsen-Wittenberg. These dukes were members of the House of Anhalt, the descendants of Albrecht the Bear (episode 106). These guys had been rather minor figures in imperial politics of the 14th century despite their elevated rank as prince electors. Their territory was rather small and not particularly rich, at least at that time. They never made a bid for the top job and could not even fully leverage their electoral vote due to their cousins in Lauenburg making competing claim.

And in the early 15th century the family was befallen by some bizarre mishaps. Though there were a good dozen male members of the family around in the 1380s, by 1422 they had completely died out. Some failed to reproduce, and others died in battle, which was standard, but then all the sons of the reigning duke, together with six-page boys and their tutor died when the tower of their caste in Schweinitz collapsed. The last of the line fried in a burning farmhouse a few years later, leaving this fief vacant.

As per the covenants of the Golden Bull, Sigismund had to award the fief and the electorate to another prince. Several threw their hats into the ring, Fredrick of Hohenzollern, who just a few years earlier had already received the electorate of Brandenburg, then the Elector Palatinate, some of the other Anhalt princes, and from the house of Wettin, Frederick the Belligerent, margrave of Saxony.

Friedrich der Streitbare

Sigismund pretended it was a hard choice, but frankly he would have been mad to give a second electoral vote to the margrave of Brandenburg and the Count Palatine on the Rhine who were already electors. The other princes from the House of Anhalt were all non-entities who could not help Sigismund with his never-ending to-do list and his money problems, so Frederick of Meissen, rich and powerful prince and bulwark against the Hussites, was the natural choice.

And with that in 1422 the titles of elector and of duke of Saxony came to the House of Wettin, where they would remain until the end of the Holy Roman Empire.

You may have noticed that I have not mentioned many names of individual margrave and landgraves from the House of Wettin. The reason is not just that there were a whole lot of them, and they were sharing just four first names amongst them. The other is that all these Friedrichs, Georgs and Wilhelms did get two things right. First, they found enough opportunity to expand their share of the inheritance by going after their neighbours rather than their cousins, and secondly, they dropped their sperm count.

So, by natural causes in 1440 the further enlarged Wettiner lands were again under a common government, led by two brothers, Fredrick II and William III. Frederick was the elder by 13 years which meant he ruled alone for a fairly long time. By 1445 the younger, William III became disenchanted with the idea of being the second in command. Egged on by his councillors he demanded a division of their lands. The way this was normally handled by the House of Wettin was the same we use at home for dividing up cake, i.e, one cuts the slices and the other one chooses. Usually, the eldest does the slicing and the younger does the choosing. Only one territory was excluded. As was set out in the Golden Bull, the electorate and the duchy of Sachsen-Wittenberg belonging to it, had to go to the eldest son.

Once the brothers had agreed they wanted to divide it all up again, the elder, Frederick presented his suggestion for the division, William turned it down. Then Frederick said to William, o.k., you do the slicing, and I do the choosing then. All went o.k., in as much that Frederick accepted the slicing and then chose the part that comprised Thuringia. At which point William said, no, I wanted Thuringia. Friedrich said, this is no way to do business, and the whole case was put before a commission comprised of local princes, including Brandenburg, Hessen and the archbishop of Magdeburg. They sided with William, granting him Thuringia, leaving Frederick with the other bit, the lands around Meissen, Dresden and Leipzig he did not want.

That is the moment where even Frederick, who carried the moniker “the Gentle”, had enough. You cannot both divide and choose. And war was on.

Some have claimed that the devastation this Saxon brother’s war wrought on Thuringia was worse than anything either World War II or even the 30-years war managed to do. We have no way to assess that, but the way the war was conducted makes this not improbable. Both sides sought out allies amongst the neighbouring princes whose sole reason for taking part was pay and plunder. And amongst these neighbours were the Hussites of Bohemia who broke into Thuringia on several occasion, largely unopposed on account of their fearsome reputation gained under Jan Zika and the two Prokops. Anyone who did not get behind the walls of one of the major cities in time, ended up raped and slaughtered, their fields burned, their vineyards pulled up and their villages set alight.

We did talk about the Hussite Cherry Festival in Naumburg in episode 182. It is most likely the siege it refers to took place during this war between the brothers. Naumburg celebrating the event for near 600 years now, may be an indication of how traumatic this Hussite invasion had been.

The whole thing lasted 4 years and ended in 1451 with Frederick accepting the decision of the commission and took the Meissen lands, whilst William received Thuringia.

This rather disastrous war had a follow-on that would in turn traumatise the future heirs to the house of Wettin. There was a knight, Kunz von Kaufungen, who had served the elector Frederick during the brother’s war but felt he had not received the agreed reward for his services. He sued the prince, and after proceedings before various courts, the parties met for negotiations. They traded arguments back and forth. Frederick made clear he was not going to budge, and Kunz von Kaufungen left the hall of his lord.   

As negotiations had broken down, according to the medieval understanding of the law, Kaufungen was now allowed to enforce his claims by way of a feud. Kaufungen found some supporters who shared his legal position and on the night of the 7th of July 1455, 16 armed men entered the castle of Altenburg and kidnapped the two sons of Frederick, called Albrecht and Ernst. The idea was to use them as a pawn in the next round of negotiations. The two boys, 12 and 14 were put on horses and their captors tried to bring them to one of Kaufungen’s castles. Kaufungen and the other nobles who had joined his feud, had sent Fehdebriefe, a formal declaration of hostilities when they rode away with their hostages. 

Frederick ordered all his subjects to hunt down the kidnappers. Kunz von Kaufungen was the first to be apprehended, already on the first day by colliers who freed Albrecht. A few days later the nobles who had joined the attack surrendered and released Ernst in exchange for freedom from prosecution.

Six days later, Frederick, whose moniker “the Gentle” may actually be a bid of a misnomer, had Kaufungen and his brother beheaded. Over the next few weeks several other co-conspirators felt the wrath of the enraged father.

This event had two outcomes. First, by executing Kaufungen and his friends, the Prince Frederick asserted a different, a modern understanding of the law. What Kaufungen did might have been allowed under the medieval rules of feuding, but were a capital crime under Roman Law, which was more and more penetrating the practice of the courts.

The other, even more material impact of the event was the trauma it inflicted on the two boys. They both attributed Kaufungen’s act quite accurately to the Saxon Brother’s war. The conflict had so weakened princely authority and finances, that even minor nobles felt entitled to challenge their lord, first in court and then in the field. They committed to never letting that happen to them should the time come.

Which is why the brothers accepted their Father’s last will and testament that set out that the land should not be divided between them – and this is now important – the elder brother was supposed to rule the land both on his own and his brother’s behalf. That was not outright primogeniture, more of a sort of unlimited guardianship. The younger brother was not disinherited but was just obliged to stay out of the way and was given a generous pension.

Ernst von Sachsen

The system worked brilliantly for the next 20 years. Ernst was formally in charge, but he did give Albrecht a bigger share in the government of the estate than he had to. Ernst focused on domestic politics, improving the economy and repairing devastation from the brother’s war, whilst Albrecht’s interest lay more in external relations and chivalric exploits. The brothers lived together in the castle of Dresden, thereby preserving the ability to react rapidly to the ever-changing political environment.

Dresden castle in ~1450

Success followed success under the joint government. Their father had already achieved a permanent settlement between the Wettins and the Kingdom of Bohemia that ended the perennial border conflicts.

The brothers fought a number of feuds against neighbouring counts and incorporated their lands. And they used their substantial resources to place two sons of Ernst onto important episcopal seats, Magdeburg and Mainz. A sister became abbess of Quedlinburg, and when she faced a rebellion of the townspeople, her brothers came to her aid, making Quedlinburg dependent upon them in the process.

Albrecht even put his head in the ring for the crown of Bohemia when his father-in-law, Georg Podiebrad had died. The attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, but 10 out of 10 for trying.

Albrecht duke of Saxony

The rise in their political profile came alongside a material economic boom. Leipzig had already established close links eastwards along the Via Regia, but in the 15th century this route via Breslau and Krakow to Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic states was taking trade away from the Hanseatic League in the North and the older route via Regensburg.

Screenshot

In 1466 the city of Leipzig gained the right to hold a fair, the event that turned into the Leipziger Messe, until today one of the great industry get-togethers only rivalled by the Frankfurter Messe.

Leipziger Messe

In 1480 a printing press was established there, the beginnings of Leipzig as one of the main centres of publishing in Germany.  

And on top of that the brothers hit another jackpot in the world of mining. The original mine in Freiberg had already been a major source of income that had allowed the family to sustain the many self-inflicted pains of the previous century. But in 1470 another deposit was discovered in Schneeberg, triggering a silver rush, or as the Germans called it at the time, a Berggeschrei. The deposits discovered at that time included not just Schneeberg, but also Annaberg-Buchholz and Marienberg. I just found out that the most famous one, Joachimsthal, just across the border in Bohemia was owned by descendants of Kaspar Schlick, chancellor of the empire and hero Silvio Aneas Piccolomini’s, aka pope Pius II’s, erotic novel mentioned in episode 184. Sorry, you wanted more cross-references, and that is what you get.

The good news continued. In 1482 their uncle, William III, the man who had fought their father in the Saxon Brother’s war, passed away without offspring. William had remained erratic and full of temper to his end. Though he had inherited the lands that were most affected by the devastation of the war, he kept fighting feuds with all and sundry.  Though the biggest disagreement he had with his wife, the daughter of the Habsburg King Albrecht II. Despite her august heritage, he treated her appallingly. At some point when she tried to rekindle their failing marriage, he threw a shoe at her, a form of insult he may have picked up during a journey to the Holy Land. In the end he had her incarcerated where she died barely 30 years old. William married his mistress of many years, but this relationship did not yield offspring and less surprisingly, neither had his first marriage. So as per the family law, Thuringia returned to the brothers.

Under the joint government of Albrecht and Ernst the house of Wettin had reached its largest geographical extent and arguably the height of its power. Which must mean it is downhill from here….

And the best way for a princely family to fall off the wagon is to divide up their lands, which Ernst and Albrecht did in 1485.

Some argue a rift had been building up between the brothers during Ernst’ pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Instead of passing the ducal authority to his brother for the time of his absence, Ernst had forced him to share decision making with his councillors. A snub that indicated a lack of trust.

A short time later, Albrecht moved out of their joint residence in the castle of Dresden. He took himself and his now quite large family to the castle of Torgau.  

And there are again councillors who are blamed for the estrangement between the brothers, claims that are confirmed by the accusations Albrecht would later make.

In 1482 the two brothers began discussions over a division of the lands. It is hard to believe that these relatively minor disagreements could overshadow 20 years of successful joint rule, a communal childhood trauma and the explicit wish of their father.

Two arguments have been brought forward. One is that both Ernst and Albrecht had large families. And as they were reaching late middle age, their thoughts may have turned to the fate of their sons. Albrecht had full 5 sons and Ernst 4. The maths no longer worked. The chance that more than a half dozen dukes could manage the principality in full agreement, as Albrecht and Ernst had done, was highly improbable. If Albrecht and Ernst would each designate just one of their sons to be joint duke and elector, what about the younger ones? And then there was the long-established Wettin tradition of divisions, how can that be overcome?

The other argument is that before they had inherited Thuringia, division of their lands would have pushed them back down the league table of the imperial princes. But now, with Thuringia included in the basket, a division was possible. Albrecht still insisted that the division would seriously impact the standing of the family, but it seems Ernst was less concerned.

Ernst could also not refuse a division since his father had not established full primogeniture but had only given Ernst the right to rule for life on behalf of both brothers.

So, over a period of 3 years the brothers swapped proposals, until on June 17, 1485, they agreed the Leipzig Division. Ernst, being the eldest inherited the Electorate as per the Golden Bull and chose Thuringia as his territory. Albrecht received the Meissen lands. Some rights and territories, in particular the silver mines remained under joint management.

