History of the Germans Podcast

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To make it easier for you to share the podcast, I have created separate playlists for some of the seasons that are set up as individual podcasts. they have the exact same episodes as in the History of the Germans, but they may be a helpful device for those who want to concentrate on only one season.

So far I have:

Ep. 139: Rudolf of Habsburg (1273-1291) – The End of the Interregnum

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 139 – The end of the Interregnum

But before we start let me run through the usual Spiel about the History of the Germans being advertising free. It matters. I guess you have seen the recent news about Google being fined §2.6bn for market abuse as they pushed customers towards their own shopping platform. This used to be such an elegant machine providing super fast, uncluttered access to the information one wanted. Now it is like a shopping mall where you have to squeeze past shrieking billboard to find the little independent bookshop in the far corner. Since I am short a few billions to spend on fines, I rely on Patrons and one time supporters who can sign up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans and historyofthegermans.com/support. And thanks so much to Michael P., Krystian N., Sarah R., Steve M and geweinstein who have already signed up.

On December 13, 1250 in Castel Fiorentino, near the small town of Torremaggiore in the northern part of his beloved Puglia, the emperor Frederick II, the Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World breathed his last. The official cause of death was dysentery, but at the time of his death he had been exhausted from decades of conflict with the Lombard cities, rebellious Sicilian nobles, the crusaders in the Holy Land, and above all, the papacy. Whilst not defeated, his position was precarious, he had lost the crucial battle of Parma and with it his war chest. Most of his friends and advisers who had been by his side since he first set out to Germany to gain his imperial crown at the age of 16 were now dead, some by his own paranoia.

His death marked not just the end of the era of the Hohenstaufen as a major European dynasty but also the end of the high medieval empire that had begun with the coronation of Otto the Great in 962. What followed was a century of chaos and convulsions until a new political structure settles in, the Holy Roman empire with its electors, its prince-bishops, free imperial cities and its diets and courts as set out in the Golden Bull of 1356.

Or that is how the story is commonly told. But as we all know, history does not tip on the pin of a single event. Many of the structural pillars of the Holy Roman Empire date back long before the death of Frederick II and the ideal of a universal emperor crowned by the pope in Rome continued for several centuries after the light of the Stupor Mundi was extinguished.

The death of the last of the Hohenstaufen emperors created two separate sequences of events. One of those were the various attempts of the descendants of Frederick II to hold on to and then regain the kingdom of Sicily. We covered this in Episode 91 “Hohenstaufen epilogue” which is one of the most epic stories in German medieval history, but one that had limited repercussions for the narrative we want to follow here.

What we will focus on now is what happened North of the Alps.

In 1245 Pope Innocent IV had excommunicated and deposed Frederick II. In the wake of that decision some of the German princes elected anti-kings, first Heinrich Raspe, the Landgrave of Thuringia and once he had died, William Count of Holland. These anti-kings stood against Konrad IV, the son of Frederick II who had been elected King of the Romans way back in 1237, but had never been crowned. This civil war ended when Konrad IV decided to seek his fortunes in Sicily in 1251 where he died in 1254.

William of Holland was therefore King at least from 1251 to the day in the winter of 1256 when his horse broke through the Ice of a Frisian lake and his enemies clubbed him to death and concealed his body under the foundations of a house, not to found for 26 years.

William of Holland had two successors, in the loosest meaning of the word. One was Alfonso X, the Wise of Castile, a thoroughly well-educated man with some Hohenstaufen blood who took the crown proposed by the cities of Pisa and Marseille for reasons even his biographers cannot quite figure out. Alfonso never travelled north and remained very much a footnote in the History of the Empire. At the same time some of the electors raised Richard of Cornwall, the brother of king Henry III of England to be the future emperor. Richard was a bit more proactive than Alfonso, traveled to Aachen to be crowned king and visited the empire a subsequent three times, before he became so embroiled in English politics, his already modest role in German politics vanished completely.

Now here is the thing. None of these kings had much impact. They were absentee landlords who had taken the title to pursue narrow personal objectives. It was more vanity than a sincere ambition to take on the mantle of a universal emperor defending Christianity against its foes. And even more importantly, they were either unable or unwilling to assume their role in the emerging constitution of the realm as the provider of peace and justice.

The Mainzer Landfriede that formalized the relationship between the princes and the emperor and established rules for conflict resolution had been agreed upon in 1235. Under these rules the emperor had precious little left of the regalia, the fundamental expressions of medieval sovereignty which included the right to raise taxes, demand tolls, administer justice, mint coins, found cities, build castles and so on and so on.

Rather than being a monarch who could call upon all free men of the empire to go to war on his behalf, the emperor was an arbiter between the diverging interests of the princes. He was to resolve differences by offering compromises both parties could agree upon. And if one of the parties rejected the compromise, the resolution was to be found by force of arms. All the emperor could do at that point was to set the rules of feuding, demanding a 3 day cooling-off period and putting limits to the level of violence. For instance the parties were prohibited from burning down castles, houses and barns and should protect widows and orphans. It was apparently ok to produce widows and orphans, just not harm them beyond massacring their husbands and fathers.

Combatants who breached these limitations could be subjected to an imperial ban. An imperial ban strips a person of all their rights, namely the right to property and even to his or her own life. A person under the ban was “vogelfrei”, which translates as “free as a bird” but has a very different meaning. Like a wild bird that belongs to no one, anyone can trap it and kill it, or more precisely could at the time since this was before the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds was established in 1889.

This level of imperial power is indeed a long way away from the crowned figure on the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes Leviathan that carried the quote from the book of Job: “There is no power on earth to be compared to him.”

But despite the narrowness of the imperial mandate, the absence of an effective King of the Romans during the period from 1245 to 1273 did have a major impact. Sure, during the time of the Hohenstaufen and even the previous dynasty, the Salians, emperors had been absent for extended periods of time. But they usually left behind some form of regency council or a caretaker to perform the duties to maintain peace and justice. And the emperors had influence far beyond their formal rights due to two things, their personal prestige and the resources coming from the combination of their family possessions and the imperial lands and estates.

When it comes to prestige Frederick II and his grandfather Frederick Barbarossa were hard to beat. Impressive personalities both, able to display imperial grandeur through elaborate displays combined with military prowess made their voices heard. It is always important to remember that the medieval political system was built on personal relationships, not the monopoly of power of the state. Hence a ruler who can impress his vassals has a huge room to maneuver, even if his formal powers are limited. On the flipside a ruler like William of Holland who ever so often had to remind his subjects that he “was appointed by the pope” quickly finds himself isolated and unable to drive policy.

As Theodore Roosevelt quibbed many centuries later, effective politics means to: “speak softly and carry a big stick”. And in the case of the emperors in the High Middle Ages, that big stick were the financial and military resources they commanded directly. The Hohenstaufen had accumulated quite a lot of those sticks. They had been the dukes of Swabia and hence held large sways of lands in what is now Alsace, the Palatinate and Wurttemberg. They had taken over the Welf lands in Swabia that was once a almost a duchy in its own right. They had taken possession of the Salian inheritance that stretched along the Main river and then further north into the Harz mountains, including Goslar. By their imperial role they controlled parts of Franconia, including the rapidly expanding city of Nurnberg. And then south of the Alps Frederick II possessed many a castle, some on the back of the inheritance of the countess Matilda of Tuscany, some thanks to his son in law, Ezzelino da Romano’s conquests. And then most importantly, there was the fantastically rich kingdom of Sicily. Few, if any princes could ignore an imperial order backed up by so much wealth and power.

Which gets us to the period from 1245 to 1273. None of the kings and anti-kings had enough personal standing or wealth or power to tell the princes what to do. Some, like Richard of Cornwall tried to bring their weight as great military leader and wealthiest man in England to bear, but he rarely stayed long enough to follow through with his decisions.

The conflict resolution process collapsed and imperial bans, if issued at all, were widely ignored. The traditional view is that the empire descended into chaos during this period. But modern historians like the great Peter H. Wilson dispute this, claiming that to be Habsburg propaganda.

When I look at what we have seen so far, some of the fiercest feuds were taking place during this period, such as the conflict between the Landgrave of Meissen, Albrecht the degenerate and his sons, namely Friedrich der Gebissene (Frederick the Bitten). We also have the rapid expansion of king Ottokar II into Austria, Styria, Friuli and Salzburg, most of which on the back of cold hard steel rather than marriage contracts. But then feuds and illicit acquisition of lands wasn’t anything new and the days of Henry VI and Frederick II had seen similar rough play.

But those large feuds of the previous century had taken place in the north where imperial power was already much weaker than it was in Swabia and Franconia. What was new and what brought about contemporary fears of the end of days was that this kind of violence had now engulfed the south as well.

One particular menace is now one of Germany’s most popular tourist attractions, the castles along the Rhine. Many of them like Rheinfels, Sooneck and Reichenstein had been built by actual robber barons who harassed trade along the river. Given the vital importance of the Rhine as a conveyer belt of goods from the south to the north, including supplying thirsty Englishmen with copious quantities of white wine, the cities along the river tried to bring the situation under control. In 1254, led by the cities of Mainz and Worms a league of Rhenish cities was founded. The purpose was to keep the trading channel open, smoke out the barons and protect the merchants. The league quickly attracted all the other major cities on the Rhine, Cologne, Oppenheim, Bingen, Speyer, Strasburg and Basel. They established a fleet of armored ships and besieged the Rheinfels. But they failed militarily, by 1257 the league dissolved and the Rhine trade kept suffering.

The other main event was the dismemberment of the Hohenstaufen and the imperial possessions. Once Konrad IV had disappeared down south in 1251, local lords began nibbling at the edges and when he died in 1254 the contest became ever more intense. When the last Hohenstaufen, Konradin, was executed in Naples in 1268, the final feeding frenzy set in.

Some of these properties had been imperial fiefs, others had been the private property of the Hohenstaufen family. But all of them were up for grabs. Imperial princes and lesser lords occupied castles and towns waving dubious charters and double handed swords. Within just a few years all of it was redistributed. Some may have believed they took it for safekeeping should a real emperor finally appear, some, like the landgrave of Thuringia claimed to be the true heir of the House of Hohenstaufen, but many just took it for themselves.

