Luebeck

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The Hanse’s Trade in Beer and Cereals

This week we will kick off with the string of cities along the Baltic Coast from Lübeck up to Königsberg (modern day Kaliningrad). Who founded them and why? And why so many? Who were the people who came to live there, how did they organise themselves and most importantly, what did they produce and what did they trade?

We will dwell on the most splendid of those, Gdansk or Danzig in German, the one city in the Baltic that could give Lübeck a run for its money, a place that developed as six separate cities and only became one entity in the late 15th century. And as we talk about Gdansk, we will also talk about the Vistula River, Europe’s nineth longest that connected Gdansk not just to many of Poland’s great cities, but also to the agricultural wealth of the Prussia of the Teutonic Knights, to the Ukraine and to ancient Lithuania.

And all that foodstuff is put on ships and goes to the growing cities of Flanders, the Rhineland, England, Northern France and even Spain. For the first time since the fall of the Roman empire do we hear about large scale grain shipments that sustain urban centres, urban centres that couldn’t otherwise exist. But grain is not the only thing that the Hansa become famous for.

The other is Germany’s most popular drink and best-known export, beer. The economics there are even more fascinating, since people did not only drink vast quantities of beer in the Middle Ages, they also cared a lot about where it came from, and Einbecker was Europe’s favourite beer.

And if you have been hoping to finally hear about the Hanseatic Kontor in Bergen, well let’s see how far we get…..

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 112: Grain, Beer & maybe some more Fish

This week we will kick off with the string of cities along the Baltic Coast from Lübeck up to Königsberg (modern day Kaliningrad). Who founded them and why? And why so many? Who were the people who came to live there, how did they organise themselves and most importantly, what did they produce and what did they trade?

We will dwell on the most splendid of those, Gdansk or Danzig in German, the one city in the Baltic that could give Lübeck a run for its money, a place that developed as six separate cities and only became one entity in the late 15th century. And as we talk about Gdansk, we will also talk about the Vistula River, Europe’s nineth longest that connected Gdansk not just to many of Poland’s great cities, but also to the agricultural wealth of the Prussia of the Teutonic Knights, to the Ukraine and to ancient Lithuania.

And all that foodstuff is put on ships and goes to the growing cities of Flanders, the Rhineland, England, Northern France and even Spain. For the first time since the fall of the Roman empire do we hear about large scale grain shipments that sustain urban centres, urban centres that couldn’t otherwise exist.

But grain is not the only thing that the Hansa become famous for. The other is Germany’s most popular drink and best-known export, beer. The economics there are even more fascinating, since people did not only drink vast quantities of beer in the Middle Ages, they also cared a lot about where it came from, and Einbecker was Europe’s favourite beer.

And if you have been hoping to finally hear about the Hanseatic Kontor in Bergen, well let’s see how far we get…..

But before we start let me tell you that the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Matt B., Tim KJ, Simon K. and Ben & Jim E. who have already signed up.

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As you know I sometimes do feature other podcasts I like on the History of the Germans, podcasts I believe you may like too. Today I want to point you to History of the Second World War podcast. Here is Wesley himself telling you about it:

Last week we talked about the largest fisheries in the pre-modern period, the herring markets in Scania. Millions of herring travelled every year between July and September through the narrow Oresund. The fish were caught and then salted in barrels. The salt for that came in part from Germany, namely from Luneburg, Oldesloe and Halle and der Saale and was brought in by the merchants of Lübeck.

The other half of the salt had come from the Baie of Bourgneuf on the French Atlantic coast, initially brought in by Dutch, Flemish and English merchants but over time that trade was too usurped by Hanseatic merchants. Our budding merchant empire has now gained a quasi-monopoly on herring, has gained access to the main supply of beeswax and furs and got busy exploiting the mineral wealth of Sweden.

But that is not all. There is another major set of products that came in via the southern shore of the Baltic, through the line of cities that stretches like a string of pearls along the coast.

Since this is a podcast about the Hanseatic League it would be great if I could name you all the cities along that coast that were members of the League. But I can’t. The Hanseatic League did not run a register of members. Membership shifted constantly.

Only Lübeck was in there from start to finish, but even places that are seen as thoroughly Hanseatic, like Bremen, had initially been reluctant to join or were expelled at some point or both. Tradition has it that there were 72 permanent members and about 130 floating members. But there is not even a definitive list of these 72. It is likely that 72 was a purely symbolic number, made up as 7 times 12, each important in numerology.

And even if there had been 72 confirmed members, there is no way I can talk about all of these. My choice of which ones I mention is entirely subjective, driven by what I think is important or entertaining. If that means I miss one or other proud Hanseatic city in this podcast, my apologies.

The ones we are talking about today are: Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, Greifswald, Stettin/Szczecin, Kolberg/Kolobrzeg, Danzig/Gdansk, Elbing/Elblag and Königsberg/Kaliningrad as well as the inland cities of Kraków and Einbeck.

Let’s go from west to east. The first set of cities we should have a look at are Rostock and Wismar. Rostock was the first to be founded, in 1218, that is more than 60 years after Lübeck and 17 years after Riga. Wismar came a few years later in 1226.

These dates refer to the date when these places received city rights, not when they were first occupied. Very much like Lübeck itself these places had been villages or townships long before. Their population had largely been of Slavic descent, and they were also often still pagans. We did talk about the history of the Slavic peoples living between the Elbe and Oder Rivers at length in the episodes 95 to 108 of the History of the Germans Podcast, so this constellation should not come as a surprise.

These foundations were explicitly meant for German Christian merchants who in the case of Rostock and Wismar mostly came from Lübeck and whose roots go back to Westphalia, the Rhineland and Flanders.

They were given an area adjacent but separate from the existing Slavic township or village. Only the settlement of the Germans would be given the town laws that granted them the right to establish a city council and exercise lower jurisdiction.

They would then build a wall around their new city. In some cases, like in Rostock, the first city is almost immediately followed by a second one next to it, one ends up being called the Altstadt or old city and the other Neustadt, or new city, even if the new city is barely a decade younger than the old one. Each would have their own council, town hall and city wall.

Rathaus in Rostock

In Rostock there was also the seat of the prince of Mecklenburg which formed the technically fourth entity. These four settlements merged into one city in 1265, chose one city council for the whole and built a joint city wall surrounding the agglomeration.

Ok, that was the process, but it still does not explain why the princes of Mecklenburg wanted these cities to be created and why they wanted them filled with German merchants.

As so often in history, it was the two main drivers of human behaviour, greed and fear. The princes on the Baltic shore, be they the counts of Holstein, the Mecklenburger or Pomeranians as well as the princes further inland, the margraves of Brandenburg and Meissen, the duke of the shrunken Saxony, the house of Welf, the archbishop of Bremen, the bishop of Magdeburg and all the other ones lived in constant fear.

None could be certain of their position. The central authority in the form of emperor Frederick II had returned home to Sicily, leaving the Regnum Teutonicum in the hands of his infant son and a regency council with the strict instruction not to exercise much authority.

And by 1250 even that bit of central authority fell away entirely leaving an almost free for all held together by some loose rules of chivalric behaviour.

For a prince, count, duke or bishop to feel secure he needed fortresses and money, lots of money. A city surrounded by a wall is a formidable defensive position. And what is even better is that the cost of building and maintaining this fortress is borne by the city’s inhabitants.

Plus cities were great engines of the economy. The city’s artisans create goods people desire and tools that increase productivity. The merchants open up markets bringing in and sending out goods. The city itself becomes a market for the agricultural surplus generated on the farms nearby.

And all that activity could be turned into sources of tax income for the princes. With a solid set of defences and some tidy income from taxes and tolls, a prince could then get on with the long and arduous task of turning his hotchpotch of rights and privileges into a territorial state.

And that was expensive. It required buying up land and rights from other lords, knights or bishops, and where they were hard to convince, take it away from them by force, until all power in the territory is consolidated in one hand.

But as we all know, there is no such thing as a free lunch, not even for a medieval prince who can raid any of his serf’s home and demand food. The price he had to pay was to grant the new settlers a number of freedoms. In particular the right to form their own city council, to administrate their affairs and to adjudicate at least their civil disagreements and petty crimes. Only the judgement over serious crimes and in particular the right to convict someone to death was reserved to the prince. That is what it took to convince a merchant from Lübeck, Dortmund, Visby or Riga to move to Wismar or Rostock.

So confusingly, the political project aimed at consolidating all power in the hands of the princes starts with the princes giving some of these powers to immigrants. And they will live to regret that decision.

Hearing that the princes of Mecklenburg set up trading cities for German merchants on their lands may sound confusing to modern listeners. You may remember that the princes of Mecklenburg were descendants of Niklot, the pagan Slavic leader who had fought and lost against Henry the Lion. This was the last leg of a set of wars and harassments that goes back to the 10th century. There could not have been much love lost between Slavs and Germans.  

The ethnic persecution of Slavs ended when the first prince, Pribislav had become Christian and was recognised as a magnate in the Holy Roman Empire first by Henry the Lion and then by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. So just 60 years before the founding of Rostock, Mecklenburger and Saxons had been caught in a brutal struggle for survival and now the Slavs are inviting the Germans in, giving them land and privileges?

If these Slavic princes did care about their own peoples being pushed aside and over time letting these places turn into German speaking lands, there is little evidence of it. Fortifications and income were apparently more important. And we are still 500 years before the invention of nationalism making identities as Christian and as an aristocrat more important than ethnic relationships.

This policy of inviting German merchants to settle in their lands was not limited to the Mecklenburger. The next set of cities along the Baltic coast, Stralsund, Greifswald, Stettin/Szczecin in Polish and Kolberg/Kolobrzeg.

Rathaus Stralsund

The magnates who founded them were the princes of Rügen and the dukes of Pomerania. These too were of Slavic extraction. The princes of Rügen had been amongst the most committed pagans and guardians of the last great pagan temple at Kap Arkona.

Likewise, the dukes of Pomerania had originally been the leaders of the Slavic tribe of the Pomeranians who had taken up Christianity thanks to the silver-tongues preaching of bishop Otto von Bamberg and the steel tipped lances of duke Boleslav III of Poland.

And again, these princes invited German settlers to come to their lands, take over some of the most promising trading locations and built their cities. In the case of Stettin/ Szczecin the choice was particularly stark, since it had been a sizeable city since at least the 10th century with an established trading activity. Still, the duke of Pomerania decided in 1237 to give the combined entity a German city law, replacing the existing Slavic rules.

Rathaus Stettin/Szczecin

And these princes did it for very much the same reasons as their neighbours to the west. Their neighbours were the Danes, the margraves of Brandenburg and Poland. The Danes under Valdemar II had raided along the Baltic shores for decades before the battle of Bornhoeved leading to a serious depopulation of the territory. Meanwhile the ambitious margraves of Brandenburg were expanding both northwards and eastwards.

Brandenburg’s move east was facilitated by Poland breaking up into six duchies after the death of Boleslav III “wrymouth”. None of these duchies could dominate the others, though technically the duke who resided in Kraków was the overlord of the whole of Poland. Each was in a precarious position vis-vis-vis their cousins, the margraves of Brandenburg, but not only them.

What knocked Poland for six in this period was the Mongol Invasion. In 1241 they arrived, led by Batu, the grandson of Genghis Khan. The duke of the Polish duchy of Malopolska and nominal leader of the whole went to face them at Chmielnik.

His forces were annihilated, and the duke fled south. His cousin Henry the Pious duke of Silesia fared no better. He had gathered even more troops and was defeated at Legnica and he himself was torn to pieces. Though the Mongols turned back either because the election of a new Khan was taking place or because they found the climate less hospitable for their specific needs, they did briefly stop to completely wipe out the populations of Kraków, Lublin, Sandomierz and other cities.