Surprisingly, this arrangement held, at least for over fifty years. Sure, there were frictions between the two branches, but either side found ways to keep themselves busy. Albrecht himself became a well-rewarded paladin of the emperors Friedrich III and Maximilian, establishing a tradition. From here forward, the Albertine line, based in Dresden would be found siding with the emperor, even across boundaries of religion. And Albrecht made the step his father had failed to take, he established full primogeniture for his lands.

His brother Ernst did not do it or did not get around to doing it. He died in 1487, just two years after the Leipzig division. His heirs, Frederick and John will probably get their own episode. The elder, Frederick became known as Frederick the Wise and he is the elector of Saxony who founded the university of Wittenberg, hid its most famous lecturer,  Martin Luther in the Wartburg, where he translated the bible, whilst his brother and successor was a key figure in spreading the Reformation. But that is something we will do when we get to the Reformation.

The two lines, known as the Ernestine and the Albertine line of the house of Wettin would never be reunited. Since the Albertiner established primogeniture from the beginning, their land became a large and coherent state, one of Germany’s richest. And it became synonymous with the name Saxony, an irony, since it lies outside the original stem duchy of Saxony.

The Ernestiner went through several further divisions, leaving the resulting statelets far too small to play a significant political role, aside from the momentous decisions of Frederick the Wise and his brother. Thuringia became the posterchild for the Holy Roman Empire of tiny principalities; the Duodez Fürsten, whose lands extended no further than 12 miles in any direction, but boasted a large palace, gardens, a theatre, opera, a princely court with regular balls and entertainments. Places that could barely field more than a 1000 soldiers but could make the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe its chief minister.

Some have argued that a united Saxony comprising both Thuringia and what is today Saxony would have been powerful enough to keep Prussia from rising to dominance in the 18th and 19th century. Maybe, but we will meet the elector Friedrich August II of Saxony, and you can make up your mind whether a few battalions more would have shifted the outcome of the Silesian Wars.

I am not yet sure what we want to do next episode, but since you encouraged me to do deviations, I may put in something I have been thinking about for a while, talking about two products Germany became famous for in this period, map making and armour. Let’s see.

In any event, I will take a week off now, not for any other reason than that I feel a bit drained….

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The Economy

So, why did Holland really leave the empire? Was it because the valiant and tragic countess Jacqueline was “hunted down from one land to the other, all of them mine”. Was it a story of misogyny, betrayal, incompetence, and ruthless power politics? Yes, it was. But it was also a story of economic and climate change and one that links into the herring trade of the Hanseatic League, the decline of Teutonic Knights and even into the Hussite Revolt, topics that seem distant, but mattered.

This week we focus on this, the latter part of the story.

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Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 199 – How Holland was Lost (Part 2) – also episode 15 of season 10: The Empire in the 15th Century.

So, why did Holland really leave the empire? Was it because the valiant and tragic countess Jacqueline was “hunted down from one land to the other, all of them mine”. Was it a story of misogyny, betrayal, incompetence, and ruthless power politics? Yes, it was. But it was also a story of economic and climate change and one that links into the herring trade of the Hanseatic League, the decline of Teutonic Knights and even into the Hussite Revolt, topics that seem distant, but mattered.

This week we focus on this, the latter part of the story.

But before we start the usual link to historyofthegermans.com/support where you are given the opportunity to keep this show on the road. Plus, as you may have noticed we did quite a few episodes recently upon suggestions from Patrons, so if there is something you care about, let me know and I will see what can be slotted in.

And our special thanks this week go to Kyle R., Erik L, Noel L., Rauschbegleiter, Stefan, Mark P. and Raimonds S. who have already committed themselves to the honorable task of fending off the mattrasses and room rental advertising.

And with that, back to the show

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Jacqueline’s fight for her inheritance

Last week we ended with the flight of Jacqueline, countess of Holland, Seeland and Hainault to England and her marriage to the dashing duke of Gloucester. For those of you who have not listened or cannot remember last episode, here is a brief recap.

Jacqueline was the only daughter of the count of Holland, Zeeland and Hainault, aka a big chunk of what is today the Netherlands. Her being a mere woman then got everybody in the region giddy with excitement. Her powerful neighbor and cousin, duke Philipp the Good of Burgundy wanted her lands, as did her uncle, John the Pitiless, the former bishop elect of Liege. And in the background the emperor, Sigismund, wanted to make sure that the Low Countries remained inside the Holy Roman Empire.

The person who was supposed to fight for Jacqueline’s rights was her husband, John, the duke of Brabant. Either by coincidence or by perfidious Burgundian planning, John of Brabant turned out to be a gormless, vindictive and easy to manipulate fool.

So, when Jacqueline’s father died, a mad scramble for her lands began. Her husband did manage to take control of Hainault, ostensibly on her behalf. In Holland and Zeeland however, John the Pitiless was the outright winner. He got the support of one of the local factions, the Cods, which brought him control of about half. When Jacqueline and her allies from the other faction, the Hooks, tried to dislodge him, John of Brabant left them hanging. And to make matters worse, in the subsequent peace negotiations John of Brabant handed John the Pitiless the governorship of the parts of Holland and Zeeland he did not already control. Plus, emperor Sigismund gave John the Pitiless his niece Elisabeth of Görlitz to marry, which added the duchy of Luxemburg to the overall pot.

So, after round one, Holland, Zeeland and Luxemburg are held by John the Pitiless, Jacqueline’s uncle. Hainault is in the hands of John of Brabant, Jacqueline’s husband. But smelling most strongly of roses was Philipp the Good, the duke of Burgundy and count of Flanders, who was in pole position to collect the whole lot should the two Johns die without offspring. And that was pretty likely given the age of John the Pitiless’ wife and the state of John of Brabant’s marriage.

The only one who had received nothing at all was poor Jacqueline. She was trapped. She hated her husband John of Brabant from the bottom of her heart. He had betrayed her in battle and had then handed her inheritance over to her uncle. Moreover, he had humiliated her in public. This marriage was over as far as she was concerned, but absent a divorce or annulment, she would have to stand on the sidelines and watch it all go down the swanny, or more precisely, down the Scheldt to Philipp of Burgundy.

But there was a way to get out of this disastrous marriage. Jacqueline and John of Brabant were first cousins, aka her mother was his father’s sister. Such a close family relationship required papal dispensation. That dispensation had first been granted, but once emperor Sigismund heard about it, he got pope Martin V to withdraw it. The case was still pending before the curia, which so far had only partially revalidated the initial dispensation.

This left enough ambiguity that Jacqueline could declare her marriage null and void from the very beginning. Which is why she fled to England where she married Humphrey the duke of Gloucester, uncle and guardian of the two-year-old king Henry VI.

Humphrey was a more proactive, competent and ambitious man than the gormless John of Brabant, which wasn’t exactly a high bar. But still he was more the kind of man Jacqueline needed to regain her inheritance.

Things were coming to a head at the end of 1424. Humphrey and Jacqueline mustered an army and sailed for Calais. From there they proceeded to Hainault, where they took possession of several of the main cities and fortresses. On January 3, 1425, Hunfrey was declared count of Hainault by the estates of the county. How enthusiastic this endorsement was is hard to judge, since the building where they met was surrounded by English soldiers.

And another thing happened around that same time, Jacqueline’s hated uncle, John the Pitiless breathed his last. The common understanding is that he died from poison. Six months earlier, a Dutch nobleman, Jan van Vliet, who had been married to one of Jacqueline’s half-sisters, admitted to an attempt on John the Pitiless’ life. He declared under torture that he had smeared a slow-acting poison on to the pages of the ex-bishop’s prayer book, all at the behest of an English spy. And John the Pitiless had indeed been struck by an inexplicable disease, which is why an investigation had been launched in the first place. Whether these confessions under torture were the truth is however disputed. For one, John the Pitiless’ death was not particularly useful to Gloucester and Jacqueline, since it brought the much more powerful Philipp the Good of Burgundy into the driver seat, but more significantly, the idea that John the Pitiless would read a prayer book is just preposterous.

The other one to recede into the background is Jacqueline’s former or not so former husband John of Brabant who finds all that politicking and fighting a bit too taxing. He decided to focus more on hunting and frolicking and handed management of his duchies, inheritances and pretty much everything else to his good cousin Duke Philipp the Good of Burgundy.  

So, the field has thinned out. It is now down to just Philipp the Good on one side and Humphrey and Jacqueline on the other.

And Philipp the Good has a brilliant idea. Instead of wasting vast amounts of money on hiring mercenaries and devastating villages, let’s just sort this like men, mano a mano. We set a date and place where we can get into the ring and fight it out to the death. A true trial by combat to determine whether Jacqueline was still married to John of Brabant or not, and then obviously, who would take over her inheritance.

The days when European leaders of this caliber would slug it out in single combat were long gone by 1425, if they ever existed. But Philipp was definitely serious. He submitted to a strict exercise regime, called the greatest swordsmen of the age to his castle to help him train, and oiled his diamond studded armor. The whole thing felt slightly mad, in particular since at the time Philipp the Good had no legitimate heirs. If he had fallen, all his lands would have gone to the least deserving protagonist in this drama, his closest relative, duke John the Gormless of Brabant.

Though the young duke spent most of his days parrying training blows in the courtyard of his castle, he did not rely entirely on this madcap idea. He initiated a more conservative plan B in parallel. He sent out an army to reconquer Hainault, all on behalf of his beloved cousin of Brabant, of course.

This campaign did quite well, in part because of a misunderstanding. The English defenders of a city called s’Gravenbrakel suddenly surrendered their well defended position. They said that they had seen their patron saint, St. George, amongst the besieging Burgundians and decided that God was not on their side. It turned out that the man they had seen had been a Brabant knight whose coat of arms and armor resembled English depictions of St. George.

But that set the tone for events that followed. The English gradually retreated and the date for the trial by combat moved closer.

This whole trial by combat thing was not only insane, it also caused a massive headache for the duke of Bedford, the English regent in France, who was also Humphrey’s brother. Note that we are in the Hundred Years’ War, at a time when half of France was occupied by the English and Joan of Arc was still in her home village trying to get rid of the voices in her head. The reason the English could hold a large part of France and were able to claim the French crown for the boy king Henry VI, was their alliance with Burgundy. And that alliance had only come about because Philipp the Good wanted revenge for the death of his father. Now imagine what would happen if Humphrey ran Philipp the Good through with a sword? John the Gormless of Brabant would become duke of Burgundy. And what use was he? The alliance would collapse, and the English would be thrown out. And even if the opposite happened, i.e., Humphrey would bite the dust of the arena, that would still require Bedford to react, potentially declare war against the Burgundians. And for what? Some waterlogged counties on the North Sea shore.

As far as the English were concerned, Humphrey and Philipp must never meet again. So, Humphrey was made lord protector of England with the task of reigning in an overbearing bishop of Winchester. Humphrey turned to his wife and said something along the lines of, sorry dear, will have to nip over to London, little business I need to take care of, will be back in a jiffy, Tallyho. And off he went, sending a letter to Philipp asking for a postponement of the fight. Ah, and he also took along one of Jacqueline’s ladies in waiting, Eleanor of Cobham, who was now waiting on her lord’s hand, feet and other parts of the anatomy.

Jacqueline would forever defend her husband Gloucester and refute all the stories she was told about his behavior back in London. But..

With Gloucester and most of his army gone, the Burgundians advanced even more quickly. Jacqueline and the remaining English had not endeared themselves to the inhabitants of Hainault and support for their most noble lady was at best lukewarm.

When Philipp and his army appeared before Mons, the capital of Hainault, Jacqueline urged the burghers to fight. They refused. She got angry and pulled the whole, I am your countess and you do what I want, and pointing to the man standing next to her, she said, if you do not, here is my English knight in shining armor who will make you. To which the burghers said, you mean this guy? Yes. Ok. They grabbed the unfortunate soldier and beheaded him right in front of the countess. She was a tough lady, so it took two more heads to hit the straw before she relented. The city of Mons and with it all that remained of Jacqueline’s support in Hainault surrendered to Philipp the Good.