The regnum Teutonicum was not the only kingdom that was in trouble in the second half of the 13^th century. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was on its last leg. The city of Jerusalem that Frederick II had regained for the crusaders was lost and had been sacked in 1244. A crusade led by Saint Louis into Egypt ended in another unmitigated catastrophe. The Mamluks of Egypt had now taken over Syria and the crusaders were again pushed back to a long strip of land along the coast. Baibars, the new sultan of Egypt picked off the great strongholds, the Krak des Chevaliers of the Hospitallers and Montfort of the Teutonic Knight in 1270. In 1272 another crusading effort fizzled out, leaving Accre as the very last outpost.

This impending collapse of the crusader states did occupy most of Europe but nobody more than the pope. As papal policy saw it, only a concerted effort of the whole of Western Christendom could turn things around. Experience of the preceding three decades had shown that efforts by just the French and the English weren’t enough. What was needed was a major contribution from the empire. These considerations weren’t just purely political and military. Mystics and holy men had been predicting for a century that only an emperor would be able to conquer Jerusalem and initiated the 1000 years of bliss, whilst the fall of the empire would bring about the collapse of the world.

The current king of the Romans and hence emperor in waiting, Richard of Cornwall could not lead the imperial forces to victory in the Holy land, in part because he was stuck with baronial insurrections and Simon de Montfort’s push for a proper parliament in England, but more crucially, because he had died on April 2, 1272.

Therefore, despite all the misgivings about overbearing emperors, Pope Gregory X demanded that the next King of the Romans should be elected unanimously and should be someone who could lead a crusade. And the man to make this happen was Werner von Eppstein, the archbishop of Mainz.

Werner’s first question that needed answering was, what does unanimous mean? In the early days of the empire, all elections had been unanimous, not because everyone agreed, but because all those who did not agree left the election diet and had to be convinced, aka bribed, one by one as the new emperor made his progress across his new realm.

That model began to fall apart with the election of Lothar III in 1125 where the Hohenstaufen brothers stormed out and went to war with the newly elected emperor. After that we had a whole string of contested elections where frustrated contenders claimed the election to be invalid on the grounds that not enough or not the right people had been at the election diet.

Who were the right people to elect a king of the Romans and future emperor?

When things kicked off in 919 at the election of Henry the Fowler, the idea was that the king was elected by the stem duchies, i.e., by the Swabians, Bavarians, Saxons and Franconians. These duchies were to be represented by their dukes and senior lords, which made sense when there were dukes for each of the duchies. But as the duchies fragmented, Franconia into lots and lots of little princes, Swabia into Swabia, Zaehringen and the Welfish lands, Saxony into Westphalia, Brunswick and Saxony and Bavaria into Austria, Andechs-Meranien and Bavaria that system had to be abandoned.

In 1152 at Barbarossa’s election, the general view was still that all lords, ecclesiastic and secular were allowed to participate, but that narrowed down rapidly. At Frederick II election in 1196 counts were excluded and in 1198 the abbots. Participation still fluctuated. In 1208, 1212 and 1220 elections were large gatherings whilst those of 1211, 1237, 1246 and 1247 were much smaller events.

At Konrad IV’s election, the last one that had been universally recognised as valid, only 11 electors were present. These were the archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Salzburg, the bishops of Bamberg, Regensburg, Freising and Passau and amongst the secular lords, the Count Palatinate on the Rhine, the king of Bohemia, the landgrave of Thuringia and the duke of Carinthia. That election was described as unanimous, even though some important imperial princes like the dukes of Saxony, Zaehringen and Andechs-Meranien, the archbishop of Cologne and the margraves of Meissen and Brandenburg had not attended.

So this does not help. What we do know is that in 1273 when this momentous election happened it was broadly acknowledged that there were seven electors. But nobody has yet found a constitutional document that sets out when and why this was decided nor a logic that explains who was in and who was out.

The first legal text that states the election rights of the seven electors, the Schwabenspiegel of 1273 unhelpfully claims that it had always been thus, ever since Charlemagne had decreed it so.

This is a conundrum that has baffled medievalists for centuries now and I am afraid there is still no consensus. There are several competing theories.

The first one is the arch-offices theory. That theory says that the electors are those who hold the great offices of state, the three archchancellors of Germany, Italy and Burgundy, which are the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier. Then the Grand Marshall, which was the duke of Saxony, the High Stewart who was the Count Palatinate on the Rhine, the High Chamberlain, the margrave of Brandenburg and Grand Cup Bearer, the king of Bohemia. That sounds sensible. Princes who take a major role in managing the empire should also be in charge of selecting the new emperor. The problem with that theory is that it just shifts the debate. These great offices of state for the secular princes come about around the same time the role of the electors is established, so it remains unclear why it was seven and why these seven.

Then we have the canon law theory which says that the legal framework of the electors was modelled on the college of cardinals who had the exclusive right to elect the pope since the 11^th century. That too makes sense and explains why the number of electors was narrowed down, but again fails to explain why it was seven and why these seven. Eike von Repgow in his Sachsenspiegel had stated that there were 6 electors as early as 1237, but again nobody knows where he got that from.

Then recent elaborate studies were trying to prove that the underlying principle was that the seven electors are the direct descendants of the Ottonian family through the female line. Now I do not want to offend anyone, but given the analysis identifies 3,400 descendants of the Ottonians alive in 1273 I am profoundly at a loss how this narrows it down in any meaningful way.

Call me a cynic, but if I had been in the position of archbishop Werner of Mainz and had been under strict instruction by my boss in Rome to organise an election that results in giving the empire a viable monarch, I would go and make sure I get all the most powerful people in the empire into a room and make them agree. And as it happened, nature had helped narrowing down the list of powerful princely families in the empire. The Babenberger dukes of Austria, the Zaehringer, the dukes of Meranien and the Ludolfinger landgraves of Thuringia had all died out.

Which meant that if we go through the major clans, there is first and foremost the king of Bohemia, Ottokar II, the by far richest and most powerful of the imperial princes. He definitely deserves a seat. Then we have the Wittelsbachs who hold two major principalities, the duchy of Bavaria and the Palatinate. At least one of them should be on the list. Then there is the house of Anhalt who were dukes of Saxony and margraves of Brandenburg, no question, they should be there.

Then we get to the more difficult ones. The House of Wettin had inherited the Landgraviate of Thuringia but was in the middle of the feud and Frederick the Bitten was the grandson of emperor Frederick II which would be a good enough reason for the papal authorities to want him kept out. The house of Welf, dukes of Brunswick too were squabbling plus were far away so NFI.

And to represent the church the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier were materially richer than Hamburg and Magdeburg. Only Salzburg could compete but was outmanoeuvred by the other three.

There we have it. Seven votes are needed for a unanimous vote.

Now let’s go to the runners and riders, which is what made the election of 1273 one of these very rare events that could indeed have put European history on very different path.

The first one to put his hat in the ring was King Alfonco X of Castile. In fact he had been in the ring all this time since 1257 since he was elected at the same time as Richard of Cornwall. He just hadn’t done anything about it. He wrote to the pope asking for endorsement. That was immediately rebuffed. Pope Gregory X knew that Alfonso had no backing in Germany whatsoever plus he was another Hohenstaufen descendant in the female line which made him suspect.

Alfonso out, the next one bringing his weight to bear was King Ottokar II of Bohemia. Ottokar II commanded the resources not just of Bohemia with its rich silver mines and fertile lands. He also had taken over the duchies of Austria, Styria and Carinthia, had put one of his followers on the seat of the archbishopric of Salzburg and expanded further south into Frioul and Aquilea. Even more importantly, he had been a crusader up in the Baltic. We had met him in episode 131 when he rescued and then expanded the Teutonic Knight’s position in Prussia and had the city of Koenigsberg named after him in gratitude. His friends and his foes called him the Golden King for all the splendour of his dress, his castles and his entourage.

Ottokar was a perfect candidate as far as the papacy was concerned. Powerful and committed enough to lead the rescue of the Holy Land.

Though he looks like a shoe-in, there is a few small issue here.

Before Ottokar had decided to go after the imperial diadem, he had been very close to Frederick the Bitten, the landgrave of Thuringia and margrave of Meissen. Frederick’s mother had been the daughter of emperor Frederick II and – now that all the male Hohenstaufen were dead, he, Frederick saw himself as the true heir to the crowns of Sicily and Jerusalem, the duchy of Swabia and all the rest. The Ghibelline faction in Italy saw him as Frederick III, the promised emperor who would expel the Guelfs and bring back imperial order.

By the time old king Richard had died, Ottokar was still engaged to Frederick’s daughter and there had been rumours of Frederick and Ottokar would break into Northern Italian and ride all the way to Naples.

Though Ottokar had quickly ditched Frederick and all these plans to go south once he sensed he was in with a chance to gain papal support, but there was still a whiff of imperial overreach around him.

And that whiff was what the German princes felt in their nostrils too. They – quite rightly – worried that such a rich, powerful and ambitious prince could turn into an emperor who would curtail their rights and – shock horror – force them to hand back all the formerly imperial lands and castles they had so recently acquired.

And then a third international player registers an interest – Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily and count of Provence. Charles is the man who had wrestled Sicily from the heirs of Frederick II and just five years earlier had Konradin, the last Hohenstaufen prince executed on the market square of Naples. He did not want an emperor to come down and contest his rule claiming some imperial overlordship of Sicily as had happened several times before.

Charles could not stand himself as the blood of the teenage hero of the Ghibelline cause was still not dry on his hands, but he had a nephew, king Philipp III of France he decided to champion. Philipp, son of Saint Louis and inveterate crusader should again please the pope. His nickname, le Hardi, the bold spoke to his determination to expand the royal domain which gained Toulouse and Alencon and to eradicate feuding in his kingdom. He was by all accounts a great medieval ruler. And he was very keen on the imperial crown. As France had gained in standing, its rulers positioned themselves more and more as the true heirs to Charlemagne. Why, they asked with some justification, should the imperial crown be in the gift of the Germans with their fragmented kingdom and ineffectual rulers.

All good arguments though again from the papal perspective there was some fear that a linkup between Sicily and the empire was again on the cards, meaning the papacy could again be encircled by a powerful ruler which in turn would lead to a re-run of the epic battle between pope and emperor that had only just been brought to a close.

Then we have the homegrown princes. Federick the Bitten was obviously out as the Hohenstaufen continuity candidate. The Wittelsbach duke of Bavaria had his eye on the throne, but he would have to convince his brother, the Count Palatinate to endorse him, but that was impossible. The duke of Saxony briefly considered a candidature but gave up quickly being the poorest and most remote of the electors.