So, for these reasons the Polish and the Pomeranian dukes needed to repopulate their cities as defensive positions and as sources of cash. And that meant inviting foreigners to come and settle down. These foreigners were mostly from the Holy Roman Empire and as we said before, demanded that they should have some say in the way their new cities were administrated and managed. This meant that cities were either given the law of the city of Lübeck if they were along the coast, or the law of the city of Magdeburg if they were inland.

That resulted in a situation where places like for instance Kraków consisted in a ducal castle complex plus a Polish settlement around it, which was inhabited by Poles and subject to traditional polish laws and the ducal jurisdiction. Meanwhile an entirely new city has been founded next to it, which was largely inhabited by German immigrants who had their own laws, jurisdiction, customs and language.

In some cases, these different settlement merged into one large city with a common city council, in other cases the different administrative structures and ethnic segregation remained for centuries. When these cities – like Krakow – joined the Hanseatic League, it was usually just the German merchant settlement that did so. Which gets me to the bit of today’s show that will get me the by far largest number of complaints and social media hate mail.

And that is the story of the greatest of all these cities along the Baltic shore – Danzig as the Germans call it or Gdansk as it is called in Polish. The history of Danzig/Gdansk could easily take up a whole episode and I may still do it at a later stage.

But for today I will stick to the bare bones. Gdansk might well be the oldest of the Hanseatic cities. Archaeologists have found remains of an 8th century Slavic settlement underneath the Long Market in the centre of the city. Arab visitors in the 10th century mention it and Adalbert of Prague, the saintly friend of emperor Otto III set off for the land of the Pruzzi and his utterly predictable death from here.

In the 13th century Gdansk became the seat of a local prince, the duke of Pomerelia, another one of these Slavic rulers who got baptised and were elevated to a feudal rank of duke.

The dukes of Pomerelia were vassals of the king of Poland, and not princes of the Holy Roman Empire. The eastern border of the Holy Roman empire was the duchy of Pomerania. All lands east of there, including Pomerelia,, Gdansk and Prussia never became part of the Holy Roman empire, even though they were later parts of the kingdom of Prussia and the German Reich between 1871 and 1918, some of it until 1945. As I said, German history is complicated.

Back to the medieval dukes of Pomerelia. They supported the growth of their settlement at Gdansk and as it expanded, a new part of town was created to house more artisans and Slavic merchants. This part was called the Suburbium, or the suburb. From the end of the 12th century German merchants, in particular from Luebeck came to Gdansk and the duke gave them their own district to settle down in.

This district also grew rapidly and in 1225 duke Swietopluk of Danzig granted the German settlers city rights. These applied only to their settlement, which became known as the Rechtstadt, or the city of rights, as only this settlement had city rights, whist the old castle area and the suburb did not.

By the end of the 13th century the Rechtstadt, so just the German merchant city, not the other bits, joined the Hanseatic League. In 1294 the dukes of Pomerelia died out. The region was then fought over by the margraves of Brandenburg, some of the Polish dukes and the Teutonic knights, a war the Teutonic Knights did win.

The Teutonic Knights took over the old ducal castle. They did not like their cities to be too independent and they had their own ports and trading cities which meant they tried to suppress the Rechtstadt. At the same time, they founded another Slavic settlement, mainly for fishermen and the collectors of amber. This settlement they called the Hakelwerk.

Now we have four different cities on the territory of modern Gdansk, three Slavic ones, the castle, the suburb and the Hakelwerk and one German one, the Rechtstadt.

The Teutonic Knights’ efforts to keep the burghers of the Rechtstadt down turned out to be unsuccessful. The settlement grew and grew and immigrants arrived almost continuously from the Empire, looking for opportunities to make a fortune in this booming trading city. The Rechtstadt quickly became too small and so another city was founded, the Neustadt or Newtown. And even this was not enough, so another, a sixth city was founded, the Jungstadt, the young town.

 Meanwhile the old suburbia that used to be the place where the Slavic artisans and merchants had lived was gradually taken over by German immigrants so that this settlement too was given German city laws in 1377 and was renamed Old Town. There we are, the end of the 14th century the place we know today as Gdansk consisted of no less than six separate political entities, all with different legal and political frameworks, their own councils and town halls.

Four of those were dominated by German merchants and artisans, the Rechtstadt, Neustadt, Jungstadt and Altstadt, whilst the Hakelwerk was mainly populated by Pomeranian fishermen and the castle area by the Teutonic Knights, their administrators and servants as well as some Pomerelians.

Only in the late 15th century once Poland had taken control of Gdansk again would this agglomeration be unified under one city council. We will get back to Gdansk in a minute.

Let me just complete the round. If you go further east along the coast from Pomerelia you get to the territory of the Teutonic Knights. As you know we will do a whole series about the Teutonic knights, so we will touch upon their story only briefly here. The Teutonic Knights had been called by the duke of Mazovia, one of the six Polish dukes, to force the pagan Pruzzi into submission and acceptance of Christianity.

The Teutonic Knights did stick to that part of the brief, conquered the land of the Pruzzi in a 50-year long brutal fight that led to the near extinction of its indigenous population and converted the remaining peoples to Christianity. And they also established their own autonomous state reporting to no-one.

When they turned their mind to rebuilding the wasteland they had created, the Teutonic Knights established their own trading cities namely Thorn (Torun in Polish), Kulm (Chelmno), Elbing (elblag) and Königsberg (Kaliningrad). The Teutonic knights did pursue the same objectives in founding these cities that their princely neighbours pursued.

The difference was that they were a lot more successful. All the cities we talked about here would shake off much of the control mechanisms their founders had put in. They would acquire full control of jurisdiction, they would buy off or fight off the taxation rights of their city lords and even gain the right to pursue wrongdoers in the surrounding lands to bring them to court in their cities.

Though only very few of the Hanseatic cities became free imperial cities, Lübeck, Bremen and Cologne being the notable cases, the rest were almost as independent of their overlords even if they did not have that status. The cities in the lands of the Teutonic Knights were different. Their city law, the Kulmer Handfeste left far more rights in the hands of the knights than the Lübeck law that applied in most other cities. The control of the Grand Master was so comprehensive that many negotiating partners of the Hansa considered him to be a member of the Hanse himself.

So, I am sorry for this long and arduous run through the foundation story of the various cities along the Baltic coast. The reason I did that was not just to complete the circuit.

There is a point to that. And that point is that there is a conflict built into the Hanseatic League right from the beginning. The dukes and princes who remained nominally in charge of these cities may have been forced to accept their independence, but for how long?

As they consolidate their power and form more modern states, these independent cities start to look like anachronistic leftovers from feudal times let alone that these places that are both militarily and economically crucial to their territories. Defending city liberties against the princes will be a constant undercurrent of the history of the Hanseatic League and one of the reasons of its ultimate dissolution.

Which gets us to the next question, what did these cities trade in? How did they get a foothold in the lucrative Hanseatic Trade? We know that Lübeck used the salt from Lüneburg, Oldesloe and Halle to get going.  But these other cities along the Baltic coast, they had no salt they could leverage into access to either Novgorod or the herring trade in Scania.

In unique natural riches there was the amber found on the coast of Prussia, a luxury product the Teutonic Knights shipped across Europe. That was by the way a truly ancient trade. Pliny the elder – always a most reliable source – talks about Amber from an island he calls Abalus, a day’s sail from the land of the Teutones wherever that was.

But amber is not really a crucial ingredient for anything, nothing that can be used to force kings and merchants to let you in to play in the big league. What these cities did have though was an enormous hinterland. And in this hinterland another army of Germanic immigrants had been called in to develop its agricultural production.

We talked about 12th and 13th colonisation of the lands between Elbe and Oder many times in the last season. We are now in the second wave when colonists move beyond the Oder River, sometimes along with the expansion of the Margraviate of Brandenburg or to populate the lands of the Teutonic Knights, but also upon invitation of the Slavic dukes of Mecklenburg and Pomerania and the Polish dukes, in particular the duke of Silesia.

The men and women from the first wave who settled into Holstein, Brandenburg and Meissen had come from the overpopulated regions of the Holy Roman empire, mainly from Flanders and the Rhineland. The settlers into Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Poland had a slightly different background. They were the descendants, the second sons and daughters of first wave settlers who had come to Brandenburg or Meissen. They did not require much persuasion to replicate what their parents or grandparents had done, having seen how well it had worked. Those who headed for Prussia were again different. They came directly from Franconia and central Germany where the Teutonic Order had large possessions and many of its members originated. Their houses in Marburg and Bad Mergentheim kept recruiting settlers offering land and low taxes.

What made this second wave work even better than the first one was that it happened alongside the foundation of the new trading cities we just talked about. These new cities provided a ready market for the new agricultural production capacity.

In part the grain, meat and fruit produced in the new villages went to feed the population of the new cities, but a large chunk also went into export. Grain from eastern Europe fed the rapidly expanding cities of Flanders, the English ports and in particular that emerging behemoth of London, the cities of the Rhineland with Cologne at its head, Northern France and as far as Spain and many more.

That list tells you that even assuming the lands of Mecklenburg, Brandenburg and Pomerania were extremely fertile, which they sadly are not, there is no way they could have produced enough to cover that level of demand. Where it came from was initially the enormous estates of the Teutonic Knights.

We understand that in the year 1400 the various silos of Prussia held 800t of wheat, 1,500 tons of Barley, 6,500 tons of oats and 15,000 tons of Rye. 330 ships a year brought grain to England, 1,100 sailed to Flanders alone. The greatest of these export harbours was Gdansk or Danzig. What gave this city a huge advantage was its river, the Vistula. Again, take out an atlas and have a look.

The Vistula is the ninth longest river in Europe flowing all the way from the Carpathian Mountains via Kraków and Warsaw to Gdansk. And it has a number of tributaries, one of which is the Bug which comes down to Warsaw from Lviv in Ukraine. With this connection, Gdansk became the gateway for the agricultural wealth of Prussia, Ukraine and Poland into Northern Europe. And I guess by now we are all painfully aware of the importance of Ukrainian agriculture in feeding the world.

For the first time since the Ancient Roman empire do we hear of large scale grain transports feeding densely populated centres in western Europe. I know I keep going on about this stuff, but again, grain is a commodity meaning you carry a lot of weight for not much cash. And you do this over thousands of miles? Getting this done organisationally and economically is no mean feat and a huge nail in the coffin of the idea that people in the Middle Ages lived within just a tiny radius around their villages. Yes most did, but if you were intrepid, you could sail the world even then..

Apart from grain there was the trade in wood. The enormous forests of Prussia, Poland and Lithuania provided the materials to build the cogs of the Hanseatic League members as well as the English and French vessels that fought in the hundred years war.

Another byproduct was wood ash that could be used as an abrasive cleaner, something the Flemish weavers used in cloth production. And there were the metals found in Hungary, Poland and Bohemia coming up the Vistula and some furs and beeswax from Lithuania.

But the biggest export alongside grain was beer. Beer is not something that requires a special climate like wine or a particular water quality like whisky. Anyone can make it anywhere and they have done so for centuries. Still, the Hanseatic cities became famous across Europe for their beer. Bremen and Hamburg still carry on making beer and brand names like Becks and Holsten tell of the old tradition.

Beer accounted for an estimated 8% of the daily calories consumed in the Middle Ages. It is by the way a myth that people drank beer instead of water because they were worried about hygiene. That was at best a side issue. It is more that medieval beer was extremely calorific and relatively low in alcohol, so it was a main source of energy for people who still mainly worked in manual labour.

What also set beer apart was that brewing wasn’t regulated in the same way most other trades were. Many medieval trades were organised in guilds that limited access to the profession in the interest of quality control and financial well-being of the incumbents. That constrained production and hampered economic growth.

Making beer wasn’t seen as a profession. Originally most households made their own beer, something you can still do with a beer making kit. Not everyone can make shoes, bake or butcher.