Jacqueline, beloved cousin that she was, was brought to Ghent to live out her days as an honored prisoner. Her county of Hainault was now firmly in the hands of Philipp the Good.

As for Holland and Zeeland, the death of John the Pitiless meant that formally the county had reverted back to Jacqueline, or more precisely, Jacqueline’s husband, whoever you believed that to be. And given there were two, the towns and cities of Holland and Seeland had to make a choice. Many chose to open their gates to John of Brabant, but not all. Correction, John of Brabant obviously could not be bothered with all of that and had appointed his cousin Philipp the Good to take up this task as well, so most of the cities opened their gates to Philipp the Good, but not all.

Which gets us to the final act of the drama, Jacqueline, the most wickedly betrayed woman in the world, as she complained to Gloucester, made one last move. On the night of August 31st, 1425, she told her servants that she wished to take a bath and not to be disturbed. Whilst her guards decided this was a perfect time to take a break, she changed into men’s clothes and strolled out of her prison and into the bustling streets of Ghent. At the city gates two of her men were waiting with horses. She got into the saddle and rode, without stopping, all the way to Holland.

There she found support in the cities that had refused to submit to Philipp the Good. She made her headquarters in Gouda. A four year long war ensued. Against all the odds, Jacqueline won 2 battles, Philipp only one. Her husband Gloucester sent two armies, one was brutally massacred when they got lost in the shallow waters of the Dutch coast, and the other turned tail before landing. But in the end, she did not stand a chance against the might of all of Burgundy, Flanders, Brabant, Limburg, Hainault and the Cod faction in Holland.

On the 3rd of July 1428, Jacqueline surrendered. She exchanged the kiss of Delft with Philipp, which apparently wasn’t really a kiss. The cousins, now reconciled, paraded through the city. The population, exhausted by the long war, cheered. Jacqueline recognized Philipp of Burgundy as her heir and retired to one of her castles in Hainault. She married one last, a fourth time, for love, not for politics, and died, aged just 35. By then John of Brabant was long dead and so was his brother Philipp of St. Pol who I left out to keep the story simple. Neither of them had legitimate heirs.

Their heir was Philipp of Burgundy who had won the jackpot. He had gained Holland, Zeeland and Hainault as well as Brabant and Limburg. In 1441 he bought the county of Luxemburg from Elisabeth of Görlitz. That together with a number of further acquisitions including the county of Namur brought the Low Countries together into what became the Burgundian and later the Spanish Netherlands.

The foreign policy reasons she did not stand much of a chance.

Ok, that is the story of the kings, dukes and counts, their marriages and wars. But is that really the full story? Me thinks not. There are a couple of reasons things turned out in favor of Burgundy that have little to do with the gormlessness of John of Brabant or the fact that Jacqueline was a woman in a profoundly misogynist world.

The first point is the obvious one. Burgundy and England were in an alliance against the dauphin of France, Charles VII. This alliance was absolutely crucial for the English position. Over the course of the Hundred Years War the English have won all the battles but had never been able to hold on to any territorial gains. And the reason was simple – demographics. England’s population had dropped to 2 to 3 million following the Black Death. France on the other hand held still 10 to 12 million people. In other words, France had 4 to 5 times the population of England. And as a consequence, all the territory, except for Calais, that England gained after Crecy and Poitiers, had been reconquered by France in the years that had followed. And the English were fully aware of this. Having Burgundy and its vast military and economic resources on their side gave them at least a chance of defeating the dauphin.

Therefore this whole business in Holland was a massive distraction for the English crown, in particular for the Regency council. As much as his brothers may have been sympathetic to the hugely popular Humphrey to acquire his own principality, there was no way they would jeopardize the alliance with Burgundy.  Hence English support for him and Jacqueline was constantly delayed and even withheld.

On top of this strategic disadvantage, the fact that England’s monarch was a child, who would turn into an adult with serious problems, was weighing on Humphrey’s ability to support Jacqueline. He had to make a choice between protecting his family’s hold on England versus a remote chance of acquiring Holland. And a chance that would shrink to near zero if he gave up his position on the regency council. So, even though Humphrey was clearly not an ideal husband, there are some solid reasons for his absence from the battlefield.

With England opening the doors for Burgundy, we get to the question that we had started with, why didn’t the empire push back against Philipp the Good?

It certainly wasn’t the case that the emperor Sigismund was not interested. The western border of the empire was the homeland of his family. Fending off French encroachment on what used to be Lotharingia, was the reason his ancestor, Henry VII, had taken the imperial crown in the first place. (episode 144). His niece, Elizabeth of Görlitz was duchess of Luxemburg, and he had used her to exercise influence in the region. In 1409 he married her to Anthony of Brabant, the father of John the Gormless. That was his way of counteracting the shift of Brabant towards Burgundy that had gotten under way in the previous generation. Then, in 1417, just when Jacqueline’s father died, he married her to John the Pitiless.

Sigismund insisted that he, as emperor elect, was the overlord of all these counties and duchies, Holland, Seeland, Hainault, Brabant, Limburg and Luxemburg. And as such it was his job to decide who would inherit them once the male line had ended. And his choice was John the Pitiless, the husband of his niece.

And at the same time, he was working hard to undermine the marriage of John of Brabant and Jacqueline, which he rightly perceived as a way the Burgundians were trying to get hold of the lot. And he had a lot of influence here. The current pope, Martin V had only just been elected at the Council of Constance, the event Sigismund had brought about and that he largely controlled. It was Sigismund who got pope Martin V to revoke the dispensation for Jacqueline’s Brabant wedding, which was also the legal means by which Jacqueline could marry Gloucester.

But where was Sigismund in 1425? His champion, John the Pitiless, was dead. And we do not see Sigismund replacing him, say by putting one of the Bavarian or Palatinate Wittelsbachs forward. Some of them, like the Bavaria Munichs, were his close allies and friends. Or he could at least endorse Gloucester who had the advantage of not being Philipp of Burgundy. It is hard to say what such a move could have achieved, but in the precarious balance that prevailed in the Low Countries, it could have provided at least political cover for whoever he endorsed.

So, why didn’t he? The answer is simple – The Hussites. The Hussite war had kicked off with the First Prague Defenestration in 1419 and in 1421 Sigismund suffered his worst defeat at Kutna Hora and Nemecki Brod (Episode 180). That was followed by further humiliations in 1424, 1426 and 1427 when the imperial crusaders ran away in panic when they heard the Hussite’s gruesome drum approaching. These defeats also weakened the king’s position in Hungary where Venice and others made inroads. The resumption of the conflict between the Teutonic Knights and the kingdom of Poland was another issue closer to home that required his massively overstretched attention…and so he had to let it slip.

The domestic reasons she struggled.

And then there were the most fundamental, the economic and climatic reasons, why the low countries turned their back on the empire.

As of today, 26% of the Netherlands lie below sea level, protected by an elaborate system of dikes, storm surge barriers, pumps and canals. This infrastructure goes back a long way and had a huge impact on the politics and culture of the region.

There are three large rivers that empty into the North Sea in Holland and Seeland, the Rhine, the Maas and the Scheldt. Each of them formed massive deltas that in the Middle Ages kept the whole region under constant threat of flooding. Early flood defenses comprised simple dikes about a meter high, protecting individual towns and villages.

Throughout the Middle Ages these flood defenses expanded to protect not just isolated settlements, but larger areas that could then be drained and turned into pasture or exploited for peat. This land reclamation had come to its completion in the 14th century when current technology could not push it any further.

In the late 14th and early 15th century a number of interlocking strains of events caused a string of catastrophes. One strain was the excessive harvesting of peat, largely used for heating at the time. The volume of peat removed was of such a magnitude that more and more areas dropped below sea level.

Then you had a weakening of the dike administration. As dikes became larger and more complex, they were no longer the responsibility of just one village or one local lord. From as early as the 12th century, the Dutch formed water councils responsible for the construction and maintenance of the flood defenses across wider areas. Overseeing these water councils was the High Water Council established by the counts of Holland in 1255. These structures were and are unique. Because a dike is only as strong as its weakest part, everybody who benefitted from it, which was pretty much everybody, had an interest in where and how the dike was built and maintained. Which in turn meant that people cooperated a lot more across larger areas than in most other regions of Europe at the time. Finding consensus on dike building and maintenance was a vital necessity, to the extent it seeped deep into the culture. When I worked in the Netherlands my colleagues would trace Dutch corporate culture all the way back to the water boards and their focus on consensus and meritocracy.

And that is also where its weakness lay. Once the dike infrastructure had expanded across the whole region, consensus and co-ordination at the top level of the High Water Council was ever more crucial. But consensus was not the prevailing political mode since 1345. The takeover of Holland by the Wittelsbachs had triggered a persistent civil war that became known as the war between the Cods and the Hooks. It is usually said that the cods were more progressive and linked to the merchants in the cities, whilst the Hooks tended to be more on the side of the landowning nobility. Though this may be very broadly correct, we find that there were constant shifts between the parties and some of the counts of Holland like Albert and his predecessor William V supported the cods, whilst William VI and Jacqueline relied on the Hooks. They are a bit like the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, factions that have been at each other’s throats for so long, nobody can remember why they were fighting in the first place.

A country divided, where neighboring towns, villages and lords are constantly at low level war, forming the consensus over the maintenance of dikes was hard to come by. Which meant that the dikes had fallen into disrepair.

At which point the last of the calamities struck, the climate. As I might have mentioned, the climate changed from the late 13th century onwards. The medieval warm period had come to an end and the little ice age was building up. It would take 400 years to reach its peak, but already by the early 15th century it got a lot colder.

And with that temperature drop came more and more regular storms. In 1287 the St. Lucia’s flood had broken open the Zuiderzee causing massive devastation, killing maybe 50 to 80,000 people, but it also opened Amsterdam an access to the sea. The St. Marcellus flood in 1362 took about 25,000 lives. In 1394 a storm forced the citizens of Oostende to give up their homes and move a few miles inland. The image of whole villages packing up all their belongings including their church decorations and bells and moving to higher ground became common place.

And then came the three St. Elisabeth’s floods. The first one on November 19, 1404, feast day of friend of the podcast St. Elisabeth of Thuringia, caused again vast flooding across Flanders, Zeeland and Holland. Following this disaster Margaret of Flanders, the mother of John the Fearless, ordered that all the dikes between Dunkirk and Terneuzen, i.e., the entire length of the Flanders coast shall be connected. This structure, as we would expect, was named not after her but after her son, the Graaf Jansdijk. It prove to be an enduring and extremely beneficial investment. Until today it is noticeable that the Belgian coast is almost a dead straight line until Knocke-Heist where the Graaf Jansdijk turned inland. Beyond that, the coast becomes messy, full of islands, some drying, some visible and meandering rivers and inlets.

In the tense political atmosphere of Holland of 1404, such an infrastructure project was not feasible. Which is why the second St. Elisabeth Flood of 1421, again on November 19th, was so devastating. Whole areas, like that between Dordrecht and Breda drowned in the flood along with all its people and animals.

One baby was saved in the most extraordinary manner. It had ridden out the storm in its crib and the family cat had steered their precarious raft through the waves by balancing on the edges. The child was named Beatrix and later married a wealthy merchant in Dordrecht.

And in 1424 it happened again, this time the outcome was milder as most of the lower lying lands had already been vacated.

After this experience and seeing the much more efficient handling of the situation in Flanders, it is not surprising that the population demanded a more effective government. They did not care who it was, just someone competent, able to organize the flood defense. And despite his propensity for bling and mad trials by combat, that was miles away from the sober attitude of the Hollanders, Philipp the Good was a very effective administrator. Jacqueline on the other hand – nobody knew. She was never given a real chance to run a territory.

In the century that followed Holland’s storm defenses became more and more sophisticated. They not only gained in height, but they were backed up by drainage canals and the most Dutch thing one can imagine, the windmills. These windmills aren’t all there to crush grains or saw wood, but to drain the water into canals and rivers. The first of them was built in 1408 near Leiden and at its peak there were ~10,000 of them patiently keeping the Dutch men and women’s feet dry.