That was it. The pope had said he wanted a unanimous vote. He wanted the empire united so that the urgently needed crusade could get under way. He did have a preference for Ottokar, but in the end he left the decision to the electors.

Spoiler alert, the electorss did not choose Ottokar. Nor did they choose Philipp of France, nor did they choose anyone amongst their own number. They did choose a count from the Aargau who had become wealthy, if not rich on the disintegration of the Hohenstaufen and the demise of the Kiburgs and Zaehringer. A man 55 years of age, a renowned warrior, tall and manly, a name you may have heard before, Rudolf of Habsburg.

Before we get to how they arrived at this decision, let us just take a few moments and think about how European history had panned out if they had chosen either Ottokar or Philipp of France.

A king and later emperor Ottokar would have shifted the centre of gravity of the empire eastwards. His interests lay in Poland, Hungary and North-east Italy. He would in all likelihood have regained the Hohenstaufen possessions in Franconia and maybe Swabia. Bavaria and the Palatinate would have become satellites of the Bohemian king. In other words the Habsburg empire a two hundred years before it was actually created. And this could have been enough time to assert a more powerful central authority across the empire. It would also have given the Slavic components of the empire much more weight whilst the three archbishops of Cologne, Trier and Mainz would have ended up in the periphery.

Had Philipp III of France gained the crown, a quite different scenario would have emerged. The French monarchy was a lot more streamlined and focused on consolidating power and establishing a functioning royal bureaucracy. If gradually applied to the westernmost regions of the empire, France would have had more resources to rebuff the English in the 100 years war. From 1303 they also dominated the papacy and, in conjunction with the Anjou in Sicily could have dominated the wealth of Italy. The empire would thus become again the universal empire of Charlemagne and Otto the Great, the central authority for the whole of western Europe. We may even had re-consolidated Germany, France, Burgundy and Italy and thereby sidestepped the nationalist wars of the 19^th century. Ok. This is maybe pushing it a bit too far, but one fact is undeniable. Without this election, the counts of Habsburg would have remained in the second division as important princes in Swabia, and after the loss of Switzerland could have even faced relegation into the regionals.

Which gets us to the million dollar question, why Rudolf von Habsburg?

Usually this is all about friends in high places, but sometimes, rarely, but sometimes it is about just friends. And Rudolf’s friend was another Frederick, Frederick the burgrave of Nurnberg. This Frederick was not in contention for the crown but he was seen as an honest broker. Someone who had the ear of all the important people. And he convinced the electors, that Rudolf,a count from the Aargau with possessions in Alsace and the Black Forest was the perfect candidate. He was already old by the standards of the time and should hence not last for very long. He was rich but not so rich as to be a genuine threat. He was a warrior of some renown, someone who could lead an army on crusade. And he was already a crusader having fought with the Teutonic Knights alongside Ottokar. And he had been one of the great winners in the dismemberment of the Hohenstaufen lands which meant he was unlikely to force the other princes to hand back their gains. He had a brace of daughters he could marry to the remaining bachelors amongst the electors tying him to them and vice versa. He had been a supporter of the Staufers in the past, may even be the godson of the old emperor Frederick II, but was also loyal to the papacy. He was all around the solution to the problem.

And Fr4edrick Burggrave of Nurnberg convinced them. Ottokar II protested but the other electors removed him from the list and replaced him with duke of Bavaria. And so, after negotiations that had lasted 18 months from April 1272 to the 1^st of October 1273 finally a unanimous decision was arrived on. Rudolf von Habsburg was to be king.

And here is the irony. Frederick, burgrave of Nurnberg who held the stirrups for the ascent of the House of Habsburg to become rulers of an empire where the sun never sets had been a member of the house of Hohenzollern, an ancestor to Frederick the great and Wilhelm I who would break the power of the Habsburgs almost exactly 600 years later. Now what is that for a coincidence!

Being elected to kingship of an empire that barely exists any more is not a straight road to world domination though. Many things Rudolf and his descendants will still have to do to get there. The very first step on this journey was the confrontation with Ottokar II, the golden king who is, as the English would say, a bit miffed about the outcome of the election. But that is a story for another time, next time to be precise. I hope you will come along again.

And before I go let me thank all the patrons and one-time supporters who have been so generous by signing up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans and on historyofthegermans.com/support. Your help is really, really appreciated.

Catch-up episode – The Holy Roman empire from 919 – 1250

by History of the Germans Podcast on 29th February 202417th December 2025

This episode is something I never thought I would do, it is a run through the history of the Holy Roman Empire from 919 AD to 1250, pretty most of the periods I have covered so far. Why do it? If you’re one of those who have listened religiously to all 137 episodes so far and feel completely up to date with what happened in the past, this will not contain much news. However it has been a year since we last talked about the emperors and you may like a refresher about the Ottonians, Salians and Hohenstaufen. Just to get your bearings. Or if you have only recently joined the HotGPod family – welcome. These next 40 minutes or so should give you a solid rundown of “The story so far”. And if you follow by reading the transcript on my website historyofthegermans.com, you can find links in the text that connect you to episodes that go deeper into the stories behind the short summaries you find here.

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

This episode is something I never thought I would do, it is a run through the history of the Holy Roman Empire from 919 AD to 1250, pretty much most of the periods I have covered so far. Why do it? If you’re one of those who have listened religiously to all 137 episodes so far and feel completely up to date with what happened in the past, this will not contain much news. However it has been a year since we last talked about the emperors and you may like a refresher about the Ottonians, Salians and Hohenstaufen. Just to get your bearings.

Or if you have only recently joined the HotGPod family – welcome. These next 40 minutes or so should give you a solid rundown of “The story so far”. And if you follow by reading the transcript on my website historyofthegermans.com, you can find links in the text that connect you to episodes that go deeper into the stories behind the short summaries you find here.

Here is the link to the epsisode webpage: https://historyofthegermans.com/2024/02/29/hre-919-12150/

As always:

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Ep. 138: From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull (1250-1356): Catch-up and Season Opener

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to a new season of the History of the Germans – From the Interregnum to the Golden Bulle.

Last thing before we get going. The History of the Germans does not carry advertising which means it is entirely dependent upon your generosity. If you feel like supporting the show and bathe in my eternal gratitude, you can do so on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or in the support section of my website.

By the mid 11^th century, this system came under immense pressure from two sides.

So, the empire, or as it is called in 1250, the Holy Roman Empire. What is it, and more precisely, where is it? That sounds like a simple question.

The Territory of the Empire

Let’s just look at a map like the one entitled “The empire of the Hohenstaufen 1138-1268” which you can find in the map section of my website Historyofthegermans.com. That is quite neat with external borders and internal subdivisions into the different princely territories.

The problem is that such a map is completely anachronistic. The earliest maps that showed territorial borders date from the 14^th century. If you look at a map like the Mappa Mundi in Hereford cathedral made around the year 1300 you will find that in the medieval mind the center of the world was Jerusalem. There are cities and important cathedrals and castles shown, but the map does not tell you who these belong to politically. Medieval people did not think in terms of territory. They were much more focused on the relationships and networks, castles, towns, cities, their connections by roads and rivers. The way to think about political structures is to look at them as personal relationships.

In the early times of the Carolingian and Ottonian empire, the emperor claimed a universal responsibility for the whole of Christendom. As a successor of the Caesars of antiquity he had a claim to the whole world and effective imperium over those parts that acknowledged Christianity as their religion. Every free Christian was bound to the emperor and every pagan was to be converted and thereby made his subject. That is why Charlemagne felt it was his job to conquer and convert the pagan Saxons in the late 8^th century and then incorporate Saxony into the empire. It may also explain why Frederick II believed he could grant the Teutonic Knights the lands of the pagan Prussians, thousands of miles away and separated from the empire by Poland.

This universal idea of the empire never really went away, and emperors kept insisting on their role as the defender of Christendom and hence superior rank over regular kings. But actual power and influence was concentrated in those territories that accepted the emperor as their direct overlord. The empire was wherever the dukes, counts, bishops etc., accepted that they held their lands as fiefs from the emperor. This could theoretically be in far away lands, like when the king of Armenia wanted to be crowned by emperor Barbarossa. It also meant in the reverse that if a prince refused to accept the obligations of vassalage and the emperor failed to bring him to heel, the territory would leave the empire.

Traditionally the empire is seen as comprising 3 kingdoms.

These kingdoms were the regnum Teutonicum, the German Kingdom which had emerged from the old East Francian sub-kingdom of the empire of Charlemagne comprising the duchies of Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria and Saxony. Henry the Fowler added Lothringia, which included modern day Netherlands, parts of Belgium, Luxemburg and a chunk of eastern France on the line Liege, Verdun to Toul. On the eastern side this kingdom originally ended on the Elbe river, but the eastern expansion that started in the 10^th century and really got momentum in the 12^th century pushed the borders of the empire eastwards. The three kingdoms on the eastern flank, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary were initially in some sort of vassalage to the emperor, however, Hungary and Poland were able to wiggle out of this subordination during the 11^th century. Poland by refusing vassalage and winning a war against Henry II, Hungary by submitting under the direct overlordship of the pope. Only Bohemia, roughly modern day Czechia, remained part of the empire and its ruler even became one of the seven Electors.

Then there was the kingdom of Italy, originally the kingdom of the Lombards who had conquered Northern Italy from the Alpine passes to Rome. Charlemagne had ousted the last of the Lombard kings and the kingdom of Italy was held by his descendants until the late 9^th century when there was a brief period of separate Italian kings. Otto the Great removed the last of that line and from then on, with a brief interlude during the reign of Henry II, the emperor was automatically king of Italy, by which is meant Northern Italy.

The third kingdom was the Kingdom of Burgundy. That was another Kingdom, or more precisely set of kingdoms and counties that comprised the Franche Comte, Western Switzerland and The Rhone Valley and Provence. Burgundy was the last kingdom to join the empire in the 1030s under Konrad II and it was also the most decentralized.

Though these were three separate kingdoms, an emperor did not need to be separately elected and crowned in each of them. Some did like Barbarossa who got crowned in Aachen, Monza and Arles as well as in Rome. But it wasn’t necessary.