Since there were no guilds, the way the cities tried to control the production and to maintain standards for health and safety was by restricting the number of houses that were allowed to make beer. Hamburg for instance had 500 houses where the making of beer was allowed. If someone wanted to become a brewer, he did not have to marry some brewer’s widow, schmooze the guild masters and pass an examination, what he or she needed to do was buying one of the houses where brewing was allowed. That is why you often find breweries in Germany being called “Brauhaus” meaning brewer’s house, referring to the physical location where brewing was allowed.

I will now get on to a completely weird tangent so forward 45 seconds if you do not want to hear this story. One of the largest brands of beer in Brazil is called Brahma. It was founded in 1888 by a Swiss guy called Joseph Villiger together with two Brazilians carrying typical Brazilian names like Paul Fritz and Ludwig Mack. Today the company is owned by AB Imbev, parent company of Anheuser Bush. In 2020 Brahma found itself under attack by various faith groups, in particular Hindus for the use of the name Brahma, which is after all the name of the lord of creation in Hinduism. The company responded by arguing that its beer brand was named after Joseph Bramah, an English inventor of the draft pump valve, as well as the flush toilet. That was ridiculed by many, in part because there isn’t the slightest bit of evidence, the spelling is different and also because the beer pump Joseph Bramah invented was the kind that is still in use in British pubs. And that is no use for pumping Pilsener, the kind of beer Brahma mainly produces. And had the guys at Anheuser Bush who own Brahma known a few words of the German of their forefathers, they would have come up with a smarter made-up story. They could have claimed that Brahma stands for Brauhaus Mannheim or Brauhaus Mack. Not that there is any evidence for that anywhere either, but at least it sounds plausible and relates to an urban myth circulating amongst the German diaspora in Sao Paulo in the 1980s. 

Ok, back to the Hanseatic League. Brauhaus, Brewing. So, as I said, there were no brewer’s guilds. But that does not mean there weren’t quality controls. Au contraire. The city councils would often issue detailed beer regulations and qualifications for the brew masters and their assistants. These regulations are much older than the famous Reinheitsgebot which was passed in Bavaria in 1516 and adopted into national law in 1906.

Hanseatic beer allowed for more variety but had one secret ingredient, Hops. Hops altered beer in two ways. One, it made it much easier to preserve, and second, it also gave the beer the “hoppy” taste that is still a key feature of northern German beer. So far so good. The Hanseatic beer is produced in vast quantities and can be preserved better than the moonshine people made at home, and it tastes nicely hoppy.

But why would you export it? Even today despite global brands, beer is typically consumed within a modest radius from the brewery. And in the Middle Ages transport cost were much much higher than today. Transporting beer 100km overland would increase the cost by 50-70% according to Erich Pluemer.

Now let me tell you about the great Hanseatic beer city of Einbeck. Einbeck is a smallish town in Lower Saxony halfway between Hannover and Kassel. The nearest port is Hamburg 230km away and Lübeck 290km away. So that means by the time Einbeck beer gets to an exporting harbour it is already more than twice as expensive as the local beer.

Now let me tell you that Einbecker Beer was famous across Northern Europe and was drunk as far north as Bergen and Stockholm, another 900km onwards by boat. Why would people pay 5X for the imported version of a daily staple? Something they drank more than 200 litres each per year.

Well, for the same reason one has to pay through the nose for Champagne, Wagyu beef, Apple phones and Louis Vuitton handbags. It is branding. Somehow German brewers managed to convince their customers across Europe that their beer was a luxury product well worth its exaggerated price. And Einbecker stood at the top of this brand pyramid. Martin Luther was given a barrel of Einbecker to get some Dutch courage before his trial for excommunication and another when he got married.

The demand for this Chateau Lafitte of beers kept 700 brewhouses in Einbeck busy. Einbecker Bock is still available, produced by the Einbecker Brauhaus that traces itself back to 1378. Alongside Einbeck, Hamburg, Bremen and Wismar too were celebrated for their beer. But all the Hanseatic cities were exporting beer still being able to extract a premium over the local lagers.  

Right,  we are now rapidly approaching the half hour mark. And that will now be the moment where for the third time I will have to say that, sorry, I will not get to Bergen, will not talk about the Tyske Bruggen, the Hanseatic Kontor. This is becoming a bit of a running joke now. But next week I will definitely get there – Scouts honour. And I will because now everything is in place. We have gone through all the major trading products that come out of the Baltic: Wax, Fur, Copper, grain, beer, amber, wood, ash and the big one, herring. We talked about salt and how Lübeck could leverage it into access to both Novgorod and the herring trade. Next week we will find out how the league as a whole but mostly the cities in Prussia and Pomerania leverage grain and beer into access to dried cod, haddock and hake in Bergen and privileges in the greatest of all medieval trading markets, in Bruges in Flanders. I hope you will join us again.

Before I go, let me thank all of you who are supporting the show, in particular the Patrons who have kindly signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans. It is thanks to you this show does not have to do advertising for products you do not want to hear about. If Patreon isn’t for you, another way to help the show is sharing the podcast directly or boosting its recognition on social media. If you share, comment or retweet a post from the History of the Germans it is more likely to be seen by others, hence bringing in more listeners. My most active places are Twitter @germanshistory and my Facebook page History of the Germans Podcast. As always, all the links are in the show notes.    

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

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

Philippe Dollinger: Die Hanse – definitely my go-to-book for this season

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

Rolf Hammel-Kieslow: Die Hanse

by on

The Copper Mines of Falun and the Fisheries of Skane

“on its eastern side the sea breaks through and cuts off the western side of Skaane; and this sea commonly yields each year an abundant haul to the nets of the fishers. Indeed, the whole sound is apt to be so thronged with fish that any craft which strikes on them is with difficulty got off by hard rowing, and the prize is captured no longer by tackle, but by simple use of the hands.” So writes the the late 12th century Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus about Zealand, the island he believed to be the most delightful province and heart of Denmark.

In the year 1400, 550 ships arrived in Lübeck, bringing 65,000 barrels of salted Herring to the city at the mouth of the Trave River. But that was only a fraction of the total that is estimated to have been as much as 300,000 barrels of herring a year that were caught in the narrow sound between Copenhagen and Malmo and then processed in a giant temporary market town on the Skanör peninsula. All these vast quantities of fish were needed to feed the European population who had not only acquired a good dose of piety but also as many as 140 fast days per year when the consumption of hot-blooded animals was banned.

How the trade in Baltic Herring became a monopoly of the Hanseatic league and the backbone of its trading network is what we will discuss in this episode. No worries, it is not just about salting techniques and the difficulties of shipping a load of fish over thousands of miles. There will be a battle with knights and everything…..and an extended detour into the largest copper mine in Europe that funded the 30-years war. I hope you will enjoy it.

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Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 111: Hewing and Herring

“on its eastern side the sea breaks through and cuts off the western side of Skaane; and this sea commonly yields each year an abundant haul to the nets of the fishers. Indeed, the whole sound is apt to be so thronged with fish that any craft which strikes on them is with difficulty got off by hard rowing, and the prize is captured no longer by tackle, but by simple use of the hands.” So writes the the late 12th century Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus about Zealand, the island he believed to be the most delightful province and heart of Denmark.

In the year 1400, 550 ships arrived in Lübeck, bringing 65,000 barrels of salted Herring to the city at the mouth of the Trave River. But that was only a fraction of the total that is estimated to have been as much as 300,000 barrels of herring a year that were caught in the narrow sound between Copenhagen and Malmo and then processed in a giant temporary market town on the Skanör peninsula. All these vast quantities of fish were needed to feed the European population who had not only acquired a good dose of piety but also as many as 140 fast days per year when the consumption of hot-blooded animals was banned.

How the trade in Baltic Herring became a monopoly of the Hanseatic league and the backbone of its trading network is what we will discuss in this episode. No worries, it is not just about salting techniques and the difficulties of shipping a load of fish over thousands of miles. There will be a battle with knights and everything…..and an extended detour into the largest copper mine in Europe that funded the 30-years war. I hope you will enjoy it.

But before we start let me tell you that the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Carsten H., Marilyn M-J., Brendan and Steffen D. who have already signed up.

Support the Show – Become a PAtron

And a bit of housekeeping. In episode 109 I said that the St. Olaf’s yard in Novgorod was named after the Swedish king Saint Olaf. That was not accurate. Even though the Gotlanders were nominally Swedish subjects, they worshipped king Olaf of Norway in their church in Novgorod. Sorry about that. I am not sure how that happened, but it did. Will try to do better next time.

As for the accurate parts of the podcast, we ended last week with the opening up of new trade routes to Novgorod and Smolensk via what is today Latvia and Estonia. The cities that were founded there, most prominently Riga, Reval (modern day Tallin) and Doprat (modern day Tartu) had joined together with Visby into one of the regional subgroups of the Hanse, the Thirds or Drittel in German. Theirs was called the Livonian Third.

The Livonian Third’s main trade was in the Eastern Wares, the beeswax, fur and silk road wares that came in via Novgorod and the Dnieper River. They also had one more trade we have not talked about, and that was the trade with Sweden.

When I think of Swedish exports, I think of obviously Abba, Tetra Pak, Ikea and mobile phones. But for centuries, Sweden’s biggest exports were metals, and in particular copper. When I say centuries, I mean centuries. There is archaeological evidence that some mining activity took place as far back as 850 AD at the mine at Falu Gruva, about 200km northwest of Stockholm. This enormous mine at some point provided 2/3rds of Europe’s copper supply until it was finally closed in 1992.

Copper from Falu Gruva did not only cover the roofs of the palace of Versailles but is also the base material for some of the most iconic images we have of Sweden, the red painted wooden cottages. That red paint was made from the sludge of the mine, mixed with water, rye flour, linseed oil and other ingredients to produce an excellent anti-weathering cover.

Falu Gruva was one of the most important, if not the most important economic activity in Sweden. It funded most of its wars when Sweden was a European superpower paying for Gustav Adolf’s rampage across the German lands in the 30-years war and Charles XII unintentional trip to Constantinople. As the Regency declared “This kingdom stands or falls by the Great Copper Mountain!”

So, what has all that to do with the Hanseatic League? Well, quite a lot actually. German merchants showed up in Sweden almost right from the beginning. Sometime around 1173 Henry the Lion had managed to get an agreement with the king of Sweden that protected their merchants and allowed Germans to settle in Swedish cities. That process accelerated after the former trading and royal centre in Sigtuna was destroyed by raiders from across the Baltic Sea. In 1252 the country’s regent Birger Jarl invited German merchants and artisans to come and help building Sigtuna’s replacement, the newly founded city of Stockholm. Stockholm never became entirely a city of foreign merchants like Riga or Tallin, nor did Sweden get taken over by a German speaking ruling class as Latvia and Estonia had been. But the German population had a major and sometimes dominant position inside the major cities, in particular in Stockholm. They brought their customs and ideas about city governance to their new home. The Swedish language too has been heavily influenced by the low German the Hanseatic Merchants spoke. Many terms, in particular those relating to artisan products, trading and politics have their roots in lower German. Whether the German influence on the Swedish language was indeed as significant as that of Norman French on the English language I am not entirely convinced. But if any of you is a Swedish linguist, I would love to hear what you think.

These Germans who came to Sweden were initially attracted by the opportunity to export agricultural products, in particular butter as well as furs. But when our intrepid Hanse merchants got wind of this mountain of copper out there in the wilderness, they realised that they had hit on the jackpot.

Though the mining in Falu Gruva had begun in the 9th century, it wasn’t a particularly professional operation. Most of the miners were farmers in their day job and went down to look for copper in their spare time.

The Lübeck merchants on the other hand knew about the most professional mining operation in northern Europe, the great silver mine in Goslar. They recruited mining professionals from there to come up to Falu Gruva and develop this abundantly large deposit. Like the merchants in Stockholm, the miners from Goslar brought with them their traditions and ways to organise tings. They were free men with highly sought after skills. Hence, they were given wide ranging privileges to elect their own representatives who negotiated their pay, who settled disputes within the community and set standards for the safety and operation of mines. The mine hence functioned largely autonomous, just overseen by a royal official.