Whilst all this was going on, the economy in the Low countries and particularly in Holland and Zeeland underwent a fundamental change. Cereal production was gradually replaced by pasture. That may be down to the salination of the lands in the floods, but more likely down to a combination of a colder climate tipping much of the marginal land to unproductive, and the influx of cheap grain from the Baltic, brought over by Hanse merchants.

The Frisian cows appeared everywhere, and with them the cheese the entrepreneurial Hollanders produced and sold all across Europe. It also forced a lot of people off the land and into the cities. Once there, they were looking for work.

And they found that in fishing, namely fishing for herring. If you remember episode 111 when we made the point that herring fishing in the narrows Öresund between what is today Denmark and Sweden was the true reason for the Hanse’s rise. In a world with 140 fast days when one was only allowed to eat animal protein in the form of fish, alligator, lizard, puffin or, weirdly, beaver, something like salted herring was a hugely important commodity.

In the peace of Stralsund in 1370 the Hanse established a monopoly on Baltic trade that included a monopoly over the herring market of Skanor, the place where almost all of the Baltic herring was traded. That monopoly became a rope around the Hanse’s neck, as former trading partners became competitors who instead of buying from and through them, sought ways to circumvent and then break the Hanse monopoly.

And that is where the Dutch came in. North Sea herring may not be quite as tasty as the Baltic variety, but it was available in abundance, cheap and outside the Hanse monopoly. This competition in the herring market led the Dutch cities slowly but surely away from the Hanseatic League, they had previously been allied with. Some had been members of the Hanse and other, like Dordrecht and Amsterdam had at least preferred trading partner status.

This rivalry grew as the Dutch moved from building fishing boats to merchant vessels, in particular when these caught up and then surpassed the Hansekogge in terms of speed and load capacity.

And then there was the beer market where both the Hollander and the Flemings picked up on the use of hops instead of Kraut, thereby becoming heavy competition for the brewers of Einbeck, Hamburg and Bremen, a rivalry that goes on until today.

In 1438-1441 these tensions between Holland and the Hanse cities turned into an outright war. They took advantage of complex Danish and Hanseatic politics to gain access to the Baltic Sea, a privilege they maintained, whilst the Hanseatic league went into its slow decline.

So, if we want to sum up why Holland left the Holy Roman Empire, there is some blame to lay at the feet of Sigismund’s predecessors and then his decision to have Jan Hus burned at the stake. But the main reason was that for Holland to preserve its land, it needed a political infrastructure that could maintain the complex system of flood defences, and that competent political infrastructure was Burgundy, not the Empire. And as the economy of Holland and Zeeland came into collision with the Hanse, which was after all the association of the merchants from the Holy Roman Empire, their exit was sealed.

It would take a little longer before the exit was formalised. But already in 1428, Philipp the Good established the Hof van Holland, the highest court in the counties. On paper this court should have allowed appeals to the imperial courts but never did and in 1549 was moved outside imperial jurisdiction. And in 1648 the formal separation took place, the culmination of a war that lasted 80 years and that we will not discuss here.

And that is all we have time for today. I have not yet decided what we will do next week, but rest assured, there are still a few stories to come.

And one last thing. I sometimes wonder whether all these deviations from the straight storyline that we have made these last two years, the seasons on the Hanseatic League, the Teutonic Knights, on the Hussites were really necessary. If we had not done them, we would now be in the midst of the 30 Years War. And that would certainly have been helpful in terms of the reach of the show.

Honest question: Did I take the right decision. Was it worth it going through the Eastward Expansion, the Hanseatic League, the Teutonic Knights, the Hussite revolt and now the empire in the 15th century? Or should I have pressed on? And going forward, would you prefer a more straightforward run through the history?

By the way, if you have not listened to any of these seasons or want to listen again, they are available both here on the History of the Germans Feed and as separate podcasts. The links to those are in the show notes.

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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.

by on

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

ürgen Wullenwever’s and Lübeck’s last stand

1531-1535, a period of just 4 years is enough to capsize Lübeck’s position as the diplomatic heart of the Baltic Sea, general secretary of the Hanse, ally of both the king of Denmark and the king of Sweden and early member of the Schmalkaldic League. How can that happen?

As Edward Gibbon would say: History, in fact, is no more than a list of crimes of humanity, human follies and accidents”.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 124 – Decline and Fall (Part 2)

1531-1535, a period of just 4 years is enough to capsize Lübeck’s position as the diplomatic heart of the Baltic Sea, general secretary of the Hanse, ally of both the king of Denmark and the king of Sweden and early member of the Schmalkaldic League. How can that happen?

As Edward Gibbon would say: History, in fact, is no more than a list of crimes of humanity, human follies and accidents”.

But before we start, enjoy this moment of Zen when you are undisturbed by your presenter extolling the benefits of online mental health services, recruitment companies or beard trimmers.  I am unsure what is more painful, the humiliation of the presenter pretending to like things he or she is clearly never going to use or the embarrassment of hearing someone who you have grown to respect debasing himself or herself. Luckily that does not happen here on the History of the Germans. istoruy of the  This podcast is entirety funded by the generosity of our patrons who have signed up on Patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website, historyofthegermans.com/support. And thanks a lot to Kevin C, Carl T, Tim B, Carlos Alonso C. and his son Eduardo A, for his patience or, should I say, lack of it. I suppose it would be easier to draw attention from youngsters if I discussed modern day German kaisers, like Tony Kroos”.

Last week we surveyed the lay of the land in the early 16th century in preparation for the dramatic events that led to the fall of Lübeck from queen of the Baltic to wealthy but ultimately no longer significant imperial free city.

And as we are squatting in the 16th century, we should do as the Romans do, which can only mean that this episode should take the structure of a Shakespearian tragedy with a sheer innumerable set of characters, complex plotline a dazzling switch around of locations.

Let’s begin with the dramatis personae:

The Lübecker

Jürgen Wullenwever, moderately successful merchant, by force of circumstance and oratory the de facto ruler of the city of Lübeck – protestant.

Marx Meier, former smith, now commander of the army and navy of Lübeck, a sharp dresser, protestant

The Danes

Ex-King Christian II, perpetrator of the Stockholm Bloodbath, Exile in the Low Countries, brother-in-law of the emperor Charles V. Catholic for political reasons only.

Frederick I king of Denmark and Norway. Successor of Christian II and current ruler thanks to election by the Danish Council of the Realm and support the city of Lübeck. Catholic but lenient on the spread of Protestantism.

Christian, count of Holstein and duke of Schleswig. Son of Frederick I. Ardent protestant.

John, younger son of Frederick I, a minor

Christopher, Count of Oldenburg, a mercenary general, distantly related to the Danish royal house.

Other Princes

Charles V, ruler of Spain, Austria and the Low countries, Holy Roman Emperor and master of an empire where the sun never sets. Brother-in-Law of Christian II. Ardent Catholic

Gustav Vasa, leader of the Swedish revolt against Danish rule following the Stockholm Bloodbath. Now King. Owes his crown and a lot of money to Lübeck. Protestant

Duke Albrecht of Mecklenburg, prince, catholic

Henry VIII, King of England

Act 1, Scene 1,

Summer of 1531, Schloss Gottorp, Schleswig-Holstein, favourite residence of king Frederick I.

News arrive that Christian II, the ex-king of Denmark and Norway after 8 years of plotting and scheming has finally convinced his brother-in-law, the emperor Charles V to give him an army to regain his crown. Initial reports indicate Christian had hired about 6-7,000 mercenaries in Northern Germany and was negotiating with the merchants of Amsterdam over the shipping to Denmark.

Frederick I is concerned about this, not just because of the size of the army that is about to be unleashed, but also because he knows Christian still has support in Denmark. Christian II had aggressively suppressed the nobility, which endeared him to the peasants and even to a degree the burghers of the major cities, Copenhagen and Malmo.

Frederick I deploys his army to Jutland, where he believes his nephew will land his troop and kick off the peasant rebellion.

And he searches far and wide for allies in this struggle. He tries to convince the emperor and the Dutch to abandon Christian II whose catholic convictions he argues are paper thin and who had proven to be a brutal tyrant. But as a plan B, he looks for direct naval support. There is a Danish navy now, but still vastly inferior to the forces of the Hanse and the Dutch. So, he writes to the various Hanseatic cities asking for help.

The response he gets is broadly positive. Lübeck under its new populist ruler, Jürgen Wullenwever is most supportive. They promise to send a fleet in exchange for restraints on Dutch shipping through the Oresund.

Messengers are going back and forth between Gottorp and Lübeck as both sides try to hammer out a deal.

Act 1 Scene 2,

October 24th,1531 the flagship of Christian II heading out of the port of Amsterdam.

Christian II has indeed indeed mustered an army of 7,000 German mercenaries, the legendary Landsknechte. The city of Amsterdam, pressured by their overlord, the emperor Charles V, have given him a dozen or so ships to bring his troops across to Denmark.

Christian II, for all his faults was no fool. He knew that his uncle had garrisoned all the major towns and fortresses in Jutland and that an attack there, this late in the year would be doomed to failure, even if the peasants would rise up for him.

Once the ships were out of Amsterdam, Christian II revealed his grand plan. Not to Denmark, but to Norway, specifically to the Norwegian capital Oslo was their convoy to go. Instead of a 300 mile sail to Jutland, they were now meant to go nearly twice as far and far out into the North Sea.

The Dutch sailors were anything but best pleased about this change of plan. But they were out at sea with 7,000 armed men, so they went along with it.

But they did not have to go far. The autumn storms that regularly batter the North Sea in October and November hit them on day 2 of the journey. The fleet split up and ships were blown far and wide. Some returned home quickly, others sought refuge in English ports but many sank, including the ship that carried the soldiers wages. As the storm raged the captains had to order the heavy cannons to be thrown overboard, so that the 4 ships and 1,000 men who made it to Oslo at the beginning of November arrived without money and without siege weapons.

But the burghers of Oslo welcomed him warmly. They had little love for Frederick I who had never bothered even to visit his Norwegian kingdom. And Norway was still staunchly catholic growing concerned about the spread of the Lutheran ideas across Denmark and the Baltic. So, on November 29 1531, Christian II was crowned king of Norway.

That was nice, but he did not control much of Norway beyond Oslo. Without cannon and just a sixth of his original force, Christian had no chance to dislodge the garrisons of the main castles in Norway.

But otherwise, he was in good shape. He had a major bridgehead in his lost kingdoms. Winter was coming and that meant any form of retaliation by the Danes would have to wait until the spring. That was enough time for the emperor Charles back in the Low Countries to muster another army and send them across to resume the original plan.

Act 1, Scene 3

March 1532, Copenhagen

Frederick I had been completely surprised and shocked by Christian’s daring move on Norway. He now needed the help of the Hanse cities even more than before. Their navies were the only ones who could prevent a landing of imperial troops in Norway. And he needed them to bring his own forces across to besiege Oslo and capture his obstinate nephew.

So, he invited representatives of the major Hanse cities to Copenhagen to discuss terms for their support. Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, Danzig and the Livonians all showed up. The leader of Lübeck, Juergen Wullenwever dominated the discussions. He insisted that any major support would be predicated on a Danish commitment to close the Oresund to Dutch shipping.

The Hansards lined up behind the Lübeck position but insisted that they have privileges of free passage for themselves and all their wares. Wullenwever does not support these proposals. In fact, he gets increasingly insistent that traffic through the Oresund should be constrained as far as possible. Wullenwever thought he smelled a rat. If for instance Danzig has free transport rights across the Oresund, what stops their Dutch associates from hoisting the Danzig flag as they approach Helsingborg, pretending they are sailing on behalf of a Hanse merchant.

The other cities too believe there are darker forces at work. As they see it, Lübeck wants as little traffic through the Oresund as possible because that traffic would then have to go via their own harbour and the river route to Hamburg and out from there.