In fact though the German kingdom was a kingdom, there was no election or coronation to be king of the Germans either. The election performed with very few exceptions by the princes in the regnum Teutonicum and the coronation in Aachen was to be King of the Romans. The King of the Romans was automatically king of all three kingdoms and – most importantly – the future emperor. To become emperor however, the king of the Romans had to go to Rome and be crowned by the Pope. To add to the confusion no king of the Romans or emperor had real power in Rome ever since Otto III had been thrown out of the Holy City in 1002. But the title stuck until about 1508. Napoleon resurrected the concept when he made his son the King of Rome, a sort of stage in the process of becoming emperor.

The Economy of the Empire

The territory sort of clarified, let’s take a look at the economy.

The general perception that the Middle Ages was a period of stagnation could not be further from the truth. The time from 900 to 1300 was a boom time for Europe. The so-called medieval warming period allowed for an abundance of crops, including vineyards in the London suburb I live in. Agricultural efficiency grew exponentially thanks to the transition from ancient slave economy to free or at least semi-free labour, the developments of new forms of ploughs and the horse collar as well as the increase in demand for cash crops like wool used by the dyers and weavers in the growing cities. As population grew, more and more land was brought into cultivation. The forest that covered the entirety of the lands east of the Rhine during Antiquity literally vanished and had to be replanted in the 18^th and 19^th century. And crucially the movement of settlers into the lands East of the Elbe and then further into Silesia, Poland, Prussia and Livonia swelled food production further.

Mining started in the 10^th century near Goslar and its silver allowed for the minting of coins and hence monetarization of the economy. A 100 years later even larger reserves of silver and copper were found in the aptly named Ore Mountains between Bohemia and Saxony. Famously the mine at Joachimsthal in Bohemia gave us the word Thaler, which then via its Spanish derivation became the Dollar. German miners were much in demand across Europe, developing pits as far away as the great Swedish deposits in Falun.

All that growth did not happen only in the countryside. There had been some ancient Roman cities in the regnum Teutonicum, Cologne, Mainz, Trier, Strasburg, Augsburg, Regensburg, Salzburg and Vienna, but all cities east of there and many in the west too were established during the Middle Ages. They were founded by ambitious kings and princes keen on the riches these places could generate. If you go down the list of the 10 largest cities in Germany today: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Dortmund, Essen and Leipzig have been founded in the Middle Ages, only 2 of them, Cologne and to a degree Frankfurt are former Roman settlements.

Trade flourished as the Northern Italian cities rebuild connections across the mediterranean and brough luxury goods north either across the Alps or via the Rhone River. From there the South-North Trade followed either the Burgundian valley or the Rhine River to the great fairs of Champagne and later the main cities of Flanders, Bruges and Ghent. These trade routes were age old, but during the Middle Ages Old Roman roads were rebuild and some, like the Gotthard pass were made viable for the first time.

What gave the empire an additional boost were new trade connections that had been of negligible importance in the past, the East West and North-South trade. One part of this story is the story of the Hanseatic league which brought scale to the trade in furs and beeswax from Nowgorod before developing a much larger trade in salted and dried fish to feed Catholic Europe with its hundreds of fast days. As shipping capacity increased trade in grain, wood and ash became viable, allowing the great trading centers in Flanders to sustain themselves. Other trade routes were the Via Regia that connected Smolensk, Kyiv and Moscow with Leipzig and Nurnberg via Krakow and Breslau/Wroclaw as well as the roads along the Danube and south through the Balkans.

Bottom line, the High Middle Ages were Boom times. How anyone can look at the skylines of Paris, Munich, Cologne, Milan or Barcelona and think otherwise is a mystery to me. The tallest pre 1850 buildings in many European cities are the spires of their Gothic cathedrals, true miracles in stonemasonry and even more astounding, architecture and statics.

What is hard to reconcile are these manifest witnesses to growth and prosperity with the narrative of never-ending wars and conflicts. How could a city thrive and its merchants transport goods all across Europe when one local lord or other besieged them every two years and robbers attacked the goods trains? The answer must be that these attacks were less frequent and less ferocious than we imagine them. Sieges usually lasted only a few days because if the place could not be taken by surprise, medieval armies rarely had the equipment or the patience for a drawn-out siege. Merchants travelled together in groups, were pretty deft with the swords themselves and hired local thugs to help defending them.

Providing safety was the key job of a medieval ruler, which gets us to the imperial administration.

The Pope and the Emperor

When the Ottonian kings and emperors took over in the 10^th century practically nobody could read or write, except for clerics. And administration of an empire that stretched from Rome to Hamburg and from Magdeburg to Lyon required letters. How else could imperial orders be conveyed to the dukes and counts hundreds or thousands of miles away, how else could rights and privileges be confirmed.

The Ottonians and later the early Salians were very happy to use clerics in their chancellery and saw little need to build up their own secular bureaucrats. And that is because the church was very much beholden to the emperor. As in Byzantium the head of the church was a subordinate of the emperor. From Otto I until Henry III the emperors could appoint the pope often without asking the congregation in Rome and even where the pope had been elected by the Romans, the emperor could overrule and even depose him. The college of Cardinals as a body to elect the pope simply did not yet exist. Churches and monasteries were seen as private property, essentially prayer factories meant to ease the way of the local lord through purgatory.

Another advantage was that these prelates had no legitimate offspring and could hence not pass their job on to their sons. Every time a bishop passed, the emperor had a material influence in the decision who would be appointed next. Therefore the emperors shifted more and more of their administrative tasks on to the bishops. Bishops were given entire counties to administer, to mint coins, to collect taxes and tolls, to muster armies and send them to the emperor and so on and so on.

The first one was the rise of lay piety.

One of the side effects of rising prosperity is that people increasingly find the time to ask themselves nagging questions, such as, why are things happening to me or to my community, why am I here, what happens to me when I die, what is the right way to live. And in the Middle Ages the answer to all these questions was religion, if something bad happens to you, it is because you have sinned, worshipping god is what humans are here on earth for, and if you are pious and live a life that pleases god, you go to heaven.

All this required an intermediary between the people and God, and that intermediary was the church. Which on the one hand gives the church enormous power, but also enormous responsibility. If the church fails to function as an effective intermediary because of corruption, lack of knowledge of the scriptures or other moral failings, whole communities are consigned to eternal damnation. And so the people, from the lowest peasant to the emperor demanded that the church cleans up its act. Greedy prelates who paraded their concubines through the streets were attacked by the townsfolk. Dissolute monasteries were subjected to strict discipline and lazy monks expelled. Monastic orders like the Cluniacs, the Cistercians and the Franciscans came into being attempting to live an austere, apostolic lifestyle. Their example put further pressure on the church hierarchy to shift from worldly desires to spiritual objectives.

This bottom-up push for a better church was complemented by a top down movement known as the reform papacy. Usually focused on Gregory VII but starting much earlier and persisting well beyond his time in office, the reform papacy fundamentally altered the role of the vicar of Christ. The popes had lost much of their spiritual authority when it had become the plaything of the Roman Aristocracy during the 9^th and 10^th century who happily put debauched 18-year olds on the throne of Saint Peter. One pope even sold the papal throne for cold hard cash. Emperor Henry III had to depose 3 popes in 1046, since all of them were profoundly unsuited for the role.

He replaced them with a sequence of German prelates, one of whom, Leo IX initiated a first set of reforms that were then pushed further by his successors. The popes changed their lifestyle to one more suitable to a religious leader, members of the curia were chosen on knowledge of canon law and scripture, a college of cardinals was established to elect the pope and theologians tried to consolidate the teachings of Christ.

Though the emperors had proactively supported the reforms of the papacy – pious laymen they were – the changed standing of the pope and with it the changed status of church now caused a huge headache. A reformed church should be able to organize its own affairs, in particular choose and invest its bishops and abbots based on religious criteria. That would be o.k. if bishops and abbots were just spiritual leaders of their flock. But as we said before, by 1077 they had become the effective administration of the empire alongside their duties as churchmen. Pope and Emperor clashed over the question who had the right to appoint, i.e., invest the bishops and abbots.

This conflict has become known as the Investiture Controversy, though the decision about who appoints and invests bishops and abbots was only one part of the conflict. It was also a conflict about superiority. Gregory VII and his successors took the view that the pope is the head of all Christendom and all monarchs have to bow to him. He even declared that he could depose any monarch, even an emperor. The emperors responded with the “two swords” theory whereby emperor and pope stood side by side, the pope yielding the sword of spiritual power and the emperor that of secular power.

The Concordat of Worms from 1122 is supposed to have put this conflict to bed. The compromise laid out within it suggested the bishops and abbots get invested with their spiritual authority by the pope and with their secular authority by the emperor. This kind of compromise was pretty similar to what had been agreed in France and England around the same time. But whilst in France and England the church and monarch reconciled and the ecclesiastical hierarchy was gradually brought back under the control of the ruler, this was not the case in the medieval empire. The conflict between pope and emperor continued well beyond the Concordat of Worms.

The Empire and the Princes

The reason the conflict between the pope and the monarch was so much fiercer in the empire compared to other medieval monarchies was only in part down to the competition over who was the universal defenders of Christianity. It had also a lot to do with the role of the princes.

What is a prince? In the empire a prince is not defined as the eldest son and successor to the monarch, but is a specific rank in the imperial hierarchy. An imperial prince, a Reichsfurst is someone who has received a fief from the emperor directly, as opposed to having received it from another noble. A prince could be a duke or count, but a bishop or abbot could also be a prince. Being a prince came with a set or rights and privileges, many of which had been regalia, i.e., had been the rights associated with kingship, such as the right to call in taxes and tolls, build castles and bridges, mint coins etc.

The first structural conflict between the emperor and his high aristocrats dates back to the mid 11^th century, to the time of the emperors Henry III and then Henry IV. When Henry III comes to the throne in 1039 the empire had gone through a long period of consolidation of power in the hands of just one man. Henry the Fowler had started out in 919 very much as a Primus inter Pares, a First Amongst Equals, but already his son Otto the Great had assumed a more elevated position when he sat himself down on the throne of Charlemagne in Aachen. As time went by, control tightened, the imperial families gained more and more titles and more and more land and rights shifted into the administration of the imperial bishops and abbots.

By the 1050s the emperors introduced a new tool to further strengthen their administrative grip. They increasingly employed so-called Ministeriales. These were unfree men trained as either fighters or administrators. These men were bound to the emperor due to their status as unfree serfs. They did not have the rights and freedoms a true knights had, who had voluntarily entered into the mutual obligations of vassalage. Ministeriales were sent out to build and garrison castles that were dominating the surrounding countryside and keep the local aristocrats in check.