As for ownership of the mine itself, that was split between Swedish nobles and the German merchants from Lübeck and Stockholm. In 1347 King Magnus visited the mine and felt a fundamental reorganisation was needed. He laid out the respective rights and privileges of mine owners and master miners, probably based on how things had been supposed to work since the 13th century. Interestingly this document keeps getting cited as the incorporation document of Stora Koppersberg Bergbelaged AB, a subsidiary of Stora Enso, one of Swedens large industrial conglomerates. If true, it  would make Stora Enso indeed the oldest joint stock company in the World. Whilst the New York Times and Al Gore are pushing the story, many historians are doubtful of that notion given that the mine owners and master miners were a long way from pooling their resources, and in the latter’s case an even longer way from lounging about and drawing dividends.

What is however not much in dispute is that until the Late Middle Ages Lübeck merchants dominated the Copper export business out of Sweden. Even the German merchants in Stockholm struggled to get a look in. we know that between 1368 and 1370 just 9 Lübeck merchants accounted for 60% of the copper exports from Sweden, a level of concentration most unusual in the Hanseatic league.

Apart from copper, iron ore was another important Swedish export, though we are still a long way from the days when Sweden was one of the largest sources of iron ore in Europe in particular for the Ruhr.

Whilst Sweden was coerced into selling its most valuable resource via Lübeck, and only via Lübeck, their neighbours in the West, the Danes too found themselves cornered by the aggressive Hanseatic merchants for their most valuable commodity, the humble herring.

Today we eat very little herring, which is a shame since this oily fish can be absolutely delicious. But it isn’t just its taste that made it the Middle Ages favourite fish. Herring have a number of great advantages. The first one is that they often move in large schools as solitary herring are getting quickly confused and lost. The name Herring might go back to the Old High German word “heri” meaning “lots” or “many”. All you need it finding a place where the school of herring passes regularly and you can catch them on an industrial scale.

And Herring are exceptionally good at reproducing. A female herring lays 30,000 eggs on average that she lets drop to the bottom of the spawning grounds after which the male herring release a cloud of milt over the same area. Who ever said romance is dead. What is particularly helpful is that different herring populations spawn at different times so that there is less seasonality with these fish. And finally the Herring tend to return back to the spawning grounds where they have been conceived going down the same route every year.

In the Middle Ages Baltic herring would spawn somewhere in the Baltic sea, we do not know exactly and then move out into the North Sea from where they would return between July and September. Now if you have been good at geography or can find an atlas, take a look at the connection between the North Sea and the Baltic. Yep, right across that entrance into the Baltic lay two massive islands, Fyn/Fuenen and Zealand. There is a way through but the navigationally challenged Herring tend to go through the straighter gap called the Oeresund which is just 4km wide at its narrowest point. And that is where every summer millions of Herring pass through, making good old Saxo Grammaticus claim that you would get your boat stuck if you tried rowing across.

Another great advantage of the humble herring is that it is very oily. That means it is easy to preserve. They can be pickled as Matjes, smoked as Kippers or simply salted.

There we are. A near inexhaustible supply of fish, caught in a geographical net laid there cunningly by Slartibartfast and ready to be salted, pickled smoked or otherwise cured for a long journey across Europe. A Europe where for 140 days a year the consumption of warm blooded animals was forbidden. And since not everyone fancies Alligator, Lizard, Puffin or, weirdly, beaver, the majority of those who could afford animal protein opted for fish.

That leaves only one question. Who will get all the money from that Bonanza. Another look on the map gives you the answer. Both shores of the Oeresund were part of Denmark for a large chunk of the Middle Ages. So surely it is the king of Denmark who will be shipping that most desirable commodity all across Christianity.

Well we know he didn’t. So why was that?

One reason was often believed to have been the Battle of Bornhoeved.  In this rather epic encounter where fighters on both side waded through blood and the king of Denmark lost an eye, the future of the Baltic region was decided for a few centuries to come.

In that battle King Valdemar II of Denmark, son of Valdemar the Victorious faced the counts of Holstein and Schwerin, the duke of Saxony, the bishop of Bremen and troops from Lübeck and Hamburg. On Valdemar’s side was Otto the child, grandson of Henry the Lion and not many others.

Before he was so crushingly humiliated Valdemar II had expelled the counts of Holstein, fought over the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen, run a crusade into Estonia and forced the dukes of Mecklenburg and Pomerania under his suzerainty. Even Lübeck had become part of his Danish empire. The young emperor Frederick II still fighting Otto IV had to accept these changed circumstances in 1220.

Valdemar’s problems began when he fell foul of one of his recently acquired vassals, the count of Schwerin over a property deal that had gone sour. Or for sleeping with the count’s wife, or both. When I talk about property here, I mean a whole county, not just a detached villa with delightful views.

The count of Schwerin responded by imprisoning the king and his son when they came over for a relaxing hunting party in 1223. Now the count of Schwerin needed allies since the friends of Waldemar, including the pope, put pressure on him to release the king.

These allies were the sworn enemies of Waldemar, count Adolf IV of Holstein who had been expelled from his lands and bishop Gebhard of Hamburg Bremen for the same reason. 2 years into the imprisonment of king Waldemar, his son in law, a member of the Wettiner clan musters the energy to come up and try to free him. But count Adolf IV and bishop Gebhard cut that short and the next family member joins Waldemar in his certainly most comfortable prison in the castle of Dannenberg. At that point Waldemar realises the game is up and starts negotiating.

Terms are tough. Return the lands of the Holsteins, Schwerins, and the bishops, release the newly acquired vassals in Mecklenburg and Pomerania from their oaths, pay 45,000 mark of silver and just generally Foxtrot Oscar.

Waldemar did sign at the dotted line and went back home to Denmark, fully intent on doing not a single thing on the long list of concessions. Instead he raised an army and got back to the job of conquering Holstein. He has some initial success and forces the Dithmarscher, these free peasants who live like the ancient Germanic tribes, back into his army. He also finds support from the house of Welf in the form of Otto the Child, who is by now no longer a child, just still called that.

His opponents have also been busy recruiting new members and can secure the duke Albrecht of Saxony, one of Albrecht the Bear’s descendants.

On July 27, 1227 it is showtime. Either side sets up in the usual order of a central contingent with the king on one side and Count Adolf IV on the other plus two wings each. Behind the Danish army were the Dithmarscher as a reserve and behind the German princes the Mecklenburger. That is about as much battle order there is. Because once the two armies have made contact it is the usual man against man fighting.

The whole process dragged on for a long time and casualties were high on both sides. There are many different versions of what ultimately decided the battle. There is the apparition of the virgin Mary displaying an unexpected fondness for kidnappers and a more credible stories that the Dithmarscher swapped sides in the midst of the battle. Or it was simply that one side was hammering harder and longer at the other one. In any event, Waldemar was injured and fled the field of battle.

The net result of this encounter was decisive. Waldemar gave up all ambition on the lands south of the Eider River, meaning the Holy Roman empire returned back to its borders that Frederick II had so carelessly sacrificed. This border will play an important role in that intractable Schleswig-Holstein question that according to Lord Palmerstone’s famous quote only three people ever really understood. I am confident you will remember that when we get there in about 3 years.

The count of Holstein regained his county and some. The Schauenburger will from here on out be major players in Danish politics. Mecklenburg and Schwerin return to being imperial princes instead of Danish vassals. Albrecht of Saxony gained Lauenburg and Ratzeburg. The Dithmarscher moved into nominal vassalage of the bishop of Bremen but basically lived as a free peasant republic until 1599. Basically instead of one dominant political power in the Baltic there were many medium sized ones, none of which strong enough to stand up to the Hanseatic League.

And many hundreds of miles north the Livonian Brothers of the Sword use the weakness of the Danes to take Tallin and fill it with German merchants.

And Lübeck, Lübeck gets extended privileges as a free imperial city making it now entirely independent of any of the neighbouring powers. And in the traditional telling the augmentation of Lübeck and the fall of the king of Denmark allowed the Hanse merchants to grab hold of the Herring trade in Scania.

But that is not quite true. Yes, a weakened Denmark is a good thing for the merchants, but as it happened King Waldemar had been a great sponsor of Lübeck and had invited them to come to Scania to trade Herring long before his defeat in 1227.

The reason the Danes allowed the Hanse in was the same reason why the Gotlander took them along to Novgorod. It was about the white gold, salt. Salt that Lübeck merchants could procure from Luneburg, from Oldesloe and from Halle an der Saale. Without salt the Herring could not be preserved or at least not in the quantities required. So the Lübecker traded salt for access to the trade in Herring.

Though the Danes had no salt, the Hanse merchants weren’t the only ones in the whole wide world who had salt. There was the Baie of Bourgneuf. Never heard of it? Me neither. But in the Middle Ages this bay on the western French coast just south of where the Loire enters the Atlantic was the largest source of salt in Europe. The bay used to be significantly larger than it is today because the vast salt fields where they evaporated the water and collected the valuable white crystals has shifted the coastline 20km westwards.

In the early 13th century mainly Dutch and English merchants collected the salt there and brought it to Denmark to salt the herring. They then took the barrels of salted herring back to England or Holland for onward distribution.

In the absence of their own salt, the Danes role in the Herring business was limited to catching the actual fish and to organise the trade.

In the Middle Ages commerce went either through major trading centres where merchants would live all year round like say Venice or Bruges. Or it would happen on fairs, where merchants from all over would get together on specific dates to exchange wares. Whether it was organised as fairs or as permanent establishments was a question of whether there was enough trading volume in the place all year around.

The most important fairs in the early Middle Ages were those of Champagne in France. These were six annual get-togethers of merchants from Flanders, Italy, Spain and Germany that took place in four cities, Troyes, Provins, Bar-sur-Aube and Lagny, each lasting about six weeks. The advantage of the fair was that it concentrated demand and supply by artificially constraining the time trading could happen. It is a bit like stock exchanges used to have limited trading hours so that everybody was compelled to bring their buy and sell orders in at the same time.

The Champagne fairs declined as the European economy grew and trade expanded. Once there was enough demand and supply to sustain trade flows throughout the year, they got bundled in one place, which for northern Europe at the time was Flanders, in particular Bruges. Later it went to Antwerp, then Amsterdam and finally London.

The fair that the Danish king set up on the small peninsula of Skanoer-Falsterbo was seasonal, less because of lack of sufficient demand but because of the seasonality of the supply. The Herring only appeared between July and September.

If you go to the Skanoer peninsula today, you are likely coming for the vast sandy beaches or to see the Falsterbo horse show. But these rather modest little towns had once been one of the most important economic centres in Europe.

The way the kings of Denmark had organised the fair was as follows. Each of the trading cities was given a specific area on the peninsula, a so-called Vitte where they could process and sell the Herring. On these enclosures the merchants would establish wooden sheds or houses in which to process the herring and store the supplies. The Vitten of Lübeck and of Danzig/Gdansk were the largest, each about 6 to 10 hectares all filled with wooden buildings.

As I said, catching the herring was largely reserved for Danish fishermen. They would land their catch and the merchants would buy it off their boats and bring it to their factory. There mostly Danish and German women would clean and then salt the fish and put them into barrels. Once that is done, the merchants may either sell his herring right there at the fair or have it shipped to their hometown. The amount of shipping that got into Skanoer was truly astounding. Lübeck alone sent 550 ships annually, some quite small, but others able to take 400 barrels of Herring down to the Trave River. In 1400 there were 900 registered Herring importers from Lübeck alone. Estimates range from 200,000 to 300,000 barrels of herring getting shipped from Skanoer when the place was at its peak. Lübeck accounted for 65,000 of them, so if we extrapolate from there, we are talking about literally thousands of ships going in and out of that place, a place that did not even have a real harbour so that all these barrels had to be rolled down to the beach, put on a dinghy or small boat and then transferred to a larger vessel.