Frederick I gets more and more exasperated with the debates and delays. He needs the Hanse navies now or it would be too late.

By early May the other Hansards leave the negotiations as they cannot see how any of this could come to a fruitful conclusion.

Only Lubeck is left at the negotiation table. Frederick I is forced to concede a full blockade of all Dutch shipping, no ifs no buts in exchange for the city’s help. Wullenwever scored his first great diplomatic victory.

Act 1, scene 4

May 1532, Schloss Gottorp, The secret office of Frederick I

Frederick I is not just exasperated but also a much better tactician than our blustering friend Wullenwever.

All throughout this period Frederick had remained in touch with Charles V and the Dutch, looking for a way to reconcile their differences. And now that had become even more urgent.

Lübeck’s demands had been completely impossible to agree to. The toll on the Oresund and the trade in Copenhagen and Malmo that was associated with it were the main sources of income for the Danish crown. Closing the Oresund, pretty much for everyone would have been economic suicide for the kingdom. No Danish king could ever agree to such conditions. And Frederick I hadn’t, at least not in writing. And he had always made clear that any such commitment would require the consent of the Council of the Realm.

So legally Frederick I was able to do what he did. He made a deal with the Dutch. In exchange for them withdrawing support for Christian II, he would keep the Oresund open for their shipping. That deal meant there were no imperial troops coming across to support Christian II in Norway.

Act 1, Scene 5

Summer 1532, the Kattegat

Wullenwever and his great warrior friend, Marx Meier did not know anything about the deal Frederick I had made with the Dutch – obviously.

So, the navy of Lubeck crosses the Oresund and sets up the blockade of Oslo. And they bring the 6,000 troops in the pay of Frederick I across. There was a bit of fighting back and forth, but on July 1st Christian II accepted defeat. He was offered safe passage and boarded a ship for Denmark. There he was immediately arrested and put in jail in Sonderburg castle. The Danish succession crisis was over.

Act 1, Scene 6

Late summer 1532, Lübeck, the office of Jurgen Wullenwever

Success in war would usually results in celebrations and given Lübeck’s role in the wine and beer trade these could have been quite fun. But I am afraid the finest Sancerre Wullenwever was gulping down at the festivities got stuck in his throat when his captains told him that they saw many a Dutch ship sailing unimpeded past the great fortresses of Helsingborg and Helsingor. 

It became clear that Frederick I had tricked him, it also became clear that there was little he could do about it. Frederick I was firmly back in control of Denmark and Sweden. Christian II was in jail and the emperor had lost interest in the Scandinavian mess.

Wullenwever was nothing if not stubborn. The Dutch were the cause of the decline of Lubeck’s fortunes. Therefore the Dutch had to be thrown out of the Baltic and if nobody was going to help, then it would be Lubeck on its own that would do the deed, cost what it may.

A war intended not just to harass Dutch trade but to bring it to a complete halt meant it wasn’t enough just to send out privateers to capture Dutch ships. Privateers are businessmen who would make rational calculations about the risk and return of attacking a large, well-armed Dutch merchantman.

What Wullenweber wanted was to attack all the Dutch ships, including the large merchantmen, including the convoys and even including their large warships. We are now in a period where we have purpose-built warships carrying cannons. If you want to see an impressive example go to Portsmouth marine dockyards and visit the Mary Rose, launched in 1511 and able to fire a broadside with its 78+ guns. 

If Lübeck wanted to attack those, they needed their own warships and navy commanders who attacked not for profit but for glory. And these were expensive.

Fortunately, the treasury of the city of Lübeck had recently been replenished with all the gold and silver from the church decorations. That popish frippery amounted to 48 tons in total, enough to keep the war going for a while.

Act 1, Scene 7

Stockholm, the Royal Palace

As so often, at the end of the money there was still a lot of war left. 48 tons of gold and silver sound a lot, but even that can run out quickly when waging major naval operations. Wullenwever needed other sources of cash. And guess what, there was one.

You remember Gustav Vasa, king of Sweden. When he was fighting for his crown in 1522, he had called upon the city of Lübeck for help, help they were willing to provide, but at a price. That price had not yet  been paid, largely because Sweden was a mess of smouldering ruins and slaughtered civilians after Christian II’s invasion.

But now, 8 years later, sure Gustav Vasa could pay them back. Wullenwever in his famously diplomatic manner, wrote a harsh letter to Gustav Vasa asking for his cash – now.

The Vasa family are famous for their temper and Gustav was no exception. Getting a condescending letter from a grubby merchant asking for money was just the thing that could send Gustav Vasa into a rage. And rage he did. Instead of sending money to Lübeck he ordered all their privileges in Sweden revoked and opened his harbours to Dutch shipping.

And that is the End of Act 1

Just look at how far we have travelled in these just 36 months. At the start of the play, Lübeck had it all. The king of Denmark and the King of Sweden were friends, owed them their crown and were firm allies. The Hanse was functioning as a coordination mechanism commanding at least some basic loyalty between the cities. Now all these relationships have become fragile, teetering on the verge of open hostility.

Let’s start Act 2 and see what Wullenwever can do to turn it all around.

Act 2, Scene 1

April 10, 1533, Schloss Gottorp

Frederick I, 61 years of age, victorious in the struggle with Christian II lay dying.

BY his bedside are his two sons. The oldest was Christian, duke of Schleswig-Holstein, 30 years old. He had been at the diet of Worms and had heard Martin Luther speak. And he liked what he heard. He introduced the new faith in his lands and made Lutheranism the state religion in Schleswig Holstein in 1528.

The younger was John, just 12 years old and so far, a blank Canvas.

The Danish Council of the Realm did not want Christian the protestant duke of Schleswig Holstein to succeed his father. The members of the council were of the highest nobility in Denmark and wanted to retain the old faith if not for reasons of theology, then because their younger brothers were the bishops and the abbots of the rich monasteries. But if Christian of Schleswig-Holstein was out, who should be king.

They would have elevated little John, who with a bit of encouragement could be made a good Catholic. But that wasn’t easy given the boy’s formidable mother and his older brother both of whom could have demanded guardianship over little John.

So, the council decided to go it alone. Denmark was not to have a king at least until John was grown up.

Act 2, Scene 2

Late spring 1533, Lübeck, Offices of Jurgen Wullenwever

The death of king Frederick I, the man who had double-crossed him was the second bit of good news for Wullenwever. The other was that he had finally been formally elevated to Burgomaster.

What made it even better was that the death of the old monarch came with a neat little succession crisis built-in. Clearly the ardent protestant Christian of Schleswig-Holstein would not allow the Danish Royal Council to bypass him and put a catholic pretender on the throne in his stead.

Christian must be a natural ally of the city of Lübeck.  This would frankly not be the first time the city on the Trave had selected a Scandinavian ruler.

But Christian did not respond to Wullenwever’s letters. No, he made it abundantly clear that he would rather forsake the crown of Denmark than owe it to Wullenwever and the city of Lübeck.

Wullenwever could not understand why Christian was so adamant. He offered him his crown and he was a protestant to boot.

What was it that stopped Christian from asking for Lübeck’s support? Did he regard Wullenwever as an untrustworthy oik who behaved like an elephant in the proverbial China shop? Possibly.

But most importantly, what Wullenwever had again not understood was that no Danish ruler could ever accept the price of his support, a closure of the Oresund for most shipping. Any king who did that would be removed after a short period, because without the tolls from the Oresund there was no money in the Danish treasury and so no chance to keep this unruly kingdom together.

Act 2, Scene 3

Summer of 1533, The city of Rye, England

Whilst all this is going down, the war against the Dutch was still raging. The fight had moved beyond the Baltic and disrupted shipping all over the North Sea.

Marx Meier who had made his first appearance as a mercenary in the army that fought king Christian II in Norway had now risen to the command of one of Lübeck’s largest warships in the North Sea.

Fortuna had been smiling on him, and Marx Meier had managed to capture a Spanish and two Dutch ships. But now he had run out of food and drink. So, he decided to go into the harbour of Rye on the South Coast of England.

Swollen with pride over his success he entered the town on horseback with his men all wearing the fanciest clothes he had taken from the captured enemy ships. It took little time for the citizens of Rye to find out that what these privateers were wearing were mainly English rather than Dutch or Spanish goods. Marx Meier was arrested and brought to the Tower in London.

The Hanse merchants in the Steelyard intervened with king Henry VIII on Meier’s behalf and the king asked to see this man. We are in the year 1533 which for you English listeners is the year when Henry VIII officially married and crowned Anne Boleyn which kicked off the Reformation in England.

Marx Meier, representative of a Protestant power in the Baltic that was at war with the subjects of the emperor Charles V, who was his enemy, suddenly seemed more useful at court than in jail. Moreover, Marx Meier is a man who likes to dress up and to party, something that endeared him to that massive codpiece that was Henry VIII.

By the end of the year Meier returns to Lübeck claiming to have made an ally in England and that things should brighten up soon.

Act 2, Scene 4

Early 1534, Schleswig Holstein

Marx Meier wasn’t a man hanging about doing nothing. The whole winter of 1533/34 he was devising plans how to foster Lübeck’s position. And he came up with the possibly worst one imaginable.

As soon as the weather allowed, Meier with a small contingent of soldiers headed out to Schleswig Holstein, the lands of count Christian and engaged in the usual plundering, raping and pillaging.

That was the last nail in the coffin of a potential alliance between Christian and the free and imperial city.

Act 2, Scene 5

Spring 1534, Hamburg

Despite the splendid adventures of Marx Meier in London, the naval campaign against the Dutch was going badly. The whole thing was extraordinarily expensive, and the city had run out of money. Plus the merchants of Lübeck had to watch their fellow Hansards from Danzig and Livonia doing great business in Flanders whilst they were banned from going there. Even Hamburg, usually joined at the hip with Lübeck refused to participate in the Dutch embargo.

Wullenwever was dragged, kicking and screaming to the negotiation table. He as well as many of the other Hanse cities had gathered in Hamburg to discuss possible solutions with representatives of the Dutch cities.

Wullenwever displayed his usual diplomatic finesse. In complete disregard of the actual situation, he demanded an apology and tons of silver in damages from the Dutch. The other council members and burgomeisters of the Hanse cities were flabbergasted by Wullenwever’s behaviour.

His colleague from Stralsund said to him: quote “I have been to many a negotiation in my life, but I have never seen anyone acting like you do. If you keep banging your head against the wall, you will leave here on your posterior” end quote. Well, he did not say posterior, but this is a family show.

As it happened Wullenwever did not leave in the manner just prescribed, but on the fastest horse he could get his hands on, because he had news from back home.

Act 2, Scene 6

Still spring 1534, Lübeck

As news of Wullenwever’s outrageous behaviour reached Lübeck, the remaining patrician voices on the council demanded an end to all this un-hanseatic nonsense. The city was broke and this war was going nowhere.

Crowds were gathering and Wullenwever’s rule would have been over, had he not suddenly appeared on his exhausted steed.

For all his faults, Wullenwever was a great orator and by promising the world and demanding adherence to the teaching of Martin Luther, he managed to turn the tide. The masses who had just hours earlier asked for his head are now demanding that the last members of the Old Council leave their posts. It is from now on the Wullenwever becomes a full-blown dictatorial ruler of the city.

Act 2, Scene 7

Sometime in 1534, the home of count Christopher of Oldenburg

One has to assume that the mercenary general count Christopher of Oldenburg was seriously surprised when emissaries of the free imperial city of Lübeck show up at his doorstep with a truly wild plan. They are asking him whether he wants to recruit a mercenary army and conquer Denmark on behalf of the City of Lübeck and – drumroll – the deposed king Christian II.

Sorry, say this again. The city of Lübeck that had fought against Christian II in three wars was to ally with this man who was locked up in the castle of Sonderburg rendering him largely useless? And just to clarify, this Christian II was a catholic who would be brought back to the throne by a protestant city, a member of the Schmalkaldic League?

How exactly was that supposed to work?