This use of Ministeriales and in particular their use in securing an imperial territory around the unimaginably valuable silver mines of Goslar infuriated the neighboring Saxon aristocrats. They felt, as their leader Otto von Northeim said, that the ruler had moved from being a king to being a tyrant. That rendered their feudal obligations null and void and since no free man should endure such humiliation, rebellion was the only honorable course of action.

Canossa and beyond

This local conflict between the emperor and his Saxon subjects turned into a civil war engulfing the whole empire when emperor Henry IV simultaneously picked a fight with the pope. The trigger was a conflict over who would appoint the bishop of Milan, the pope or the emperor. The two sides exchanged increasingly angry letters. Henry IV finally called his adversary „Hildebrand, not pope but false monk“ and demanded that he vacated the papal throne. Pope Gregory VII responded by excommunicating and deposing Henry IV. Initially the imperial bishops and many princes supported Henry, but their resolve crumbled as evil portends appeared. The nobles not just in Saxony but also in Swabia and Bavaria saw the opportunity to curb imperial power.

An imperial diet of all major princes told Henry IV that he would lose his throne unless he was released from the ban within a year and a day. That led to Henry IV’s famous journey to the castle of Canossa where he intercepted Gregory VII, did penance for three days in the snow, thereby forcing the pope to forgive him. That was a cunning move that saved his throne, but not the imperial power.

Even though the emperor was released from the ban, the princes still deposed him and elected a new king. In this election they also declared that any new ruler of the empire was to be chosen solely on the basis of merit, not on hereditary rights.

The civil war that followed lasted, depending on what individual conflicts one includes or does not include for either 30 or 80 years.

Henry IV did win the first round against the opposition and even ousted his enemy Gregor VII from Rome but was later bottled up in Italy for almost a decade and finally deposed by his son Henry V. Henry V stabilized the situation to a degree but when he died without male heir, his successor, Lothar III had to fight with Frederick and Konrad of Hohenstaufen, who felt cheated of the throne. Konrad of Hohenstaufen became the next king of the Romans but was now in turn in a constant war with Lothar’s heirs, the house of Welf. That means that except for some brief interludes, imperial power was contested in one or other part of the empire throughout the period from 1077 to 1152.

At the end of the process, imperial power and possessions in the northern half of the German kingdom were almost completely lost. The area north of the Main River began to forge its own destiny away from the imperial gaze, giving rise to some of the most powerful principalities of the Late Middle Ages and Early modern period, Saxony, Brandenburg and Brunswick/Hannover as well as the Hanseatic League and the land of the Teutonic Knights.

As for imperial history, it became a story of the south and west, of Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia, Burgundy and above all, Italy.

Rebuilding the empire under Barbarossa

Frederick I, Barbarossa assumed the throne in 1152 and settled the civil war. He was a descendant from both sides of the last conflict, a son of Frederick von Hohenstaufen and of Judith, from the house of Welf. The new king not only reconciled the two rival clans that had fought over the throne, but also roped in the other princes into his political projects.

He gave up the ambition to consolidate imperial power and instead went back to the earlier model of the king as a “first amongst equals”. As an honest broker, he settled longstanding conflicts between various princes by granting new ducal prerogatives to Austria, Meranien and Zaehringen and awarded titles and lands to others whilst keeping barely anything for himself.

Since he left no political testament, we do not know what Barbarossa’s long term plan was. But judging by his actions it seemed that he had decided to leave the German kingdom to the imperial princes and instead create his own power base in Northern Italy.

Northern Italy by that time had become a land of powerful cities rather than one of princely territories. That does not mean there were no aristocrats. In fact the cities were dominated by oligarchies of noble families. These cities were constantly at war with their neighbors creating a sort of chessboard of alliances. Based on the logic of „the enemy of my enemy is my friend“, cities formed alliances with the neighbors of their neighbors to fight their neighbors, or all the black squares against all the white squares on the chessboard.

From the perspective of a German high aristocrat, Northern Italy that had no grand territorial princes was a no-man’s land ready for the taking. Enough loot for himself and to reward his loyal followers. Initially everything went really well for him. He could gather huge support from the imperial princes to pursue several major campaigns in Italy that were extremely successful. He took and destroyed the largest of the Lombard cities, if not the largest and richest city in Europe, Milan in 1162. After that he resurrected the Roman law of antiquity that saw imperial power as absolute and demanded the return of all previously lost royal rights and prerogatives.

But the Italian cities did not like an overbearing emperor any better than the German princes did a century earlier. They buried their differences, rebuild the city of Milan and formed the Lombard League with the explicit aim to oust the invader.

The Lombard cities found strong support from their neighbor further south, the pope. The pope too did not like the presence of imperial troops close to Rome. Moreover pope and emperor had a longstanding dispute over the inheritance of the great countess Matilda, which comprised Tuscany and chunks of the Emilia Romagna.

Barbarossa responded by mounting the largest of all his campaigns into Italy, and, instead of attacking each of the cities along the way, decided to head straight for Rome and force pope Alexander III into submission. On July 24^th, 1167 his army captured Rome after a brutal fight during which St. Peter was set alight. The pope had fled to Benevento but Barbarossa had his antipope stage a sumptuous coronation of his wife. That was the high point of his career. The next day, dysentery spread through the imperial army like wildfire. Rome’s climate was notoriously unhealthy, in particular in the height of summer. Without wanting to exaggerate, the death toll was completely devastating. Most of the great families of the realm lost at least one member and the great chancellor of Barbarossa and archbishop of Cologne, Rainald von Dassel, perished.

After this disaster, Frederick Barbarossa’s political system collapsed. His princes no longer saw him as the great victor offering the riches of Italy, but as a man condemned for his sins, in particular the sin of creating anti-popes and burning St. Peter. Though he made several more attempts to regain his position in Italy, few princes were willing to support him and in 1177 after the final defeat in Legnano he had to make peace with the pope and the Lombard cities.

Having lost the battle for Italy, Barbarossa began gathering his own territory in the German kingdom. He leveraged his position as emperor to call in lands that have become vacant due to the lack of male heirs. In a way the catastrophic losses at the siege of Rome helped, as it left many a county without successor. Within a relatively short period of time he acquired an L-shaped dominion stretching from Alsace through the Middle Rhine to the level of Frankfurt and from there Eastwards to Bohemia, including large parts of Franconia including the increasingly important city of Nurnberg.

Barbarossa was no longer the respected arbiter of princely disputes but had become a player in his own right trying to create his own family powerbase, his “Hausmacht”, from which to steer the empire. This model of emperors whose main source of power are the family possessions rather than the resources of the office will be the dominant political structure of the empire going forward.

The limits of this model became apparent when the largest landowner in the empire, Henry the Lion from the House of Welf, duke of Saxony and duke of Bavaria came into conflict with his vassals. Henry the Lion had tried to consolidate his power in an attempt to achieve quasi-regal status. When Henry’s rivals hit back, Barbarossa could not or did not want to come to the Lion’s aid. Henry the Lion lost the contest and his vast possessions were divided up. Bavaria went to the Wittelsbach, Westphalia to the archbishop of Cologne and the eastern part of his lands to the Ascanians. Only the lands around Brunswick were left to the Lion, who was also exiled. Only one participant got nothing, and that was the emperor Barbarossa himself. Nobody wanted to allow him to expand his already large dominion any further.

The Hohenstaufen in Sicily

The Hohenstaufen then got one last lucky break. Barbarossa’s son, Henry VI had married the aunt of the king of Sicily who somewhat unexpectedly died without legitimate heirs. Henry VI used the ransom king Richard Lionheart had to pay him for his release to fund a campaign to gain his wife’s inheritance. And by another stroke of luck the superannuated empress gave birth to a son, Frederick, in 1194.

The kingdom of Sicily turned out to be a poison chalice. Sicily, which comprised most of Southern Italy and was one of the richest kingdoms in the medieval world reached almost up to the gates of Rome. That meant the papacy was now surrounded by lands that were at a minimum nominally and often also practically controlled by the emperor. That would be an uncomfortable situation for anyone but if you add to that disagreements over the implementation of the Concordat of Worms and the spat over inheritance of Tuscany, it is easy to understand why the relationship between pope and emperor went from animosity to outright hostility.

Civil war between Philipp of Swabia and Otto IV

Breaking the link between Sicily and the empire became a focus of papal policy from the day Henry VI marched into Palermo in 1193. And the pope did not have to wait long to make a move. In 1197 Henry VI died just 32 years old. His heir, young Frederick is barely 3 years old and his mother whisked him away to Palermo.

The empire is now rudderless. Henry VI’ brother, Philipp, duke of Swabia reluctantly picks up the title of king of the Romans, but has to contend with the son of Henry the Lion, Otto IV who enjoys papal backing. Another civil war follows during which both pretenders hand over royal privileges left right and center to gain support amongst the princes. When Philipp of Swabia is assassinated in 1208, precious little is left of the imperial regalia.

Otto IV once champion of the pope was now undisputed king and was even crowned emperor in Rome. But he faced the same dilemma as Barbarossa. With little imperial rights and possessions still available in Germany, an emperor needed to leverage his position into obtaining some of the riches of Italy. And Otto IV decided to go after Sicily, given it was ruled by a child and by then riven by constant infighting. That was again a bad move since it blew up the relationship with the pope. Otto IV is excommunicated and runs back to Germany to shore up his realm.

Emperor Frederick II and the Mainzer Landfrieden

Pope Innocent III sends young Frederick, the son of Henry VI, now 16 years old and at that point the last male Hohenstaufen to follow Otto IV north and depose him. Frederick does what he is told and thanks to the battle of Bouvines he did not even participate in, Otto IV is ousted and Frederick becomes Frederick II, emperor. The other thing he was told to do and did not do was to relinquish the crown of Sicily. At which point we are back to the imperial-papal stand-off.

Frederick managed to keep the conflict from blowing out into the open for an astoundingly long time by regularly promising to go on crusade. The Holy Land was in dire straits after the disastrous failures of the Third and Fourth Crusade. When Frederick finally sets off, the pope had already lost patience and excommunicated him. Papal armies invaded Sicily whilst he was en route to Jerusalem. Frederick II managed to gain Jerusalem by negotiation, rather than by force, but got precious little thanks for that. Upon his return he achieves a reconciliation with the Vicar of Christ only after defeating the papal invasion and threatening Rome itself.

Things hold together more or less until 1245.