Such a massive congregation of merchants always means that other things than Herring would be traded there as well. And since only some of the merchants came from the Baltic and others from Holland and England, each bringing different wares, the fair quickly became a major exchange for cloth, fur, beeswax, salt, spices, silk, butter, grain and anything else the medieval mind desired, not just herring. Thousands of people came to work on the Vitten to salt the herring, to bring the fish ashore, to ship goods from land to shore. There would have been entertainment put on for all these people who stayed there for a few months, plays, jugglers and musicians. Basically an enormous festival, one of Europe’s greatest and most profitable parties.

In all the revelry, there was something that irritated our Hanseatic merchants, and that was the presence of what they called the Umlandfahrer, the traders who came in from the North Sea, from Holand and England to buy the herring and sell their cloth. And these guys also had access to the resource that we have seen sits at the heart of Hanseatic influence in the Baltic, salt. The approach they took was twofold.

One was to send their own ships out to the bay of Bourgneuf and bring back that sea salt from there and on the next journey stop in England and Flanders to sell the Herring. That was even a necessity for those Hanseatic cities that did not have a ready access to the salt of Luneburg, Halle and Oldesloe like Gdansk. Thanks to increasingly aggressive tactics the Hanseatic merchants crowded the Umlandfahrer out of the Herring trade.

Finally in the late 14th century the Hanse fought multiple wars with Denmark we will discuss in more detail later. These being successful the Hanseatic League took over Skanoer for a period and formally expelled the non-Hanseatic traders, thereby creating a monopoly for Scania herring.

Did it work? No it didn’t. By the late 15th century herring export from Skanoer had dropped to 50,000 barrels.

The big trading fair was a mere shadow of its former self. No more trade in anything but herring, fewer ships, less entertainment, no major bands coming to play, just a lonely dude with greasy hair and a bontempi organ.

This decline in the Herring trade was in part a function of the expulsion of foreign traders. The Hanseatic merchants were now shipping all that beeswax, fur, cloth and so forth directly to destination without stopping in the Oresund.

All this had also coincided with a decline in the number of Herring that passed through the Oresund. We know that their number declined, but the exact reason is unclear. My money is on the most obvious, overfishing. Herring tend to go back to the places where they were born. If one takes out a lot of the Herring who go back and forth into the Baltic, their North Sea cousins and competitors will take over their feeding grounds leading to a gradual decline in the population. There may also have been an impact from the shift in the climate that sets in from the 13th century onwards.

In any event, the Baltic herring supply gradually declined in the 15th century and was replaced by North Sea herring caught by Dutch fishermen and distributed via the emerging Dutch trading centres of Amsterdam, Delft etc.

What finally did for the Herring trade was the Reformation which abolished the concept of fast days and forcible eating of fish.

But this is still a long way away. Next week will talk again about fish, this time about dried cod, halibut and hake from Norway. And we will talk about grain, about the cities founded along the coast of Mecklenburg, Pomerania and into the lands of the Teutonic knights and finally about how the Hanseatic league uses its economic muscle to make the Kontor of Bergen the monopoly in the trade of Norway’s main export. I know I promised to do that last week, but I got waylaid by the story of Swedish copper, which I think was worth it, or wasn’t it?

You should know that this project is as much a journey of discovery for me as it is for you. I do usually know roughly what I will be talking about 2 to 3 weeks ahead, but the actual research takes place in the days before the recording. And if I find something interesting, I tend to dig deeper even if that means the schedule gets a bit messed up. So let’s see what I will dig up for next week. I hope to see you then.

Before I go, let me thank all of you who are supporting the show, in particular the Patrons who have kindly signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans. It is thanks to you this show does not have to do advertising for products you do not want to hear about. If Patreon isn’t for you, another way to help the show is sharing the podcast directly or boosting its recognition on social media. If you share, comment or retweet a post from the History of the Germans it is more likely to be seen by others, hence bringing in more listeners. My most active places are Twitter @germanshistory and my Facebook page History of the Germans Podcast. As always, all the links are in the show notes.    

And last but not least the bibliography.

For this episode I again relied heavily on:

Philippe Dollinger: Die Hanse – definitely my go-to-book for this season

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

Rolf Hammel-Kieslow: Die Hanse

If you want to know more about the story of the Swedish copper mining have a look at the Falu Gruva website Falu Gruva – Upptäck tusen år av historia or go to the Unesco world heritage site about Falu Gruva and look through the application for the inclusion on the World heritage List which gives a very detailed account of the mining activities there: Mining Area of the Great Copper Mountain in Falun (unesco.org)

And finally I have to thank the Scandinavian History Podcast which helps me understanding the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian perspective on these events: https://podfollow.com/1536322900

by on

 Riga, Reval/Tallinn, Dorpat/Taru, Narva

“In the monastery of Segeberg there was a man of worthy life, and with venerable grey hair, Meinhard by name, a priest of the Order of Saint Augustine. He came to Livonia with a band of merchants simply for the sake of Christ and only to preach. For German merchants, bound together through familiarity with the Livonians, were accustomed to go to Livonia, frequently sailing up the Daugava River.”

So begins the chronicle of Henry of Livonia, a German missionary who tells about the foundation of the bishopric and city of Riga, the conversion of the pagan population of what is today Latvia and Estonia, and the cruel antics of the Livonian brotherhood of the sword.

In this episode we will touch upon the Livonian Sword brothers and we take a first glimpse at the Teutonic knights, but this is the history of the Hanseatic League and so what we really focus on are the merchants, specifically the merchants from the “Society of German merchants who frequently travel to Gotland”, the Gotlandfahrer who we have met last week. Because the tale we hear today adds the other important streak to the structure of the Hanseatic League, its willingness to use military force in the pursuit of profits.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 110 – The Livonian Cities

“In the monastery of Segeberg there was a man of worthy life, and with venerable grey hair, Meinhard by name, a priest of the Order of Saint Augustine. He came to Livonia with a band of merchants simply for the sake of Christ and only to preach. For German merchants, bound together through familiarity with the Livonians, were accustomed to go to Livonia, frequently sailing up the Daugava River.”

So begins the chronicle of Henry of Livonia, a German missionary who tells about the foundation of the bishopric and city of Riga, the conversion of the pagan population of what is today Latvia and Estonia, and the cruel antics of the Livonian brotherhood of the sword.

In this episode we will touch upon the Livonian Sword brothers and we take a first glimpse at the Teutonic knights, but this is the history of the Hanseatic League and so what we really focus on are the merchants, specifically the merchants from the “Society of German merchants who frequently travel to Gotland”, the Gotlandfahrer who we have met last week. Because the tale we hear today adds the other important streak to the structure of the Hanseatic League, its willingness to use military force in the pursuit of profits.

But before we start let me tell you that the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Spencer B., James K., Atlas M and Kate R.-S. who have already signed up.

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When we left the emerging Hanse last week, they had just established themselves on the island of Gotland, had founded the city of Visby and convinced the Gotlanders to take them to Novgorod, the great entrepôt of all the goods the wide steppes of Eastern Europe could offer. There they had established a trading compound to buy the beeswax Europe needed to bathe its churches in divine light and the furs the fine lords and ladies of the splendid medieval courts craved. And last but not least Novgorod stood at the end of that vast system of interconnected rivers that allowed the Varanghians to travel from Scandinavia to the Black Sea, and on to Constantinople. On those same rivers thick, dark fir tree honey went south, and silks and spices came up north.

Thanks to the friendship or naivety of the Gotlanders, the Lübeck merchants had wrangled themselves into this trade. They brought up cloth from Flanders and Westphalia to the shivering Northerners as well as their valuable salt needed to preserve food for the winter.

Getting to Novgorod was however a challenge. It involved sailing roughly 800km or 500 miles from Gotland to Kronstadt, the island off St. Petersburg where the wares had to be moved to another set of ships. Then they had to go 130km up the Neva River into the Ladoga sea, most of that whilst being under constant threat from raiders. In Ladoga there is another change of vessel for the last 200km trip again upriver to Novgorod.  

There had to be a quicker and simpler way. Geographically there is one – absolutely. There is the Daugava, Dvina or Düna River that flows into the Baltic a mere 400km or 193m east of Gotland. The Daugava is quite a useful river. If you track it upstream you get to Vitebsk where you have portage links to Smolensk where one can pick up the Dnjepr down to Kyiv and Karkiv and the Black Sea. Or you can go further to Tver where there is another Portage link to Novgorod.  And if that wasn’t enough, from the mouth of the Daugava/ Düna you can pick up a land route directly to Novgorod which may be long drag, but along an established route.

So, why are the Gotlanders and their Lübisch friends not going there? Well, they were. As our new fried, Henry the Livonian said at the very beginning of this podcast, the German merchants were familiar with this route as early as the 1180s.

But there was a minor problem with it. The people who lived at the mouth of the Daugava were pagans. And not any pagans, but a Baltic-Finnish peoples the Germans called Letts or Livonians in Latin. The Livs were however not the only ones living in the area. There were other groups, the Semigallians, the Selonians, the Latgalians, the Curonians and the Lithuanians who controlled large areas to the soouth.

All of these groups saw no reason to change their religion or their way of life. So when Meinhard of Segeberg, the German missionary arrived in 1184, he had an uphill struggle. He settled on the lower Daugava at a place called Uexkuell/Ikskile and surprisingly converted a few locals. But progress was slow.

In 1185 the Lithuanians attacked the Livonians and burned the village of Ikskile. Meinhard and the other inhabitants fled into the woods where the missionary came up with an idea how to accelerate the conversion process. If he were to build a modern stone fort to protect the local population, the Livonians would see the superiority of the Christian faith and gratefully join his flock. So he made a deal, if the Livonians were to convert, he would get some specialists from Gotland who would build them some brand new fortifications. Deal done, a modern fort was rising up in Ikskile. After it prove its worth in an attack from the Semigallians, the people of neighbouring village of Holm asked for the same, and again the holy bishop called upon the masons of Gotland to help.

But bribery turned out not to be a successful method to instil spiritual devotion. As soon as the last stone was laid, the ungrateful Livonians took a bath in the Daugava something they believed would wash off the stain of their baptism.

Meinhard now minus a great deal of money and reputation had to return to the piecemeal missionary approach of one soul at a time. Despite the setback, back home in Germany the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen got very excited about Meinhard’s attempts to convert the Livonians.

He elevated Meinhard to bishop of Livonia and the modest churchlet of Ikskile to the rank of Cathedral. That elevation did however do nothing much to foster Mienhard’s efforts. In fact he kept been taken to the cleaners by the Livonians. This began to irritate the holy man to the point that he made plans with the German merchants who kept coming up the Daugava to trade fur and beeswax. The merchants promised to take Meinhard back to Gotland where he was to muster an army to forcibly convert the obstinate Livonians. Meinhard, who – spoiler alert- will become Saint Meinhard followed Saint Bernhard of Clairvaux in the doctrine that cold hard steel is a surefire means to implant the Apostle’s Creed.

At the last minute the Livonians – afraid of the military confrontation- convinced Meinhard not to go, promising to get baptised again and become good Christians after all. Meinhard went back to Ikskile, only to find his recent converts splashing about in the Daugava again. That is when he sends one of his monks to go to Rome and ask pope Celestine III to sanction a crusade against these duplicitous  Livonians. Before the answer made it back to Meinhard, he died surrounded by his monks, but only very few parishioners.

The ball was now in the court of the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen. As you may remember from last series, the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen have been hankering for a role as the highest church authority in Scandinavia and the Baltic since, well since there was Christianity in Scandinavia and the Baltic. And you will also remember that at avery junction, their hopes were dashed. The pope established an archbishopric in Lund that took charge of all Danish and Swedish churches. Then the emperor Barbarossa gave his rights over the bishoprics of Oldenburg, Mecklenburg and Ratzeburg to Henry the Lion, who made them effectively his fiefs.