Well, the Lübeckers explain. Here is how this works:

Denmark has no king at the moment. The power sits with the Council of the realm which is stacked  with members of the high nobility. Nobody likes those.

The peasants in Jutland would happily rise up against their aristocratic oppressors to bring back their champion, king Christian II. Christian, they believe is a man of the people and a good catholic, something the peasants appreciate.

Then the emissaries say they have commitments from the cities of Copenhagen and Malmo to help in the fight. They too do not like the Council of the Realm because they are Catholics. The burghers have all been taken in by the teachings of Martin Luther. Christian II is their champion because as everyone knows he isn’t really a catholic but secretly sympathises with the protestant faith.

And let’s not forget that Christian II is the brother-in law of the emperor, which must count for something. And have we mentioned that Henry VIII of England is a mate?

Finally, there is the navy of Lübeck that still has control of the Baltic Sea. Nobody has more ships except maybe if the other Hanse cities combined with the Danes and the Swedes. But that would never happen.

Finally, the commercial terms. Christopher and his cousin, the ex-king Christian II get to rule Denmark and Norway. Lübeck was to be paid 400,000 guilders in compensation, is to be given the Oresund castles in perpetuity, 2/3rd of the tolls and Gotland, Bornholm and Bergen to boot.

Christopher of Oldenburg, at this point a mid-sized mercenary general sees that the plan may be bonkers and may also be the greatest opportunity that had ever crossed his desk. Christopher of Oldenburg is in.

The war is on.

Act 3, Scene 1

August 1534, Jutland

The war had begun. The incursions by Marx Meier into Holstein had expanded into a larger campaign. Christopher of Oldenburg had landed in Seeland and Copenhagen and Malmo had declared for Christian II. Peasants all across Denmark are in revolt.

The Danish council of the Realm now stands with its back against the wall. They did not want Cristian of Schleswig Holstein to be king, but with the realm in such turmoil they could neither elevate the 13-year old John nor continue with the interregnum.

In their distress they offer the crown to Christian who from now on is Christian III of Denmark and Norway. At least technically. Because he holds just parts of Denmark and nothing of Norway.

But he is an experienced general and administrator and so he gradually gets his act together. He convinces both catholic and protestant Danes to fight under his command against the invaders. Slowly but surely his army moves down the Jutland peninsula, recovering one stronghold after another.

Act 3, Scene 2

Stockholm, palace of Gustav Vasa

The king of Sweden is watching things closely. The idea that Denmark would become some sort of vassal of Lübeck is not much to his liking. He may hate the Danes and owe the Hansards for their help in the war of independence. But at the same time, having these ruthless merchants so close and demanding not just their money back but also even more access to the mineral wealth of his kingdom, that cannot be a good idea.

Gustav Vasa joins the fight on the side of king Christian III of Denmark.

Act 3, Scene 3

November 1534, Lübeck

King Christian III’s army has appeared before the walls of the city. Cannonballs are flying into the streets and on to the church roofs. How could that have happened?

The war was going so well just a few moths ago. Copenhagen and Malmo are in the hands of the Lubeck armies. But now their own homes are on fire.

Christian III had done the unexpected. Rather than gathering his troops to retake his capital, he had led them straight to the heart of his enemy, Lübeck.

The citizens of Lübeck had enough. They tell Wullenwever to go out to the Danish camp and agree a ceasefire. Either that or they go themselves and he should find himself a swift horse to get out here quick.

On November 11h, 1534 Wullenwever agrees to hand back all the places held by his own troops on condition that the siege is lifted. Christian III accepts since this gives him a free hand to regain Funen and Seeland.

Inside the city, Wullenwever isn’t removed as Burgomaster. But the main institutions no longer support him. He is isolated in his office, no longer able to raise funds or send fresh troops.

In his desperation he writes to Henry VIII and offers him the Danish crown if he would send him troops. And since he does not have the time to wait for an answer, he does the same with the duke of Mecklenburg. Neither responds.

Act 3, Scene 4

June 1535, Helsingborg

Despite the ceasefire, the war isn’t over. Christopher of Oldenburg still has Malmo, Copenhagen, most of Seeland and Funen. And he holds Helsingborg, the most important Danish fortress on the Oresund.

That is where he concentrates his troops, his own mercenaries and the Lübecker, which include the troops of our friend, the flamboyant Marx Meier. And it is here where the Swedes under Gustav Vasa are headed.

The two sides set up for battle. Christopher of Oldenburg and Marx Meier have decided to face the challenge head on, rather than hide behind the walls of Helsingborg. The commander of the fortress city was a loyal supporter of Christian II who had set up the large cannons on top of the city walls, aimed at the Swedes.

The smaller cannons of Helsingborg are prepared by the Danes and brought down to the battlefield, all set up and ready to fire.

As the Swedes appear within cannon shot, the German Landsknechts fire their Danish guns. The guns had been loaded with double charges so that they explode when fired killing not just the gun crew but many other men nearby. The extent of the treachery became clear when the aim of the cannons on the city walls is lowered. The Helsingborg garrison fire one devastating barrage after another at the Lubecker and Oldenburger below. Squeezed between the walls of Helsingborg and the advancing Swedes there was only one thing for the Landsknecht to do, run, run as fast as you can. 

Christopher of Oldenburg makes it to Copenhagen where he holds out until the end of the year. Marx Meier is captured and despite a valiant attempt to not only flee but also take the fortress he was imprisoned in, ends up being tortured, beheaded and quartered.

Meanwhile the Lübeck fleet too is defeated, and not just by Danes and Swedes, but by their old Hanseatic allies, the Prussians and oh yes, the navy of Danzig.

Act 3, Scene 5

August 1535, Lübeck, Rathaus

Once the news from Helsingborg reaches the city, Jurgen Wullenwever’s days are numbered. He resigns as Burgomeister and the members of the old council that had left the city in 1531 return and take their old seats.

And as before, they do not execute the man who had created so much chaos. They offer him a role as a clerk within the city’s administration and the opportunity to live out his days in peace.

Act 3, Scene 6

September 24 1537, Wolfenbüttel

Did Jürgen Wullenwever end his days as a clerk shuffling paper in a darkened office inside the splendid Rathaus of Lübeck? You bet.

Just a month after his ousting he is back on the road, seemingly in search of new allies to support his friend Christopher of Oldenburg who still holds out in Copenhagen.

He did not get far. Men of the archbishop of Bremen recognise him and take him prisoner. He is brought to Rotenburg castle where he undergoes a first round of torture. Then he is sent over to the Archbishop’s brother, the duke of Brunswick. Neither the archbishop not the duke had been involved in the conflict but hey, that does not mean they like a populist rabblerouser.

Wullenwever admits to all and everything his torturers accuse him, including being having stolen 20,000 guilders from the church treasury, wanting to unseat the new government of Lübeck and to support the anabaptism faith that was whipping Münster into a religious frenzy. None of that is true and as soon as the screws were off, Wullenwever denied all these allegations.

Still, on September 24, 1537 on the main square in Wolfenbuttel, Jurgen Wullenwever, the most politically ambitious Burgomaster of Lubeck was hung, drawn and quartered.

The End

Well, that is the end of our little play, but not really the end of the story.

The end result of the Wullenwever years was a massive decline in the influence of Lübeck in the Hanse itself. The Dutch can now sail freely into the Baltic Sea. Denmark consolidates into a strong centralised protestant kingdom after the last peasant uprising is suppressed. Sweden is heading to become a major European power whose king Gustavus Adolphus will rampage through the German lands in the 30-years war.

As for Wullenwever he becomes one of the more unusual figures in German historiography in as much that everyone claims him. The nationalists see him as an uncompromising defender of the German rule over the Baltic against the Danes and Swedes. The communist see him as a liberator of the lower classes whose attempt to bring democracy and freedom is thwarted by the conservative establishment. And it seems the German bourgeoisie is also in the Wullenwever fanclub. One of the finest restaurants in Lübeck is named after the man.

Only Thomas Mann and pretty much most historians take a dim view of him. Mann was particularly irritated because the Nazis renamed the house his patrician family had occupied for a couple of hundred years as Wullenwever Haus. In I think 1942 he said: quote:

“The stupid rabble does not even know that a house that bears the stamp of the eighteenth century on its rococo gable can not well have anything to do with the audacious mayor of the sixteenth. Jürgen Wullenweber has done a lot of damage to his city by the war with Denmark, and the people of Lübeck have done with him what the Germans might do one day with those who led them into this war: they have executed him” end quote.

As for my view, I think he was surely an awful diplomat, but his biggest fault was that he put all his efforts behind a political goal that was both unachievable and ineffective. Closing the Oresund against the natural interests of the Danes and their fellow Hansards would never have worked for more than a brief period. Moreover, as we have already seen in the late 14th century the Dutch weren’t the problem. In many ways they were the solution that brought about the economic boom in the second half of the 16th century.

That means the Hanse story isn’t over. There is still at least two more episodes to come. Because even though the political unity is cracked the cities aren’t. The political leaders may clash with each other over ludicrous plans of world domination, the merchants on the ground keep ploughing along, building their network, expanding the reach of their trade and making money. The cities, in particular Danzig, Hamburg and Bremen are flourishing as Lübeck and its protectionist leaders fade into the background.

As usual, I would like to thank my wonderful patrons who have signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com/support. Your help is really, really appreciated.

As for the bibliography, see the shownotes.

Rainer Postel: Der Niedergang der Hanse in Hanse, Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos: RI OPAC (regesta-imperii.de)

Jahnke, Carsten: Die Hanse | Reclam Verlag

Philipp Dollinger: Die Hanse

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Emperors, kings and princes are closing in on Hanse cities

1474-1531 was a time of immense change and upheaval for the Hanseatic League, and not just for them. The Habsburg empire is bedded into being, England’s war of the Roses is over, in the North the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth stretches all the way from Kyiev to Gdansk. The kingdoms and princes are getting stronger. Columbus tries to sail to India and Vasco da Gama actually sails to India. Luther nails his 95 theses on the doors of the churches of Wittenberg. All is in flux, and so is the Hanse and Lübeck, its most important city.

Well, is it still the most important city? What about Danzig/Gdansk and Hamburg who take advantage of shifting trade flows whilst Lübeck finds itself on the sidelines. Who do they blame? The Dutch and the Danes. Cometh the time, cometh the man – his name is Jürgen Wullenwever and he has all the solutions, or does he?..

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 123 – Decline and Fall (Part 1)

1474-1531 was a time of immense change and upheaval for the Hanseatic League, and not just for them. The Habsburg empire is bedded into being, England’s war of the Roses is over, in the North the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth stretches all the way from Kyiev to Gdansk. The kingdoms and princes are getting stronger. Columbus tries to sail to India and Vasco da Gama actually sails to India. Luther nails his 95 theses on the doors of the churches of Wittenberg. All is in flux, and so is the Hanse and Lübeck, its most important city.

Well, is it still the most important city? What about Danzig/Gdansk and Hamburg who take advantage of shifting trade flows whilst Lübeck finds itself on the sidelines. Who do they blame? The Dutch and the Danes. Cometh the time, cometh the man – his name is Jürgen Wullenwever and he has all the solutions, or does he?..

But before we start let me do my ritual prostration before all of you who are supporting the show. To quote Steve Young, Quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers: “In medieval times artists had patrons that supported them and this is a similar thing …We’re basically saying, Wouldn’t you like to be part of this”. And here are four of you listeners who have signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans because they wanted to be part of it, Walt B., Max B., Devri K. O. and Thomas N. Thanks to you all.

Last week we hurtled through the 15th century a time often seen as the high point of Hanseatic power, wealth and influence. The cities may stand like a victorious prize-fighter over the crumbled bodies of their opponents, but what few can see is that the contest had taken its toll. Many of the inner organs are damaged. The flow of goods and money had shifted from the land route between Lubeck and Hamburg to the sea route around the Jutland peninsula. As a consequence, the interests of the Livonian and Prussian cities had begun to deviate from those of the Wendish ones, in particular from those of Lubeck.