Sicily is firmly in Frederick’s hand, he is nominally accepted as overlord of Northern Italy and de facto controls several cities and important castles there. Which gets us to the question: What happened to the Regnum Teutonicum, the kingdom north of the Alps?

Frederick II had stayed there from 1212 to 1220 when he fought against Otto IV, but did not set foot there again except for a brief interlude in 1235. For him the empire North of the Alps was of secondary importance. What he cared about was that there would not be a rival king who could lead armies south and mess up his political plans in Italy. He was therefore happy to leave the princes with all the privileges and rights they had amassed during the civil war between Philipp of Swabia and Otto IV.

To make sure that no local rival could emerge he had his son Henry elected king of the Romans and crowned in Aachen. Henry was just 9 years old when he was made king and was educated by senior German princes, first archbishop Engelbert of Cologne, then duke Louis of Bavaria. Once Henry had reached adulthood he took his job seriously and began rolling back the concessions made by his father and his other predecessors which inevitably brought him into conflict with the princes.

That was exactly the opposite of what Frederick II wanted. He wanted peace and quiet up north, even if that meant the emperor had little power there. He sided with the princes against his own son. Henry feeling utterly humiliated, rebelled. Frederick II came up to Germany and defeated his son by sheer weight of the imperial prestige and the display of exotic animals and entourage.

Given that the whole issue had become so public, Frederick had to formalise the rights of the princes and the constitution of the empire, which he did in a document called the Mainzer Landfrieden of 1235, issued in both Latin and German.

This document consists broadly of two sections. The first one defines the status of the various princes, bishops and nobles and the second establishes the framework to maintain peace and justice in the empire.

Under the Mainzer Landfrieden the hierarchy of the empire differentiates between imperial princes and other lords. An imperial prince is someone who holds at least one of his fiefs directly from the emperor. Other lords are mediated, i.e., they are vassals of an imperial prince not of the emperor. And below them are free men, who in turn may be vassals of a mediated lord, unless they are toiling on the land of an imperial prince or even the emperor’s land himself. That is a major difference between kingdoms like England and France and the empire. The kings of France and England were the direct lords of all free men in the kingdom and could call upon them to go to war on the king’s behalf, even if their immediate lord wasn’t going. In the empire, the emperor had no such rights over the subjects of his imperial princes. If he called for war, he needed the imperial princes to come along for the journey and bring their forces. If they refused, that was that.

Furthermore imperial princes automatically received the right to exercise the imperial regalia in their fiefs. These included the right to administer justice, mint coins, raise taxes and tolls, build castles, found cities, establish mills and so forth. Over the centuries princes had obtained these rights one by one from the emperors sometimes in exchange for services rendered and sometimes by hook and by crook. The Mainzer Landfriede cleaned this mess up by simply declaring that all imperial princes could exercise all these rights within their fiefs, even if they never previously had that right or had lost the relevant charters.

The final big concession was that the emperor allowed the princes to pass their fief on to their daughters or even other relatives, should they die without male offspring. That was huge, because it meant the emperor could no longer revert a fief that had expired. This process called Heimfall of Escheat in English had been one of the main tools medieval monarchs had used to replenish the royal demesne. Meanwhile the imperial princes often retained the right of escheat and kept confiscating the land of widows and orphans who happened to lack the protection of a powerful warrior.

Then there is a second part of the Mainzer Landfrieden, the rules about conflict resolution. The main role of a medieval monarch was to provide peace and justice. And that was a difficult thing to achieve.

The preferred conflict resolution model of 13^th century Germany was the feud. In the absence of a functioning system of courts and a central authority to prevent violence, feuds are an entirely rational way to enforce a claim, though probably not one that ends up favouring widows and orphans. Abolishing feuds everywhere in the empire as Frederick had attempted in Sicily was completely out of the question given the weakness of the imperial poition. So the next best option was to regulate the way feuds can be declared and are to be conducted.

Under the Mainzer Landfrieden, any feud had to be formally declared and the parties had to observe a three-day cooling-off period before hostilities could begin. And certain acts of violence were prohibited upon sanction of instant imperial ban, in particular one was not allowed to set things alight, in particular not houses, barns and castles.

And finally, before a feud could be formally declared, the parties had to go before a judge, someone appointed by the emperor or even the emperor himself. Historians as I increasingly learn are not lawyers, and hence are keeping stum on what exactly this judge could decide and how a judgement could be enforced. I tried to read the original text but was none the wiser. What is clear is that the parties have to get a judge’s decision, but either party is still able to initiate a feud if they do not like the outcome. So it seems the judges acted more as arbitrators, attempting to diffuse the tension and arrive at a mutually acceptable solution. That is not a judgement as we would regard it today, but it was a way to reduce the overall level violence.

Once this constitution was laid out, Frederick II returned back to Sicily and had his second son, Konrad IV elected King of the Romans and gave him strict instructions to be a good arbiter between the princely interests and for heaven’s sake, do not rock the boat. His older brother and predecessor was led away to prison in Puglia where a few years later he ended his life by driving his horse down a cliff. Given the example, young Konrad IV did do exactly what his father had asked him to do, which was nothing much.

The end of the Hohenstaufen

The conflict between pope and emperor escalated dramatically in the 1240s as Frederick gained more and more power in Northern Italy and the pope got more and more concerned about imperial encirclement. Pope Innocent IV finally left Italy for the safety of Lyon, technically in the empire but practically outside imperial reach.

In 1245 the pope called a church council to excommunicate and depose Frederick II. At the pope’s behest some of the Imperial princes elected an anti-king, Heinrich Raspe, the Landgrave of Thuringia, exactly the situation Frederick II had tried to avoid by making all these concessions in 1235.

And this was not the only part of the political edifice of the Hohenstaufen empire that began to crumble. The Lombard cities reunited into a second Lombard League and in 1248 inflicted a massive defeat on him before the walls of Parma. Konrad IV too lost a battle against Heinrich Raspe, though that was less decisive. When Frederick II died in 1250 his empire was in dire straits. He had himself become increasingly paranoid and had accused his closest advisor Petrus de Vinea of treason, had him tortured and killed.

Whilst he had a whole brace of legitimate sons and an even larger set of illegitimate ones, they would all perish as the pope was hell bent to have the Hohenstaufens destroyed, root and stem. This story is very moving and sad, but to long to recount here. What matters is that Konrad IV left for Sicily only a year after his father’s death, leaving behind his little boy, Konradin as the last representative of the Hohenstaufen North of the Alps. Konradin never took a major role in imperial politics and perished in his attempt to regain Sicily for his family.

The empire was left to a series of ineffectual kings. Heinrich Raspe had been replaced by King William of Holland who spent his days trying to grow his own territory. Upon his death in a frozen Frisian lake, two new kings were elected, a Spaniard, Alfonso of Castile who never set foot in the empire and Richard of Cornwall, brother of King Henry III of England. Richard was a bit more interested in the job, but got entangled in English politics which turned him into an absentee landlord.

The vast lands of the House of Hohenstaufen as well as all that was left of the imperial possessions were suddenly without legitimate owner. They became the last great territorial feeding frenzy before the gates for new entrants into the circle of imperial princes close down.

Here we are. The Holy Roman Empire is still enormous, stretching from the gates of Rome to Hamburg and from Rostock to Arles. Its cities are still thriving and its peasants are bringing in rich harvests. But by the time King Richard of Cornwall dies in 1272, the empire as a political construct had suffered from 50 years of neglect, of rulers disinterested or disengaged. The resources of the office, the imperial regalia and castles and estates are lost. When henry the Fowler took on the kingdom of East Francia, it was a hospital pass, but it still looks like a lottery ticket compared to becoming King of the Romans in 1273.

Still, this next crop of rulers, often derided as “minor kings” were in fact much more successful than their more glamorous predecessors. The first will lay the foundation for a family fortune that at its hights grows into an empire where the sun never sets. Another will finally break the hold of the papacy over the emperor and again another will create one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful medieval capital the world has and will ever see.

That is what this coming season is all about, the 100 years from the Interregnum to the Golden Bull of 1356 or how the medieval empire becomes the Holy Roman empire with its prince-electors, its imperial diets, courts and ceremonies. An empire often derided as ineffective and antiquated, but that survived for centuries, and bestowed a legacy of regional cultural centres that are some of the greatest attractions of modern Germany.

I hope you come along on the journey as we find out how all this arise from the debris of the medieval universal empire.

I hope you enjoyed this painfully condensed summary of the history of the empire during the High Middle Ages. As I said at the beginning this should serve as a reminder for those of you who have listened to the show all the way to here. And to those who are new to the History of the Germans – I hope this was useful. As I have been rushing through things at a rate of knots this podcast is not famous for, I am sure some things may be unclear or you may want to hear the long version again. Therefore I have posted a transcript of today’s show on my website historyofthegermans.com where I have placed links to the relevant episodes in the text. If I have not completely screwed it up, you should be able to just click on the respective highlighted sentence and it should take you through to the relevant episode.

And I very much hope that you will come along for the next season, which starts next week with The Interregnum, the schreckliche, die kaiserlose Zeit – the horrible time, the time without an emperor. See you then.

EPISODE 127 – Art and Culture of the Hanse

by History of the Germans Podcast on 2nd November 202317th December 2025

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.

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

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 Episode 127 – Art & Culture of the Hanse • History of the Germans Podcast

As always:

Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www.historyofthegermans.com

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So far I have:

To listen on Apple Podcast – click here

Ep. 127: The Hanseatic League (1143-1669) – The Art and Culture of the Hanse

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TRANSCRIPT

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

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.

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 20^th 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 11^th to 13^th 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 14^th 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 13^th 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 20^th 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 19^th 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.

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.

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 14^th 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 13^th 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 12^th 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 16^th 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 14^th century a new wing was added on the eastern side of the market square. And then in the 15^th 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 19^th, 20^th and now the 21^st 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.

EPISODE 126 – A BRIEF HISTORY OF BREMEN

by History of the Germans Podcast on 26th October 202317th December 2025

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 19^th century. A story of rebellion, stubbornness, piracy and emigration to America, I thought worth telling.

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

A story of rebellion, stubbornness, piracy and emigration to America, I thought worth telling.

The episode webpage with transcripts and further links is available here

As always:

Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www.historyofthegermans.com

If you wish to support the show go to: Support • History of the Germans Podcast

Facebook: @HOTGPod

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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.