This Livonian opportunity really excited the archbishop who was at the time our old friend Hartwich, the last of the counts of Stade. He and his family were the perennial losers of the late 12th century. His elder brothers lost the March of Brandenburg to Albrecht the Bear, well and their lives too. His sister was murdered in her bed by men of the bishop of Hildesheim after she had previously been ousted as queen of Denmark and Hartwich himself, well, he had tried to give the county of Stade, his family inheritance to the see of Bremen, but failed when Henry the Lion effectively stole it from under his nose. Hartwich was a frustrated old man who desperately needed a success.

So he chose one of his associates, a man called Berthold to go to Livonia and make it his, or theirs. Berthold is a proactive man and since the papal patent for a crusade in Livonia had arrived, he could recruit knights, thugs and anyone able to hold a sword and in dire need of forgiveness. These men promised to go on crusade with him and that is what they did. Well that is also all that they were prepared to do. They came along with Berthold, burned, broke and baptised, but once the time of their penance was up, they got on the next available ship and sailed home. Berthold would probably have done the same had his horse not run away with him straight into the midst of a Livonian army who tore him limb from limb.

Enter stage left the third bishop of Livonia sent by Hartwich. This time Hartwich digs deep into his most precious possessions, the members of his ever-dwindling clan. Albrecht of Buxtehude is the archbishop’s nephew. And he is not the kind of man who falls for a Livonian’s ruse. When he arrives with 500 men in 23 ships, the Livonians promise to get baptised, as per standard procedure. But this time Albrecht does not leave it at that. He invites the leaders of the Livonians to a drinking party. Once they are all seated, he has the doors bolted and tells them that they will not get out until they provide suitable hostages that ensure their future good behaviour.

Albrecht is then shown a site a bit further downriver from Ikskile that he judges to be a more suitable location for his cathedral city. As it lay along a tributary called the Riga, the city he founded in 1201 is called Riga. Riga was not intended as a city for the Livonians. It was a place for Christian religious institutions and the bishop’s allies, the crusaders and the merchants. He moved the seat of the bishopric from Ikskile to Riga. He founded several monasteries that took their place inside the new settlement, and he offered it as a place for German and other merchants to live and trade.

Riga became the basis from where the new arrivals began their conquest of what is today the countries of Latvia and Estonia. The timing was pretty much ideal. Emperor Henry VI had died in 1197 in the midst of the preparations for a huge crusade. Now this crusade is not happening, but vows had been made. Many of these armed pilgrims were diverted to Livonia. The subsequent civil war between Philip of Swabia and Otto IV created many opportunities for murder, maiming and the breaking of oaths that required the cleansing powers of a crusade. That alone provided a steady flow of thugs ready to come fighting. Beyond that the merchants from Dortmund, Muenster, Soest and Lübeck, to name just a few knew that there were enormous riches to be made in the trade with the East and the key to those lay in the mouth of the Daugava. All Albert and Hartwig had to do was to go around Germany once a year and drum up support for the colony in the far north.

Riga filled up and many of those who came saw their hopes for wealth and power fulfilled. From this time onwards until 1918, the countries of Latvia and Estonia were split into two social groups, the Latvians and Estonians who spoke their languages and a German-speaking ruling class that controlled the land, the church and the government. The most successful amongst those new arrivals were members of Alberts and Hartwig’s extended family. Their brothers, cousins and brothers in law swamped the newly conquered country. The dynasties they founded, the Uexkuells, the Tisenhusen and the von der Ropp played an outsized role in the history of Latvia and Estonia. So good old Hartwig, after all his ordeals finally saw some of his ambitions fulfilled, at the expense of the inhabitants of a far-away land.

One institution that Albert created had become particularly famous, the Livonian brothers of the Sword. This was a knightly order, like the Templars, the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights, though they were specifically designated for the Nordic crusade in Livonia. Its members were not just noblemen, but they also admitted merchants.

Which finally gets us back into the story of the Hanseatic League. What role did they play in all this? A very large one indeed. The 23 ships Albert’s first warband arrived on, well they had been provided by the Society of German Merchants who frequently travel to Gotland, the Gotlandfahrer we heard about last week. And then there is the question of why the crusaders headed to the mouth of the Daugava. There is no shortage of pagans along the Baltic coast, so if the purpose of all this had been to convert them, Riga would not have been an obvious destination. The Prussians and Lithuanians were a lot closer and even more fiercely opposed to Christianity and books. The chronicler Henry of Livonia says quite explicitly that it was the merchants who had brought Meinhard of Segeberg to Livonia. All in, though other players were important, the crusade into Livonia was at least partly organised and initiated by the Gotlandfahrer who were looking for a shorter route to Novgorod and the markets of the east.

This may also be a good moment to talk about the social background of these merchants. Merchants, and what we mean here are long distance merchants, not local traders. They came from three different groups.

The first were men who had started out as Ministeriales, these unfree serfs who received a full knightly or ecclesiastical training to serve their lord as soldiers or administrators.

These were quite common amongst the merchant class in cities that had been seats of bishops or major princes. And that is not a surprise. They were often in charge of markets, tolls, taxes etc., and hence had both understanding of and access to finance. In 12th century Cologne there was a man called Gerhard Unmaze who became immensely rich as a merchant and banker financing his lord’s wars against Henry the Lion.

The other group were free landowners who had a base in the city from where they sold their produce and then gradually shifted to trading not just their own but third-party wares.

And finally there are the people who came from all walks of life, entrepreneurial artisans, the administrators of ecclesiastical or princely manors and sometimes just men or women who had a small amount of capital and turned it into a large pile by placing their bets right.

One thing they all had in common was access to capital. To trade beeswax and fur with Novgorod, wine with England or grain and fish with Norway required the funds to charter a vessel and fill it with goods to sell. It would then take months to get to the destination, sell the goods and buy others before returning and selling those wares. Only then would there be a profit. Hence in the initial phase of the Hansa, becoming a merchant required some start-up capital, something only the Ministeriales, the free landowners and some artisans and some commoners had. Later there would be financing options that opened the profession up to others who had toiled in the counting house of a merchant or trained on the ship of a successful captain.

What is interesting is that until the end of the Middle Ages these long-distance merchants once admitted to their cities guilt would not experience much social differentiation with the nobility. Their lifestyle was almost identical. Whether you fight in a king’s army or undertake arduous journeys, in both cases military prowess is a crucial part of your life. The luxuries you use and display are the same. Knights who became merchants did not take a step down in their social ranking, at least not in the 12th and 13th century.

Hence it is no surprise the Livonian brother of the Sword admit merchants into their ranks and merchants from Bremen and Lübeck were instrumental in setting up the Teutonic Knights in Akron..

The sword brothers as they are often called were never particularly numerous. Estimates are of 80 to 120, though in battle they would weigh in at about 1,000 to 1,500 with all their attendants, squires and infantry support. They were also a bit of a disgrace. They had been given the same statute as the Templars, but their background and general demeanour was a bit tougher. The first master was killed by one of the brothers with an axe and there was almost no crime these guys had not been accused of. Their military usefulness was also limited since the terrain was not really suited for heavily armoured knights. Where they excelled was in organising the crusades and building and defending forts.

If the Sword brother’s weren’t the secret weapon, what really accounted for the bishop’s success was that the local peoples were divided. All these different tribes were regularly at each other’s throats plus the Lithuanians and Russians were a constant threat. Smart diplomacy and inducements provided by the German merchants were ways to gradually wear down the opposition and taking hold of their lands.

In the 25 years following the foundation of Riga, the bishop and his allies, the merchants, the sword brothers and the crusaders subdued the various peoples who lived along the Daugava and north up into what is now Estonia. The Danish king Waldemar also showed up in the region and Albert and Valdemar agreed on a separation of zones of influence. The Russian prince of Polotsk, the nominal overlord of Livonia, was forced to accept the changed circumstances.

Nevertheless the situation for the bishop and the Swordbrothers remained fragile. The land was found to be poor and war was expensive. The brothers tried to fill this gap by first increasing levies on their serfs, then by demanding a bigger share of the spoils from the bishop and finally by attacking Danish positions in Estonia. In 1230 they tried to merge with the Teutonic Knights who were based in Prussia, a few hundred miles south on the other side of Lithuania. The Teutonic knights turned them down saying that the Sword brothers were quote “people who followed their own inclinations and did not keep their rule properly”. Basically a rough and unruly lot whose reputation was so damaged, they tried to use the good name of the Teutonic knights to get back in the saddle.

In 1236 the Sword brothers suffered a devastating defeat where their master and almost half of the brothers died. The different local peoples immediately revolted, and the colony was reduced to Riga and some of the better defended forts and towns. The Sword brothers were taken over by the Teutonic knights, the lands they had taken from the Danes in Estonia were returned and the bishop, now archbishop of Riga had to grant half of his lands to the Teutonic Knights. That done the grandmaster Hermann von Salza sent an army and by 1250 the situation had stabilised. The lands south of Riga and along the Daugava were recovered. But again peace did not hold for long. In 1259 the Samogitians rebelled and again the knights and the bishops were pushed back into their strongholds. This time it took 4o years of fighting before the land was finally subjugated.

We will talk a lot more about the Sword brothers and the wars in Livonia when we do the series on the Teutonic knights. What we are interested here are the Hanseatic merchants and their role in all this.

Their main interest lay in access to the markets along the Daugava and the land route to Novgorod. On that front they had their first success in 1212 when the ruler of Polozk is forced to allow German merchants to trade freely along the river as far as Vitebsk and Smolensk. In 1229 the prince of Smolensk grants wide ranging privileges to the German merchants upon reciprocity with the Russian merchants. There is relief from tolls and taxes, the right to adjudicate their own affairs and the right to appeal to the court of the prince over the local courts and various rules about weights and measures, priority treatment at portage and markets and the obligation to help merchants whose boats have stranded.

What is interesting about this document, apart from the fact that 13th century German merchants are opening a trading post in a city halfway between Moscow and Minsk and closer to Odessa than to Berlin, is the list of signatories. There are the prince of Smolensk, the bishop of Riga, the master of the sword brothers but also: Regenbode, Dethard and Adam, citizens of Gotland, Friedrich Dummom from Lübeck, Henry the Goth and Ilier, both from Soest, Konrad Bloedauge and Johann Kinot from Muenster, Bernek and Volkmar from Groningen, Arembrechta nd Albrecht from Dortmund, Heinrich Zeisig from Bremen and four citizens of Riga. That list illustrates how the Hanseatic League and the Gotlandfahrer had remained an organisation open to traders from across the Empire. They worked together and it seems also fought together to open and defend their markets.

The Kontor in Smolensk was however short-lived, which is unsurprising given the political instability in this territory. But once the situation stabilised under the Teutonic knights, trade thrived. Riga became one of the key members of the Hanse. Though the Teutonic knights did not allow them to adopt Lübeck law and thereby be even more closely associated with the emerging Hanseatic League, they were given Hamburg Law, which by agreement between Hamburg and Lübeck was identical.

Riga was not the only Hanseatic city in the area. The other important port was called Reval at the time and is today known as Tallin. Its story is slightly different. The crusades into Estland were led by the Danes and it was the Danes who expanded an existing Estonian settlement and trading station. The Danes left in 1227 due to a serious defeat back home and the Livonian brothers moved in. With them came 200 German merchants who quickly settled in the town. The sword-brothers did not stay beyond their defeat in 1236 and the Danes returned. But the Hanseatic merchants stayed in Tallin. They convinced the Danish king Eric Ploughpenny to grant them the city laws of Lübeck and the Tallin quickly gained a high degree of independence from the Danish crown. Tallin is even closer to Novgorod than Riga and became a key harbour for the trade with fur, beeswax, cloth and salt.

Two other places became important. One was Narva, even further along the coast and closer to Novgorord. Despite its attractive geographic position, Narva never really thrived. The citizens of Tallin did not very much like the competition and cut them off from trade flows and even from participation in the Hanseatic League.