Lubeck still held the upper hand within the Hanse organisation, not because it was some sort of capital or head of the Hanse, but thanks to its role as the general secretary who sets the agenda for the Hanseatic Diets.

During the 15th centuries the frictions could be glossed over with feats of naval warfare and a huge dose of potluck. But we are now entering the 16th century and that is a very different kettle of fish.

The 16th century is the time when Europe changes fundamentally, politically, socially, culturally and spiritually

In 1477 Maximilian of the house of Habsburg married Mary, heiress to the duchy of Burgundy and the County of Flanders. In 1496 their son, Philip the Fair married Johanna of Castile, the sole daughter and heiress of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, Spain to you and me. Within just a few decades a pan-European empire had emerged that combined the wealth of the New World with some of the richest lands in Northern Europe and held the imperial title to boot.

The Kingdom of France too is on a roll. First, they take back the duchy of Burgundy that Maximilian struggled to hold on to. Then the marriage with Anne de Bretagne brings this once independent duchy into the kingdom. Provence and the south of France gets integrated in 1480 when Rene, the last of the Anjous had died.

In 1485, August 22nd to be precise Richard III loses the battle of Bosworth Field, bringing an end to the War of the Roses. From that time until the British Civil war that starts in 1639, the country or now countries are largely at peace. Conflicts are either minor or short-lived allowing the king, parliament and the people to focus on useful things, like building a commercial empire. The Muscovy company was founded in 1555 by royal charter giving some English merchants the monopoly to trade with what was to become Russia. In 1592 we get the Levant company and by the very end of that century the British East India Company.

What few remember today was another great dynastic marriage, the marriage in 1386 between Jadwiga, heiress to the kingdom of Poland to the grand duke of Lithuania, who changed his name from the pagan Jogaila to Wladyslaw Jagiello. This was the beginnings of the personal union between Poland and Lithuania that resulted in the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth in 1559. This political entity would grow and grow until in 1619 it stretched all the way from Ukraine to the Baltic states and from Smolensk to Krakow.

Another future world power too was stirring in that period. Ivan III, ruler of a rather modest principality that used to pay tributes to the Mongol Khans expanded far and wide, laying the foundations of what would after some exceedingly bloody convulsions turn into Russia.

The Margraves of Brandenburg that we had not mentioned for a while, they too got busy. Well first they got busy dying out. In 1320 the last of the Ascanier Margraves, the descendants of Albrecht the Bear had died without offspring. The territory first went to the House of Wittelsbach who made a right old mess of it and in 1374 it came to the then reigning imperial family, the Luxemburgers. They too had a bit of a tough time so that the whole thing was handed over to Frederick of Hohenzollern, the Burgrave of Nurnberg. He came in, initially as some sort of governor but prove to be so successful that by 1415 he became the Margrave. Despite the poverty and chaos of the Mark, this was an important role because the Margraviate was one of the seven electors who chose the emperor. Frederick and his successors prove to be proactive and smart rulers who leveraged their status as electors and the meagre resources they had inherited into an expanding state that gradually reached out for the Baltic Sea.

And then there are the most important neighbours of the Hanse, the kingdoms of Danmark, Sweden and Norway. These three kingdoms had come together thanks to the efforts of Margaret of Denmark in the Kalmar union. The union established that all three kingdoms are ruled in a personal union by one monarch. That monarch was Eric of Pomerania, initially as a tool of Margaret but when she had died in 1412 on his own. As we heard last week, this ended in a bit of a disaster and Eric was expelled in 1439 ending his day in the tiny duchy of Pomerania – Rugenwald. After that the Kalmar Union did not vanish. An imperial prince, Christopher of Bavaria became king of all three kingdoms. But the Swedes had established a much stronger autonomy for themselves. No longer were they obliged to bear Danish soldiers or officers on their territory and their obligations to fund Danish wars was much reduced. Let’s leave this here. We will look at the next steps in this story towards the end of this episode.

Whilst these new or enlarged entities were growing in strength and importance, the long-time ally of the Hanse, the Teutonic Knights went downhill.

The latter, without telling too much of what we will discuss next season had become a shadow of their former selves after the battle of Tannenberg in 1410. Their new neighbour, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth gradually picks them bare until only East-Prussia and Livonia is left. The former ends up as part of the Margraviate of Brandenburg and gives its name, Prussia, to the new state. The Livonian possessions of the knights come under pressure from Russia and Sweden and are ultimately reduced to the tiny duchy of Kurland.

These new powers had little tolerance for city freedoms. One of their main objectives was to consolidate power within their kingdoms or principalities. That meant to end the perennial feuding between their subjects and between the subjects and themselves. To bring those to an end they had to break the power of all intermediaries, be that counts, knights or cities. What they could not tolerate in particular was that anyone in their lands engaged in their own foreign policy. And that meant by extension that they could not tolerate their cities to engage in the Hanse as a political project. They could probably tolerate it when the Hanse was standardising trading and organised a reliable system for judicial redress. But they took a very dim view of Hanseatic wars against other princes, princes they may have friendly relationships with.

Cities therefore came under increasing pressure from the princes to limit their involvement with the League. The Brandenburger Margraves were at the forefront here. They had several Hanse cities in their territory, including the two interconnected cities of Berlin and Coelln. Yes, that is Berlin, as in the capital of Germany. We are in episode 123 and this is the first time the place gets talked about properly. That tells you something about the difference between Germany and say France, England or Italy. No history of these countries could get to the 16th century without talking extensively about Paris, London and obviously Rome. Germany’s capital remained in the shadows for a very long time. It was founded in two steps. In 1251 there was a city called Berlin, located on the right bank of the Spree around the church of St. Nikolai. Its twin city was Coelln, founded probably 10 years later in the Spree Island today called the Museum Island.

This dual city was a member of the Hanseatic League and like other Hanseatic cities enjoyed a lot of autonomy within the margraviate. They elected their own council and had their own city laws. How economically significant the two cities were, is still somewhat in dispute. If you go around the quaint Nikolaiviertel today you may conclude that they weren’t. Historians disagree and place Berlin-Coelln amongst the mid-range of Hanseatic cities.

In 1440 Frederick of Hohenzollern as part of his consolidation drive decided to force the city into submission. He initiated the construction of a castle that dominated the bridge between the two cities. The citizens revolted and in 1448 flooded the construction site. Finally, a compromise was found and Berlin-Coelln agreed to leave the Hanse. The castle was built and later became the Stadtschloss, the primary residence of the Margraves, later the kings in and then of Prussia and finally the German Kaisers. Most of it was destroyed in the Second world war and the East Germans replaced it with the Palast der Republik, which the post reunification government decided to demolish and now in an astounding development has been replaced with a reconstruction of the former residence of Kaiser Bill.

The fall of Berlin-Coelln encouraged more and more princes, in particular those in Westphalia and Saxony to go after the cities’ autonomy in their lands. Gradually only the largest and most powerful cities could retain the freedom to set their own policies and follow through with the decisions of the Hanseatic diets. In the end the Hanse had to establish different tiers of cities, excluding some from participation in confidential discussions at the Hanseatic Diet because they could not be trusted to keep the information from their overlord.

If the Hanse did not have enough problems with strengthening powers on their doorsteps, state-sponsored capitalism in England and Holland and the princes nibbling away at the membership list, there was also the most significant development of the 16th century to consider, the Reformation.

The reformation kicked off in 1517 when Luther nailed his 95 theses on the doors of the palace chapel at Wittenberg, as well as several other churches in the town. Luther was excommunicated in 1521 and cited to the diet of Worms in 1522. Events accelerated from there. Johannes Bugenhagen was one of the most important figures in the reformation of Northern Germany and Denmark. Bugenhagen had joined Luther in Wittenberg in 1521 and had become his parish priest and confessor. In 1533 he became one of first Protestant doctors of theology and an important preacher and practitioner of biblical interpretation.

Aside from that he was also a great organiser, setting up Lutheran churches Brunswick in 1528, Hamburg in 1529, in Lübeck in 1531, In Pomerania in 1535 and in Denmark in 1537. Little shows the speed with which the reformation spread across the German speaking world than the conversion of the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, Albrecht von Brandenburg to Protestantism in 1525, just 8 years after a minor theologian in a smallish university city in Germany wrote up his thoughts and publicised them to his fellow academics.

That gets us to events in Lübeck itself. There too the news of the reformation and the events at the diet of Worms spread like wildfire. The Patrician Council was opposed to what they called the Lutheran Heresy. They feared repercussions from emperor Charles V who after all ruled the Low Countries and they were simply conservatives who did not want to upset the existing order. An order under which many of their relatives enjoyed ecclesiastical honours and incomes.

The Council banned Luther’s writing, introduced penalties for anyone who possesses these books and expelled two Lutheran preachers.

But by 1531 the council crashed into its perennial problem, they were running out of money. And again, they had to call a committee of this time 64 non-patricians. Those were partially artisans but also upper middle-class merchants, shippers and other professions. The committee of 64 quickly moved beyond matters of taxation and demanded the return of the expelled Protestant vicars  and the right to “preach the gospel” in all the churches in the city. From there it took only a few months before Bugenhagen arrived and the city became Protestant. Church property was confiscated, and the monasteries were dissolved. The committee ordered the churches to be stripped of all its popish frills, yielding a cool 48 tons of gold and silver for the city treasury.

Bugenhagen also created a new constitution for the city which limited the power of the council. From now on any alliances, ordinances or borrowing by the council required the consent of the committee of 64 as well as that of another committee of 100 formed by representatives of the parishes.

By 1531 Lübeck was a fully Protestant city. The city joined the Schmalkaldic League, the military alliance of protestant princes and cities established to protect each other against a backlash from emperor Charles V.

For the Hanse as a whole the Reformation caused some serious problems. Whilst some important member cities like Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock and Brunswick had embraced the Reformation, some like Cologne did not want to and others again were restrained by their catholic overlords, for instance Danzig which was now part of Catholic Poland-Lithiuania.

If the political situation was already precarious with territorial princes encroaching on to the Hanse world and the Reformation undermining solidarity of the cities, their economic position was also threatened.

In 1492 an Italian navigator in the pay of Ferdinand and Isabella of the newly formed kingdom of Spain had discovered what he believed was a sea route to India. The discovery of the Americas was one of the reasons that trade shifted towards the Atlantic ports. The other, arguably commercially more important one was the discovery of an actual route to India via the Cape of Good Hope by Portuguese navigators. These events did create a whole new set of trading routes that partially replaced existing channels and partially brought previously unknown goods onto European tables, leaving aside the avalanche of precious metal that created wave upon wave of inflation.

The Hanse as an organisation did not directly participate in these new trade routes. But they still benefitted from the huge amount of wealth that was created. The growing cities of not just Amsterdam and London, but also smaller ones like Bordeaux, Nantes, Rouen and Bristol demanded grain and beer as well as vast amounts of wood to build their ships. The volume of trade of the Hanseatic cities kept growing strongly all throughout the 16th century.

So, whilst the shift in global trade did not negatively affect the Hanse overall, it did impact the relative importance of the Hanse members. Danzig became the main export harbour for grain and wood to the Low Countries, France, England and at times Spain and Portugal. Hamburg and Bremen, located on the North Sea were closer to where the action and became larger, richer and more important.

Lübeck on the other hand declined not in absolute, but in relative terms. They were in the wrong place and had the wrong products.

Since the very end of 15th century the copper that was brought into Lübeck from Sweden faced competition from the copper king of Europe, Jakob Fugger. Jakob Fugger was a merchant and banker from Augsburg who made his fortune by lending to the perennially skint emperor Maximilian a relationship he levered into a pan-European commercial empire nobody had seen before. Some people claim that Jakob Fugger was the richest man who ever lived, though he had some serious competitors like Mansa Musa, Marcus Licinius Crassus or John D. Rockefeller. But a place in the top 10 is probably a fair assumption. He was definitely the richest man the Holy Roman empire ever produced.