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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 10^th 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 11^th 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 12^th 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 14^th 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 17^th 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 14^th 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 28^th to 29^th 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 16^th century but there was a great assembly hall there since 1444.

Despite the economic improvement social tensions remain. Bremen’s history in the 15^th and 16^th 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 480^th 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.

Episode 125 – The Rise of Hamburg

by History of the Germans Podcast on 20th October 202317th December 2025

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….

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

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….

The episode webpage with transcripts and further links is available here

As always:

Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www.historyofthegermans.com

If you wish to support the show go to: Support • History of the Germans Podcast

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So far I have:

Bibliography:

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

Philippe Dollinger, Die Hanse, 6. Auflage, 2012

Ep. 125: The Rise of Hamburg in the 16th century and beyond

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

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 14^th 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 14^th 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 12^th 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 16^th end early 17^th 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 16^th 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 15^th 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 14^th and 15^th 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 16^th 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 17^th 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 100^th 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 17^th 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

Episode 124– Decline & Fall (Part 2)

by History of the Germans Podcast on 14th October 202317th December 2025

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”.

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

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

As always:

The episode webpage with transcripts and further links is available here

As always:

Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www.historyofthegermans.com

If you wish to support the show go to: Support • History of the Germans Podcast

Facebook: @HOTGPod

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So far I have:

OPAC (regesta-imperii.de)

Bibliography:

Rainer Postel: Der Niedergang der Hanse

in Hanse, Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos: RI

Jahnke,Carsten: Die Hanse | Reclam Verlag

Philipp Dollinger: Die Hanse

Ep. 124: The Hanseatic League – Decline and Fall (Part 2) – Jürgen Wullenwever’s and Lübeck’s last stand

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

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 16^th 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 16^th 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 24^th,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 1^st 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, 2/3^rd 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 14^th 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 16^th 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

Episode 123– Decline & Fall (Part 1)

by History of the Germans Podcast on 6th October 202319th February 2026

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?..

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

The episode webpage with transcripts and further links is available here

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So far I have:

“The problemsof victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.”

Ep. 123: The Hanseatic League – Decline and Fall (Part 1)

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

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

The 16^th 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 22^nd 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 16^th 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 16^th 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 16^th 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 15^th 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 15^th 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 4^th 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 8^th, a court headed up by said archbishop convicts all 82 accused, including fellow 2 bishops, of heresy. On November 9^th 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.

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.

Episode 122– Calamitous Victories

by History of the Germans Podcast on 28th September 202317th December 2025

Calamitous Victories open the Baltic to English merchants

In 1435 the Hanse can look back at a string of successes. Another war with Denmark won, the patrician regime in Lübeck and elsewhere restored, conflicts with Burgundy and England settled in their favour. But as Winston Churchill once remarked, “The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.”

And these problems are raising their ugly heads….

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

And these problems are raising their ugly heads….

The episode webpage with transcripts and further links is available here

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Ep. 122: The Hanseatic League – 15th century Politics – Calamitous Victories

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 122 – Calamitous Victories

And these problems are raising their ugly heads….

Before we start just a quick reminder that you are listening to an advertising free podcast which means all this effort is ultimately funded by my lovely patrons. Patrons are people who are incredibly generous, not just towards me, but towards all of you listeners out there. They keep this old cog sailing, and we are all very grateful to them. As you may know by now, you can join this illustrious group by going on to patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website, historyofthegermans.com/support and get access to bonus episodes and other privileges for the price of a chocolate croissant per month. There you can join Daniel C., Jim T-W, Karem C. and Mark W. who have already signed up.

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Last week we talked about the constitutional crisis of 1406-1418 when the city of Lübeck was incapacitated by tensions between the ruling patricians and the upper middle class and the artisans. The old leadership emerged victorious from the conflict, leaving the city council as dominated by the wealthy as it had been before.

Though the uprising had failed, the conflict left a mark on the Hanse. The patricians who had defended their position in many of the member cities agreed to make the Hanse an instrument in the preservation of their power. The Diet of 1418 instituted the right of the League to interfere in the internal affairs of the cities, specifically to expel any city that had overthrown their patrician rulers. Merchants who wanted to partake in the Hanse privileges now had to prove that they were a resident of a current member city, not just that they were from the Holy Roman Empire

With that the Hanseatic League moves one step further on its trajectory from a largely voluntary association driven by mercantile interests to a more structured, political entity though it is still a long way from a league of cities with its own institutions, bureaucracy and army. Proposals by Lübeck to go down that route had been rejected.

Lübeck, though still not the capital of the Hanse became its general secretariat. Most Hanseatic Diets took place in the city on the Trave River, the city council maintained the Hanseatic archives and disputes between members of the Hanse were settled here.

Most importantly, Lübeck was in charge of the agenda for the Hanseatic Diets. The Diets weren’t parliamentary debates as we know them where – at least in principle – the members could change their minds. The delegates of the different cities usually arrived with explicit and detailed instructions from their home towns. And these instructions were based on the agenda and proposals set out in the invitation, which was drafted by – the city council of Lübeck.

The cities who received this agenda were in practice limited to a yes/no decision on the proposals from the Baltic shore. If they had an alternative proposal, their delegate could initiate a debate. But the proposal could not really be agreed upon on the same diet because few of the other delegates had discussed it with their councils back home, so they would not have the power to vote in favour. So, even if the majority of delegates agreed to an alternative proposal, these would still have to go back to their hometowns for ratification. Therefore, the Diet usually went with the Lübeck proposal.

Another constraint was that very few of the 70+ members and 200 associate members actually went to the Hanseatic diet. It was usually just the most important ones and those with a strong interest in the matter at hand who shouldered the expense of sending a delegation. The smaller cities left their representation to the large cities who led their Regional Hanse association. These were Cologne for the Rhenish cities, Brunswick for the Saxon ones, Gdansk for the Prussian and Westphalian ones and Lübeck for the Wendish cities. Other regular attendees were Rostock, Wismar, Stralsund, Magdeburg, Hamburg, Bremen and Lüneburg. Usually, there were only about a dozen delegates. Even the important diet of 1418 counted only 35 participants which still made it one of the largest gatherings on record.

This set-up put Lübeck into the driver seat. And mostly they made proposals that benefitted all of the cities. The Hanseatic Diet spent a lot of the 15^th century standardising and simplifying the laws of commerce. Rules about shipping, contracts, sharing of risks and the like were very much in line with the main purpose of the effort, removing barriers to trade.

So the city fathers were serious about making the Hanse a success but in the end the shirt is closer than the jacket. When interests diverged, the interest of Lübeck was the one that prevailed.

It did not take long after 1418 for the imbalance of the system to become apparent.

The issue that brings it out in the open goes back to 1370 and the peace of Stralsund. The victorious Hansards were given not just the fortresses on the Oresund for a period of 15 years, but also effective control of the great herring market in Scania for an indeterminate period.

The Hanse used these powers to expel their Dutch and English competitors from Falsterbo and Skanoer. As you may remember, the herring market was much more than a market for herring. Traders came from all over to sell their wares, cloth from Flanders and England, spices and luxury items from Italy, fur and beeswax from the North, grain and wood from Prussia and Livonia. Everything and anything was traded there.

But when the English and Dutch were banned from the fair, their cloth and spices did not get there. Hanse merchants who might have bought them in Scania now picked up these wares in London or Bruges. Within a short period of time the once huge fair was reduced to just a fish market, an enormous fish market, but just a fish market.

The ban from the herring market had an obviously detrimental effect on the Dutch and the English. They still wanted to trade in salted fish, grain, beeswax and the like. So once the Oresund was open again, they sailed past Scania all the way to the source of these goodies, to Livonia and to Prussia.

They also found a solution to the exclusion from the fish market itself. The Dutch started fishing for Atlantic Herring on the Dogger Bank. Atlantic herring may be less desirable than the Baltic subspecies, but in the end it came down to price and availability. Atlantic herring was cheaper and available, whilst Baltic herring was no longer as abundant as it had once been. The gradual cooling of the sea and more importantly, the intense overfishing of herring who had not yet spawned led to a gradual decline in the stock of Baltic herring.

There were widely divergent views on how to address this issue of intensifying competition on their doorstep. Some saw opportunities in working with the newcomers, whilst others argued for protectionist policies. The Livonian and Prussian cities initially preferred a collaborative approach, granting the English and Dutch traders a place at the table, even admitting some to the Artushof. But when the English abused the hospitality granted, Gdansk expelled them. But the Prussians and Gdansk in particular kept a close relationship with the Low Countries where they sold a lot of their wood, ash and grain.

Lübeck and the Wendish cities were more consistently protectionist against both the Dutch and the English but were more open to admitting Southern Germans.

Protectionist measures usually included a blanket ban for foreigners to trade with other foreigners, to contact the producers, the strict enforcement of staple rights and the prohibition of joint companies with foreign merchants.

Things got more heated when war with Denmark breaks out again. In the meantime, the great Margaret had passed, and her successor was Eric of Pomerania, a much less accomplished political operator.

Eric had supported the patrician old council in the constitutional crisis and had expected the grateful senators to return the favour by helping him in his conflict with the counts of Holstein. The counts of Holstein had become dukes of Schleswig as vassals of the Danish crown. As it happened they weren’t exactly as faithful a vassal as the Danish king would have liked. Or maybe the king just wanted Schleswig full stop.

The Lübeck Patricians weren’t quite so convinced they owed that much to Eric. Their primary concern was to keep the land and river route between Lübeck and Hamburg open. Remember that they had spent vast amounts of money on the Stecknitz canal that provided a direct shipping connection between the Baltic and the North Sea. And that money that had been the trigger for the civil discontent that had brought the Hanse to the brink of extinction. No way they would risk a war with the count of Holstein whose lands lay between the two cities and who could cut the connection any time he wanted.

Eric was to say the least, a bit disappointed and he was the sort of man who did not like to be disappointed. He retaliated by inviting the Dutch and the English to trade with his vast territories, which included not just Denmark but Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Faroer and Shetland.

He also supported the Poles and Lithuanians in their struggle with the Teutonic Knights. At the risk of spoiling the next season I have to mention here that at the battle of Tannenberg in 1410 many knights had fallen, including their grand master, Ulrich of Jungingen. Even though they negotiated a favourable peace treaty the Teutonic knights were no longer the force they once were. In the subsequent decades they would lose more territory to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, including the city of Gdansk.

And then Eric introduced a new toll for passing through the Oresund, a serious impairment to the Hanse trade.