The other important Hanseatic city in Estonia and still Estonia’s second largest city is Dorpat/Tartu. Tartu is deep inland on the road to Novgorord and had been a trading post since at least the 11th century. The sword Brothers conquered the place in 1224 and made it the seat of the bishop of Estonia. Dorpat/Tartu became a member of the Hanseatic League and a rich trading city.

As the Danish kingdom went through its darkest time in the 14th century, the Teutonic Knights bought Estonia off the Danes and held it until the 16th century.

Riga, Reval/Tallin and Dorpat/Tartu played a major role in the Hanseatic League history. The Kontor of Novgorod that was so crucial to Lübeck and Visby in the 12th and 13th century came more and more under control of these Baltic cities. Within the Hanseatic League the Livonian cities together with Visby formed one of its regional divisions, its Drittel or thirds. And that made sense. The trade with Novgorod and along the Daugava was almost entirely in their control and hence the cities involved in it formed their own special interest within the League.

Another group of cities that may have been part of this Drittel were the Swedish cities, Stockholm, Kalmar and Nykoping. Those and the role of German merchants in Sweden during the Middle Ages will be subject to the next episode, as will be the other important trade, the trade in fish. That is when we will finally get to talk about the city of Bergen and the pier that was called Tyske Bryggen for centuries and is now called just called Bryggen. I hope you will join us again.

And now, before I go and before I thank all of you who are supporting the show, in particular the Patrons who have kindly signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans, let me tell you about my latest plan.

I am like you a great fan of narrative history podcasts and I do listen to quite a few. What I noticed is that I find them often quite difficult to navigate. It is ok if you are a hardcore fan, because then you have listened to all previous episodes and just wait for the next one to drop. But sometimes I let things slack and suddenly there are 20 new episodes I have missed. Or I discover a new podcast that is now on episode 177 and I feel a bit intimidated.

So, my idea is to publish this and all future episodes of this series twice. Once here in the main feed and then – a day later- in a separate podcast, called The Hanseatic League – A podcast by the History of the Germans. So for you guys, who are committed listeners to the History of the Germans, nothing changes. You still get your episodes as normal. You will not miss anything on the other feed. And please, if you suddenly come across a separate podcast about the Hanseatic League, do not get angry when it turns out to be almost 100% the same episode you just listened to.

On the other hand, if you know someone who might be interested in the History of the Germans, and most specifically in the Hanseatic League, but may be put off by believing he needs to listen to 108 other episodes first, just send him there.

If this turns out to be successful, I may repurpose some of the back catalogue into separate Podcasts as well. Let’s just see.

I will explain all this in the show notes and on social media, specifically on Twitter @germanshistory and my Facebook page History of the Germans Podcast. Ah, and still a big thank you to all my Patrons. Your support is so important to keeping the show on the road.    

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

Philippe Dollinger: Die Hanse

Die Hanse, Lebenswirklichkeit und  Mythos, curated by Jürgen Bracker, Volker Henn and Rainer Postel

Rolf Hammel-Kieslow: Die Hanse

Eric Christiansen: The Nordic Crusades

And since we are at it, I came across a really interesting article about the trade in beeswax in the Middle Ages by Dr. Alexandra Sapoznik titled “ Bees in the medieval world: economic, environmental and cultural perspectives – King’s College London (kcl.ac.uk). A bit niche and geeky but quite fascinating.

by on

the Beginnings of the Hanseatic League

If I put the word Hanseatic into Google Search I get as result number 4 “Hanseatic King’s Lynn -Visit West Norfolk”. I can say with absolute confidence that there is not a single German individual, place or organisation that a small town in England would choose to not just associate with but incorporate itself into its history, safe for the Hanseatic League. They may play Zedoch the Priest at the coronation but that is because both Handel and Price Charles are considered English with German roots. Kings Lynn calling itself a Hanseatic city is a different thing. And it happens in many other places, Bergen is proud of its Hanseatic past as is Visby in Gotland or the Dutch former members of the League.

The love of all things Hanseatic goes so far that it even overrides the German fascination with all things car related. As you may know, the German system of numberplates is strictly hierarchical. The first 1, 2 or 3 letters indicate the place where the vehicle is registered at the time. The more letters, the smaller the town or county of registration. For instance, WES stands for Wesel and STD for Stade, two of the smaller members of the Hanseatic League. The two-letter cities are plentiful and some, like LG stands for Lüneburg and BS for Brunswick. Only the largest cities get to proudly display just one single letter – for instance K for Cologne, B for Berlin and F for Frankfurt.

But what about Germany’s second largest city, the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg? Does your honourable Hamburg merchant drive round in a car ostentatiously displaying a proud single H? No, of course he doesn’t. His numberplate is HH, standing for Hansestadt Hamburg, leaving the single H to the inland Hanoverians. Other Hanseatic cities like Bremen, Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock, Greifswald and Stralsund also proudly carry an additional H on their numberplate, a subtle reminder to everyone that their hometowns are different and dare one say, superior to other cities.

How can an organisation that had hardly any permanent institutions traded rather pedestrian commodities like grain, Hering, furs and beeswax and ceased to exist in 1669 still stir so many peoples’ hearts with pride, that is what we will try to figure out in this podcast series.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans – Season Six, the Hanseatic League is starting today with Episode 109 – The Gotlandfahrer

If I put the word Hanseatic into Google Search I get as result number 4 “Hanseatic King’s Lynn -Visit West Norfolk”. I can say with absolute confidence that there is not a single German individual, place or organisation that a small town in England would choose to not just associate with but incorporate itself into its history, safe for the Hanseatic League. They may play Zedoch the Priest at the coronation but that is because both Handel and Price Charles are considered English with German roots. Kings Lynn calling itself a Hanseatic city is a different thing. And it happens in many other places, Bergen is proud of its Hanseatic past as is Visby in Gotland or the Dutch former members of the League.

The love of all things Hanseatic goes so far that it even overrides the German fascination with all things car related. As you may know, the German system of numberplates is strictly hierarchical. The first 1, 2 or 3 letters indicate the place where the vehicle is registered at the time. The more letters, the smaller the town or county of registration. For instance, WES stands for Wesel and STD for Stade, two of the smaller members of the Hanseatic League. The two-letter cities are plentiful and some, like LG stands for Lüneburg and BS for Brunswick. Only the largest cities get to proudly display just one single letter – for instance K for Cologne, B for Berlin and F for Frankfurt.

But what about Germany’s second largest city, the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg? Does your honourable Hamburg merchant drive round in a car ostentatiously displaying a proud single H? No, of course he doesn’t. His numberplate is HH, standing for Hansestadt Hamburg, leaving the single H to the inland Hanoverians. Other Hanseatic cities like Bremen, Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock, Greifswald and Stralsund also proudly carry an additional H on their numberplate, a subtle reminder to everyone that their hometowns are different and dare one say, superior to other cities.

How can an organisation that had hardly any permanent institutions traded rather pedestrian commodities like grain, Hering, furs and beeswax and ceased to exist in 1669 still stir so many peoples’ hearts with pride, that is what we will try to figure out in this podcast series.

But before we start let me tell you that the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Cory M., Daniel R., Christopher W., and William S. who have already signed up.

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A history of the Hanseatic League normally begins with the story of the foundation, destruction and refoundation of Lübeck. This series will not do that. For once, we already had a whole episode of the Foundation of Lübeck. If you want to check it out, look for episode 105 of the History of the Germans Podcast.

But more importantly, the foundation of Lübeck, is still just the foundation of a city. Do not get me wrong, Lübeck is a stunning city and its Rathaus and the magnificent churches, including the astounding Marienkirche tell us about the wealth and the civic pride of its inhabitants. But then, Burges is an even more astounding merchant city, as are Antwerp, Amsterdam, not to speak of Florence or Venice.

What I mean is that if Lübeck, Bremen, Hamburg, Gdansk and Riga had just been successful trading cities in the Middle Ages, the city of King’s Lynn would not remind everyone of their old business relationship.

It isn’t the size and beauty of its cities that that makes the Hanseatic League special, it is the way they co-operated. And that does not begin with the foundation of Lübeck, but with something that happened shortly afterwards, in 1161.

Being a merchant in the 12th century isn’t a job for sissies. These traders aren’t spindly bespectacled men passing their days making long entries in their accounting book or piling up gold coins in the counting house.

Merchants in the 12th century are part trader, part adventurer and part pirate. At that stage most of them cannot write but are a dab hand with the sword. Their life is incredibly dangerous. If the risks associated with sailing the Baltic seas at the outer edge of the seasons isn’t going to get you, the locals may take a sudden dislike to you, robbers may steal your wares, or some greedy local ruler may decide it is time to levy some new tolls or some toes.

You may remember that when we talked about Frederick II’s law code in Sicily where he banned the carrying of weapons. Well, he banned everyone, including his nobles from going about town with swords and knifes. The only civilians exempt from the rule were the merchants, because they really needed them.

These guys were hard as nails. Only a bunch of merchants can come up with the concept of the Carroccio, the ox-driven war cart the Italian communes used as a rallying point during their battles. These machines were far too heavy and ungainly to flee the battlefield forcing the merchant citizen warriors to fight until the very bitter end whilst their knightly opponents ran away as soon as the bannerman had fallen or turned tail.

Travelling within one of the more settled political entities like say Sicily or the Contado of one of the major Italian city republics was already a challenge. But going about in what used to be the Stem duchy of Saxony where imperial power was non-existent, and the central ducal power disappeared in 1180 was a lot more challenging. Now going across the Baltic where the largest power, Denmark was caught up in almost incessant civil war, large parts of the coast were still occupied by Pagans with little sympathy for Western merchants and your target is Novgorod whose ruler is only loosely connected to the Western monarchs, that is way up the “maybe not such a good idea” scale.

Plus the distinction between honourable merchant and freebooter was rather fluid. Imagine you are a merchant and you have set out to buy cloth and currants at the great fairs of Champagne. But the winds were distinctly not in your favour or something broke on the boat. So you get there late, or you know that you will be late. All the good stuff will be gone, and if you come home empty handed, you face ruin.

What do you do? You place your ship at the mouth of the Rhine or Schelde Rivers and wait for the next colleague who comes up, board his ship, take his goods and be off. The only other alternative is, well you press on to somewhere nobody from your corner of the world had yet gone and if very lucky, bring back some fabulous new products everyone will pay top dollar for.

There were some people who were up to this task, and that were the inhabitants of Gotland. Gotland is hat large Swedish island halfway up the Baltic and according to many the original home of the Goths. Gotlanders are tough people and had been trading across the Baltic since time immemorial. By the 12th century their ships had gained almost a monopoly of the transport of wax and furs from the far north of the Baltic to Schleswig and from there to western Europe.

The Gotlanders were merchants in the style of the Vikings or more precisely, they were Vikings. That meant they spent most of the year as farmers with the seafaring activity more of a side hustle. They lived on their farms and during the season took their Viking ships called Knarres up to the great trading city of Novgorod, picked up what they needed and then returned either home or somewhere where there was a market for it.

Where a merchant would go with his wares depended on two things, firstly, whether there would be willing buyers prepared to compensate you for your troubles. And secondly whether you are likely to make it out of there with all your cash and all your limbs.

Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria who had just wrestled the site of Lübeck from the count of Holstein seems to have understood this very well. If he wanted for this new settlement to grow and produce lots of fine gold, he needed to the Gotlanders to come here. And for that he needed to create both, a source of demand for goods and a guarantee for the safety for these foreign traders.

The former was created relatively easily. South of Lübeck lay his great duchy of Saxony and beyond it the rest of the Holy Roman Empire. All that he needed was people willing to use this new route. But as he was the duke of Saxony, his power stretched all the way to Westphalia and the two great trading cities there, Soest and Dortmund. He invited merchants from there to trade in Lübeck, and if they wanted to, settle there.