Jakob Fugger spread his tentacles deep into the Hanseatic world, showing up in Lübeck in 1494 and a few years later in Livonia, trading not just in copper, but in all and everything the Hanse had believed to have had a monopoly in.  The appearance of the Fuggers was a bit like the arrival of Amazon in the world of general retail. His business model was that of a modern corporation with branches, double bookkeeping, huge financial firepower and close links to government. And facing him were mid-sized Hansards with shoddy accounting and reliant on a network of friends and relatives.

The Hanse retaliated with good old-fashioned piracy. They seized several Fugger ships and refused to hand them back. Jakob Fugger was a formidable opponent who could mobilise not just vast amounts of money but also the emperor himself if that was in his interest.

The copper issue and the antagonism with Jakob Fugger was a challenge, but not the only one. Salted herring and Stockfish, two of Lübeck’s mainstays were already less in demand in the Protestant world that scrapped all these 140 fast days where one could only eat fish, alligator and beaver. The same could be said of beeswax, which again was not as much in demand in protestant rites as it is in Catholic ones. And that comes on top of the dwindling stock of herring in the Baltic and the attempts of the other Hansards and Dutch to bypass the Lubeck-dominated Kontor of Bergen.

And then there is the other important leg of its economy, the link between the Baltic and the North Sea via Hamburg. As we heard last week, the trade in grain and wood was moving more and more onto the route via the Oresund and Kattegat into the North. As shipbuilding and navigation skills advanced, this once dangerous trajectory had become manageable and much cheaper than the land and river route that had allowed Lübeck to flourish.

This route via the Oresund was used not just by the Hanseatic traders from Livonia or Prussia, but also by the Merchant adventurers from England, Soctland and Holland. Their trade had grown for a while now.

The English were still hampered by the imbalance in trade privileges. In 1474 the then king of England, Edward IV had agreed that the Hanse could retain its vast privileges in the Steelyard in London but did not have to grant similar privileges to Englishmen who wished to sail into the Baltic.

The Dutch on the other hand had much less impediments to deal with. Some had initially been members of the Hanse, including Amsterdam, but by now they were outside the association. What they had instead was an enormous market for Hanse products. This market was not just the low countries themselves but all of Western Europe that traded first through Antwerp and later through Amsterdam. Many a merchant was tempted to give up solidarity to his fellow Hansards in exchange for a good relationship with such important customers.

I think it is fair to say that neither the English nor the Dutch constituted a mortal danger for the cities in the Hanseatic League. As we will see, cities like Hamburg and Danzig/Gdansk benefitted enormously from the co-operation with the foreigners. But that is not how the population of Lubeck, in particular the lower classes saw it.

They were convinced that all the relative decline was down to the pesky Dutchmen who kept supplying the Danes in the regular conflicts the city had with its neighbour to the north.

It was just simpler to blame it all on the Dutch and the Danes, because the problems with the Fuggers, the herring, the Bergen Kontor, the Reformation, the princely oppression, all that is complex. The Dutch and the Danes, that is pretty simple. Everybody understands that.

“Cometh the Hour, cometh the Man” as your run of the mill cricket pundit would say. And that man was Jürgen Wollenwever, and his sidekick, Marx Meier.

Wollenwever managed to weave all these strains together into one near unbreakable pike he pointed at Denmark, only to find himself and all the ambitions of his adopted hometown kebabbed on it.

Jurgen Wollenwever came from a successful family of merchants who had settled in Hamburg. He was probably born in 1488. We know little about his career, apart from the fact that he settled in Lubeck in 1526 and became a citizen there in 1531. We do not hear much about his commercial successes which suggests there weren’t many even though his family was growing in prominence in Hamburg. This lack of success may well have fuelled his disapproval of the patricians on the council.

As we mentioned before, the years 1526-31 is when Lübeck converts to Protestantism. Wullenwever and his family have wholeheartedly embraced the reforms Martin Luther proposed. Because of his sincere conviction and a substantial dose of demagoguery, Wullenwever became a key figure in this transition.

He joined the committee of 64 that represented the artisans and lesser merchants who were all staunchly protestant, forcing the city to change course. His moment came when the new constitution that Bugenhagen had drafted is announced. Immediately afterwards two patrician Burgomasters leave the city, and they are followed within a week by the majority of the old city council.

As it happened in 1408, the council is then replenished with members of the committee of 64. This time the difference is that all these new members are in one way or another beholden to Jurgen Wullenwever. This trader of modest success had managed to become the undisputed dictator of the Empire’s second city within just 5 years of arriving at the city gates. 2 years later his position was confirmed when he was elected as Burgermeister.

Pope Leo X, the one who excommunicated Martin Luther had famously writtento his brother Giuliano on the day he was elected: “God gave us the Papacy, let us enjoy it”. Not sure how much he did enjoy it in the end. In any event, by 1531, 18 years later, such a sentiment was no longer appropriate. Wullenwever did not see himself as a dictator who could now enjoy the fruits of his scheming. He believed that he had to enact “the will of the people”. And the will of the people was to get rid of the Dutch and hit out at the Danes, because the Danes and the Dutch were responsible for everything that has gone wrong.

Specifically, his main policy objective was to compel the king of Denmark to close the Oresund for all Dutch shipping.

And he believed he was in a good position to get this done. Because for the umpteenth time, Denmark and with it the Kalmar Union were in a succession crisis. Two competing Danish kings were slugging it out, Frederick I and Christian II. Wullenwever’s plan was to offer the support of the city of Lübeck to Frederick I in exchange for a complete closure of the Oresund.

That sounds sensible but to understand what it really meant we have to go back to 1448. In 1448 King Christopher of Bavaria died. Christopher was that imperial prince from the Platinate who was plucked out of a hat by the Danish Royal Council to become king instead of the hapless Eric of Pomerania.

The intended successor of Christopher was another German prince, Christian of Oldenburg. That is Oldenburg in Oldenburg, not Oldenburg in Holstein. Christian was one of those guys who won the inheritance lottery. From his father he had inherited the county of Oldenburg somewhat of a backwater in Frisia, surrounded by floodplains and tribal chieftains. Don’t get me wrong, I love Oldenburg and even lived there for a period. But I would not have wanted to live there in the 15th century. Nor did our friend Christian. He grew up at the court of his uncle, Adolphus count of Holstein and duke of Schleswig. That uncle was childless which may have been a good reason for little Christian to be extra special nice. Christian was extra special nice, and his uncle made him the heir to Holstein and Schleswig.

When King Christopher of Denmark, Sweden and Norway died in 1448, the Danish royal council looked round for any suitable prince to become the new king. Denmark was as you know an elective monarchy and in the absence of a natural heir the royal council was free to choose whoever they liked.

They offered the crown to Adolphus of Holstein, him being the most important noble in the region and bringing Schleswig Holstein to the Danish crown. Adolphus declined citing old age, but put forward his nephew and heir, Christian of Oldenburg. Only condition, he had to marry the previous king’s wife, Dorthea of Brandenburg.

With that Christian, son of an obscure count from the foggy North Sea shore became king of Denmark. That was great, but he also wanted to be king of Sweden and king of Norway like his predecessor.

But the Swedes are now fed up with Danish kings who are in fact German princes picked out of a hat by the Danish Royal council. The Swedes elect one of their own, Karl Knudsson as king Charles VIII. Because anything the Danes can do, the Swedes can do too. Karl was an important noble and during his term as head of the Swedish Royal council had become a very wealthy landowner. In this role he had ruled Sweden as an independent kingdom, even at a time when king Christopher had still been alive. Crowning him in 1448 was just a natural progression in Sweden’s exit from the Kalmar union. 

Christian and Charles would fight it out, first over who would get the third kingdom, Norway. Charles won this one. But in 1457 Charles loses support in Sweden and get deposed. Christian takes over but in 1464 Charles is back. In 1470 Charles dies and the kingdom of Sweden is then ruled by Charles nephew Sten Sture. Sture defeats the Danes in 1471.

After that the Kingdom of Sweden is ruled by various protectors of the realm, occasionally interspersed with brief periods where the Danes force their way into Stockholm.

Meanwhile in Denmark itself the family of Christian of Oldenburg rules. Christian’s son John takes over in 1481. Apart from his fight over Norway and Sweden, John’s main focus was to strengthen Denmark commercially and militarily. He supported Danish merchants in their competition with the Hansards and built a navy, partially to use against the Swedes, but also to counterbalance the power of the Hanse.

John died in 1513 after a long and ultimately fruitful reign. He might not have been able to suppress the Swedes and even suffered a defeat by the peasant republic of Dithmarschen. But his rule materially improved the economic position of Denmark and strengthened the royal position by suppressing the power of the rebellious nobles.

John’s son, Christian II takes over in 1513. Christian II continued his father’s domestic policies, supporting the commoners against the nobility. What he became famous for though was his brutality. Even before he succeeded his father, he had become viceroy in Norway and was considered tyrannical in his attempts to reduce the power of the local nobility.

Once king, he made a large-scale attempt on Sweden. He was supported in this effort by his brother-in-law, the emperor Charles V, pope Leo X and Jakob Fugger. Christian II had remained Catholic, whilst the Swedish protector of the realm, Sten Sture the Younger and his privy council were leaning towards Protestantism. That explains the support from the pope and the emperor. Jakob Fugger who had funded the dowry and a big chunk of the war was after the great copper mine at Falun Grove. That in turn explains the involvement of the Hanse in this war. The Hanse, and Lubeck in particular did not want to let the copper mines fall into the hands of the Fugger. And if that meant war with Denmark, well than it is war with Denmark.

In 1520 Christian II and his army of mercenaries from France, Germany and Scotland, paid for by the Fuggers, takes Stockholm.  On November 4th 1520 Christian II is crowned king of Sweden. Three days later he organises a party at the palace and by the stroke of midnight soldiers enter the great hall and arrest several nobles. A prescription list is produced by the archbishop of Uppsala that includes all the opponents of Danish rule in Sweden and even some who were supportive of the Kalmar union, just enemies of the archbishop. The day after, November 8th, a court headed up by said archbishop convicts all 82 accused, including fellow 2 bishops, of heresy. On November 9th they are led out to the grand square before the palace and beheaded or hanged.

One of the executed was Erik Johannsson Vasa. His son, Gustav Vasa swears revenge and within days Sweden is ablaze with war. Vasa inflicts a first major defeat on the Danes in April of the following year. The Hanse, namely Lübeck join Gustav Vasa’s efforts in 1522 and by June 1523 Christian II had to withdraw completely. Sweden was free and its king owed the city on the Trave for their support.

When Christian II returned to Denmark, defeated and broke, the Royal Danish council was not best pleased. Also, the Reformation was gradually taking hold in Denmark making Christian II even more unpopular.

What needed to happen happened fast. Christian II was deposed and his uncle, Frederick I became king instead. Christian wasn’t killed, he was just sent into exile in Holland, where his brother-in-law, Charles V was the ruler.

Frederick I was now king of Denmark. He was a more measured man than his nephew. Though he remained Roman Catholic, he allowed Lutherans to preach in his kingdom and encouraged the publication of the first Danish translation of the bible. And he continued his predecessor’s policies of supporting economic growth and the build-out of a navy.

In 1531, the old king Christian II tried to come back. Again, with help from his brother-in-law the emperor Charles V and the pesky Dutch merchants he mustered an army and landed in Norway.

Now the stage is set:

This is the same year, Juergen Wullenwever becomes the de facto ruler of Lübeck. He believes that Christian II’s landing in Norway is the opportunity for Lübeck to regain its control of the Baltic Sea, to push out the Dutch and to advance the Reformation.

His idea is that the Hanse, led by the city of Lübeck, should support Frederick I and in exchange Frederick would close the Oresund to Dutch shipping for good. Gustav Vasa, who still owed them for the support in the Swedish war of independence would do the same. The Hanse monopoly on Baltic trade would be recovered. Protestantism would flourish. Everything will be great!

But will it? That we will find out next week. I hope you will join us again.

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