The Burgermeister of Lübeck Jordan Pleskow, the same who had engineered the return of patrician rule in the city was able to maintain peace despite these constant provocations. But once he had died, the hawks on the city council got their way. The Wendish cities declared war on Denmark and closed the Oresund.

They quickly realised why their shrewd old Burgermeister had counselled against war. Only the Wendish and Pomeranian cities were prepared to support the war. The Prussian and Livonian cities, in particular Danzig, Riga and Tallinn were outraged by the blockade.

The reason was economic, which should not be surprising in an association run by merchants.

There were only two trade routes to ship goods out of the Baltic. One was the land route between Lübeck and Hamburg. The other was via the Oresund. The route via the Sund had gained in importance as time went by. The grain, wood and ash that made up the majority of the exports from Prussia and Livonia was extremely bulky. As a consequence, ships got bigger and bigger. Unloading them in Lübeck and putting the wares on smaller vessels to go via the Stecknitz canal and the Elbe River to Hamburg and reloading them on another ship there was very expensive and time consuming. So expensive and so time consuming that the route through the Sund and around the tip of Jutland became more and more attractive, even if it involved spending days in harbour waiting for fair winds.

Gdansk, Riga, Tallinn and many other cities on the Northern end of the Baltic were now shipping their goods through the Oresund and around Jutland. A war with Denmark closed that route and forced them to use the Lübeck route.

On top of that Eric’s provocations were much less harmful to the Prussian and Livonian cities. They did not mind the Dutch and English as much as the Lübecker. And the war against the Teutonic Order was even welcome to an extent since the Knights had suppressed city freedoms and had a commercial operation that competed directly with the merchants.

Renewed war with Denmark was therefore a blow to the trade of Danzig, Riga, Reval, Elbing etc., a blow that they could have accepted had it been for a purpose they supported. But as things stood, it looked almost as if Lübeck was trying to restore its overstretched finances by provoking a war that forced their fellow Hansards to use their harbour and their canal.

Things weren’t helped when the Hanse fleet was beaten by the Danes. The fleet had protected a large convoy of ships coming with salt from Bourgneuf destined for Prussia. That salt was now filling Danish barrels that went to London and Bruges on Dutch and English ships.

News of the disaster were badly received at home. The population blamed the recently reinstalled patrician governments in Wismar, Rostock and Hamburg for the failure. Heads had to roll.

The war went on in this manner for 9 long years during which the Prussians and Livonians grudgingly paid their fellow Hansards for services they did not want to use in the first place. And by the way, because the salt did not get through from Bourgneuf, everyone had to buy the expensive salt from Lüneburg adding to the frustration.

But it gets better. The Wendish cities did win their war, not thanks to their prowess, but thanks to Eric’s total incompetence. His long war with Holstein and lack of sensitivity towards the interests of its different kingdoms had left him in an increasingly precarious situation. In 1434 Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, a mine owner of German extraction led a rebellion of Swedish peasants against what they believed was Danish overreach within the kingdom. The rebellion forced Eric not only to make wide-ranging concessions to his Swedish subjects but also to end the costly war with Holstein and the Hansards. The counts of Holstein were confirmed as dukes of Schleswig and the Wendish cities were confirmed in their extensive privileges in Scania and elsewhere. These privileges included a relief from paying the recently introduced toll for the use of the Oresund. This latter exemption only applied to the Wendish cities who had fought the war with Eric, meaning the Prussian and Livonian cities still had to pay it, forcing them to use the Lübeck Hamburg route

The next leg makes things even worse for the traders from Gdansk, Riga and Tallinn. In 1438 king Eric is deposed in Denmark because of his failures in war, general incompetence and debauchery. The Danish Royal Council offered the crown to the last descendant of Waldemar IV, Christian, the count Palatinate, a German imperial prince they called Christian of Bavaria. Christian knew nothing about Scandinavia and was supposed to be a puppet monarch whose impressive titles belied a rather weak position. The Wendish cities, on whose support he had relied, were given further privileges and the castle of Helsingor. Lübeck then completely blocked the Dutch from entering the Baltic.

Another blow to the Prussian and Livonian cities. The Wendish cities’ war had cut them off from their preferred trading route and their business partners in Holland. When the Prussian cities claim that Lübeck is acting mainly in its own interest rather than the interest of all Hansards, they do have a point.

Hanse solidarity starts breaking down in other areas as well. The trade in grain in Livonia kept growing with growing demand from the Low Countries. Much of that trade was going through foreign merchants, Dutch and Southern Germans in particular. When these traders were starting to buy their wares directly from the owners of the estates the council of Riga had enough. They banned anyone, not just the Dutch and Southerners, but also their fellow Hansards from buying directly. That hurt the Lübeck traders hard and they went to the Teutonic knights who ruled Livonia and asked them for help against the unruly city. That was a serious breach of protocol. Asking a foreign power to solve an internal Hanse conflict was an admission that the association was unable to serve its main purpose, facilitating trade.

Riga retaliated by confiscating all Lübeck assets in its harbour. The conflict remained unresolved, and Riga persisted with its strict protectionism.

Having such a rift between the Livonian cities and Lübeck was not helpful when the Kontor in Novgorod got under more and more pressure. In 1424 150 German merchants were incarcerated as retaliation for what the authorities believed was an act of piracy committed by Hansards on Russian ships. 36 of these merchants died in captivity. Ownership of the Kontor was restored to the Hansards, but less and less merchants were willing to take the risk of suddenly getting locked up and rotting in a Bojar’s jail, just for some squirrel’s pelts.

Gradually it was mainly Livonians who came down and they took control of the Kontor and they squeezed out the others. In 1471 Ivan the Great, the ruler of the principality of Muscovy, and grandfather of Ivan the Terrible conquered Novgorod. He had no liking for foreigners in general and – more importantly – wanted to shift trade to his own territories around Moscow.

Lübeck and the other Hansards saw little reason to come to the protectionist Livonian’s aid and so the Kontor was closed. Over the coming century the trade in furs shifted away from the Baltic Route to the Land route that ended in Leipzig, where a great fair had been established by the Wettiner Margraves of Meissen in 1165 and 1268. Episode 107 if you are interested.

Another Kontor that got hurt in this Hanse infighting was Bergen. Here Lübeck, Rostock and Wismar took sole control in 1446. That led the other Hanseatic cities, including the Dutch members of the League to bypass Bergen and procure the Stockfish directly from Iceland and elsewhere.

In London the situation was even more complex. London was the place where two main Hanse trading routes came together, the East West route from the Baltic bringing fish, grain, beeswax and wood and the South/North route bringing wine from the rhine valley and increasingly from France into England. Traders on these two routes did have little in common. As you may remember there used to be initially two Kontors in London, one for the Cologne merchants and one for the Easterlings.

Things get difficult when the Wendish, Prussian and Livonian cities find themselves in conflict with the King of England. The source of this conflict is the issue of reciprocity. The English merchants are irritated that their German counterparts can trade more or less freely in England whilst they face all sorts of obstacles when they try to get into the Baltic. That sounds fair enough and the English kings, when they are not preoccupied with the 100 years war or the war of the Roses are giving their support to the Merchant Adventurers. Support that goes as far as capturing a fleet of nearly 100 Hanse ships, which results in a declaration of war. Lübeck is again the most bellicose and intransigent warmonger, but there is some support from the Prussian cities on this one. This is by the way the war during which the privateer Paul Beneke captured the galley of Tommaso Portinari (episode 118).

The ones who have no stake in this game and would very much prefer to remain neutral are the merchants of Cologne. They have been welcoming English traders for centuries and their close links go back to the days of emperor Henry V and the empress Matilda, if not beyond.

Still their fellow Hansards insist that Cologne even if they are not willing to fight alongside them, should at least join the trade embargo against England. But that is too much for Cologne. On balance Cologne decided that membership in the Hanse is not worth cutting the trade connections with England. In 1471 the city of Cologne, one of the four leading cities of the Hanse is excluded.

This war between England and the Hanse lasted 3 years and was part of the much larger war of the Roses. Alliances were swapped like crazy and the Hanse was sometimes attacking English shipping, sometimes French or Burgundian. King Edward IV was restored to the crown with the help of ships from Danzig but soon after turned against the Hanse.

In 1474 this episode of the conflict was over. The Hanse was party to the peace of Utrecht which granted them extensive privileges whilst giving minimal right to English traders in the Baltic. The biggest loser in all this was however Cologne. Edward IV had agreed to boycott the Cologne trade as part of his reconciliation with the Hanse. The great Rhenish city was completely isolated and cut off from its most important market. In 1474 it had to beg to be re-admitted to the Hanse.

Given all these internal tensions, the question is why the Hanse kept going not just during the 15^th but well into the 16^th century. The answer is that despite all of these tensions, the networks between the individual merchants remained intact and valuable. The patricians on the city councils may gradually turn into land-owning aristocrats seeking honour and glory on the battlefield. But the upper middle classes, the merchants like Bernd Pal kept their business relationships with colleagues in the other cities. To a degree the protectionist measures made such networks ever more important. If you wanted to trade in Livonia, the restrictions meant that a Lübeck merchant needed a local partner to get around these measures. Maybe Bernd was sent up there at the tender age of seven for exactly that reason.

At the same time the standardisation of law and commerce that came in the wake of the Diet of 1418 facilitated trade and was generally regarded as beneficial to all traders.

So, there was still a lot of value in this organisation which is why it persisted. And from the outside it still looked extremely successful. The Hanse had won two great wars, against Eric of Pomerania, the ruler of all of Scandinavia and against England. The tensions were hidden under the surface, invisible to the outside.

What was more visible though was the change in the environment. The rise of the Hanseatic League, the association of the Merchants of the Holy Roman Empire had coincided with the disintegration of that self-same Holy Roman Empire. And other kingdoms, Denmark, Sweden and Norway weren’t in much better shape. England and France were at each other’s throat for a century. But as we head towards the 16th century these medieval principalities are stabilising and becoming pre-modern states. New powers, like Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth appear on the Hanse’s doorstep adding to the tensions inside and between the cities. That we will discuss next week. I hope you will join us again.

Before I go just one more big thank you to our patrons who have signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website, historyofthegermans/support. Your generosity is really, really appreciated.

Episode 121– A Constitutional Crisis

by History of the Germans Podcast on 21st September 202317th December 2025

The lower classes in the Hanse cities are rising up

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

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

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

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