Now he needs the second leg to that trade, the Gotlanders. And it seems things there had gone badly pear shaped. In 1161, just three years after the re-founding of Lübeck. At that time Henry the Lion wrote to the Gotlanders:

Quote: “In the name of the holy and undivided trinity. Henry, by divine benevolent grace, duke of the Bavarians and the Saxons. All present and future faithful of Christ should learn, in their wisdom, how out of love for peace and respect for the Christian religion, but especially out of contemplation of eternal retribution, we have resolved the discord that has long been bad between the Germans (‘Teuthonicos’) and the Gotlanders (‘Gutenses’), stirred up by the spirit of evil. We re-established the ancient unity and concord. And also how we resolved the many evils, namely the hatred, enmities, and murders that arose from the discord of the two peoples, with the helping grace of the Holy Spirit in an eternal stability of peace, and afterwards kindly accepted the Gotlanders into the grace of our reconciliation.”

Clearly things had escalated quite badly. Hatred, enmity and murders are not conducive to the establishment of a thriving trading city.

So, Henry goes and personally guarantees their safety. He writes:

“The Gotlanders should have a firm peace throughout the entire dominion of our power, so that they should obtain full justice and amendment from our judicial power whatever the loss of their property or injuries suffered within the borders of our rule, with the added benefit that they should be exempt from tolls in all our cities.”

He then lists all the various ways he would punish any of his subject should they harm any of the Gotlander.

So far so good. He now has solved the problem of getting the Gotlanders to come. But that does not yet get him what he really wants. Because since he has just freed the Gotland traders from paying taxes and tolls, he now needs his own merchants to undertake lucrative journeys to faraway lands, merchants that he can ask to line his pockets.

And so he puts in another last cause that reads rather innocuously as follows:

“And last of all, the same benefits and rights, namely this treaty, that we have decreed for our merchants, we stipulate faithfully in perpetuity also for all Gotlanders, and should maintain it inviolably, as long as they in grateful reciprocity grant the same to us, visiting us and our land more frequently and our port in Lübeck more often.”

It basically says, all this protection applies only if you grant the same level of protection to our merchants when they visit Gotland and please come often. Several historians have suggested that this passage was only added later, namely in 1225, the date of the oldest remaining copy of this document, which by the way is called the treaty of Artlenburg.

And maybe that is true. Because in 1161 Henry was in no position to demand anything from the Gotlanders. He needed them, they did not need him. They could continue trading via Schleswig. A bit slower but not really a problem.

But even if it was not written explicitly, the Gotlanders knew that if they wanted to trade through Lübeck and get their Beeswax quicker down to the great monasteries of Westphalia, it would not be helpful slaughtering German merchants arriving on Gotland and nicking their stuff.

So Gotlanders and German merchants enjoyed safety and support in each other’s ports. As time went by not only did Gotlanders come to Lübeck, merchants from the Holy Roman empire also came to Gotland. They founded something they called “The society of Germans who frequently sail to Gotland”, the Gotlandfahrer.

The purpose of this society was threefold. The first and most prevalent reason that merchants pooled together was safety. If they travelled in a convoy, pirates and even hostile states would find it more difficult to capture and rob them. It is a system that is as old as trade. Every caravan trundling along the Silk Road is based on this logic. The members of the convoy or caravan pledge each other support in case of an attack. And since the Gotlandfahrer went several times a year on the same route, the structure was more institutionalised, and the mutual assurances were likely given in the form of elaborate oaths.

These arrangements are however only useful when they can be enforced. There is no point to have a member of the society who takes flight as soon as the pirate fleet appears leaving his fellow merchants to fight the battle. And what can also not be tolerated is that a member brings the society into disrepute by cheating his negotiation partners or making himself a nuisance on Gotland. So the society had likely rules of behaviour and means to enforce them.

The treaty of Artlenburg has a side letter where Henry the Lion appoints a certain Olderich as his bailiff or representative and gives him the right to adjudicate between the members of the Guild. Olderich is likely an alderman that the merchants had themselves elected and who now possessed the right to sit in judgement over his fellow society members, even allowed to order physical punishments in the duke’s name.

As the organisation consolidates further, they become a legal entity. We know that in 1226 they had their own seal showing a lily as a symbol of royal protection.

In many aspects the society of Gotlandfarer resembles the Italian communes in the Middle Ages. In Italy too, the roads were dangerous, and the merchants were ganging up to protect themselves. As their system of mutual support became more and more institutionalised these Communes gradually took over the management of the cities where they were based in. In the end the term commune went from meaning a group of merchants to meaning the citizens of a specific town.

And that is where the Gotlandfahrer and its successor organisation differed from the Italian communes and most other societies, guilds or other merchant organisations of the Middle Ages. The Gotlandfahrer were not exclusively from Lübeck. The society was open to all merchants from the empire. Why they were so open is relatively easy to understand. The city of Lübeck was only a few years old and many of its inhabitants had come from elsewhere. Moreover, the capital needed to fund the building of ships and the purchase of goods to trade had to come from somewhere. Certainly not Lübeck which was still in ruins from the fire. It came from established trading cities like for instance Dortmund and Soest in Westphalia. In Italy the great cities like Milan, Cremona, Pavia, Venice and Genoa already had a sizeable population when long distance trading started out in earnest. Out here on the Baltic shore, everything was new and everything was in flux.

The Gotlandfahrer society did not enforce restrictions based on whether an applicant was a citizen of Lübeck. Anyone could join, after having been properly scrutinised. In fact even though the society was explicitly called a society of Germans, they did admit Gotlanders to their ranks. Seemingly the initial quarrels and murders were quickly forgotten.

German merchants settled on Gotland, in the city of Visby. For a time there were two cities with separate councils and seals, one for the Gotlanders and one for the German merchants, but they soon merged. The council of the unified city of Visby was still elected separately by each of the communities though.

The Gotlander merchants had initially lived on their farms all across the island, but now Visby became the centre. The city grew rapidly and in the middle of the 13th century acquired 11,200 feet of city walls enclosing 90 hectares. Inside were at least 18 churches, more than in any other Swedish medieval city, the biggest of which was the church of St. Mary of the Germans.

What made Visby rich was the trade with Novgorod, a city lying about 200km south of modern-day St. Petersburg. Novgorod was the entry point into the markets of this vast landmass that is today Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and beyond. The main exports from Novgorod were fur and beeswax.

Beeswax was in high demand in the west, mainly because the monks and bishop’s chapters needed it to light their churches during their nightly prayers.

Interestingly the honey that came from the same source as the beeswax was not sent westward, but south to Constantinople and then down the Silk Road. The bees had fed on the vast forests of pine, spruce and fir that covers large parts of Russia. The honey they produce is hence dark and viscous, features much valued in the Orient. The honey went along the great river systems down to Constantinople and from there east along the Silk Road as far as Baghdad and China. This export was seemingly so lucrative that Novgorod would replace its honey with imported honey from the Baltic that was usually much lighter.

It still astounds me that relative commodities like honey and beeswax could be transported over thousands of miles to their end users in the 12th century when roads were terrible or non-existent and there was constant danger from robbers and local rulers. This is the same time where journeys to the Holy Land were always preceded by the making of wills and generous donations to the church. And still many did not survive the trip. Taking such a long journey not for a guaranteed ticket to paradise but for the mark-up on a half-ton of honey, and doing it not once in life, but annually takes a particular kind of person.

The traders who took the honey down to Constantinople came back with spices, silks, and other luxuries from the east which they would then sell to the German and Gotland traders who took them westward. So, when king Henry II had his mutton generously peppered and the lovely Eleanor clad in the finest silks, that pepper and that silk was as likely to have come via Kyiv, Smolensk and Gotland as via Venice and Bruges.   

Fur was always popular, partly as a luxury but also as a day-to-day necessity in winter. The furs came down from further north as hunters travelled up to Karelia, the white sea and even the Barents Sea to hunt the most beautifully pelted quarry. The moist valuable was the sable where 100 pelts sold at 82 ducats in Venice, martens came in at 30 ducats. Beaver and ermine much cheaper at 12-14 ducats. Then it gets even cheaper with lynx at 5 ½ ducats, otters and weasels at 5 and then the different types of squirrels at usually 3 to 4 ducats. The most desirable of the squirrels was the grey arctic ground squirrel whose coat could go for up to 7 ducats. I wonder what they would have paid for the pelt of one of these grey tree rats that have overrun the UK and nearly exterminated the lovely red squirrels ever since they were introduced in the 1800s.

Novgorod’s first main import, apart from the honey, was cloth. Cloth was always in demand. The great cloth cities of Flanders: Bruges, Ghent, Ypres and so forth wove English wool into the Middle Ages’ most popular traded good. There was also linen coming up from Westphalia.  

The second equally important import was salt, needed to preserve food. Fish as well as meat caught in the summer needed to be preserved so that there was something to eat in the winter when the rivers were frozen and the fields and woods empty of fruit.

And salt may be the reason for what happens next. The Baltic Sea is not very salty. To be precise, salination is just 7 grams per litre of water compared to 35 grams in the major oceans. That makes it one of the nicest places to spend a beach holiday but one of the worst places to generate salt from evaporation. To make things worse, underground salt deposits in Europe occur mainly in a strip going from southern Poland across Northern Germany, Denmark and into the North Sea.

Crucially, there are no mineable salt deposits in the Baltic north of Denmark, specifically not on Gotland. That looks to me as the main reason the Gotlanders started to make common cause with the merchants coming in via Lübeck. The Gotlanders knew the way to Novgorod and its lovely beeswax and furs. The German merchants could provide the Salt so desperately needed up north. There were the large salt mines in Lüneburg and Oldesloe, both not far from Lübeck. So they allowed the German merchants to sail on their vessels all the way to the top of Finland. Later the Germans would fit out their own ships, mostly the more modern cogs, and sail there on their own transports. For that journey they did not create a new “Society of Germans who frequently travel to Novgorod”. The Gotlandfahrer society as a legal entity was a one-time affair. From now on what we will later call the Hanseatic League will be a much looser entity, much harder to grasp, with limited statues and institutions.

But they would still altogether travel in a convoy. And for good reason. As I mentioned before, Novgorod lies almost 200km inland.

So the merchants from Gotland, Lübeck and later from many cities along the Baltic coast would sail up in separate convoys and then congregate on the island of Kotlin or Kronstadt, just off the coast at what is today St. Petersburg. Kronstadt would later become the headquarter of the Russian Baltic Fleet. But since St. Petersburg would not be built for another 500 years, Kronstadt was just a port where goods could be moved on to lighter vessels to sail up the Neva River.

Once the fleet had gathered, they would elect two aldermen for the term of this trading expedition. One was the Alderman of the Yard, who was the overall responsible and the Alderman of St. Peter who managed transport and was in charge of security.

They then proceeded along the Neva River, the river that flows past St. Petersburg as it makes its way from the Ladoga Sea to the Baltic. Along the shore waited Karelian and Swedish raiders trying to steal their goods. Once through the Neva River the traders reached the town of Ladoga at the mouth of the Volkov River. Here again the goods had to be moved to new transports as there were impassable rapids. And to cap it all off, they travelled another 200km on the Volkov River until they finally reached Novgorod.

Novgorod was by then one of Eastern Europe’s largest cities. When the Kyivan Rus began to disintegrate in the 12th century, the princes of Novgorod became the dominant force in what is today Russia. The city itself was however almost independent, its politics led by local noblemen, Bojars, who lived in the city usually inside fortified compounds, but merchants and artisans also had a say. Population in the 14th century reached 15-20,000, very much on par with the largest cities of the Hanseatic league and not far short of Cologne with 25,000.

The Gotlanders had been trading with Novgorod for probably centuries and had acquired their own fortified compound inside the city, called the Olaf yard, after saint Olaf, king of Sweden. There they hosted their new German friends and neighbours. These trading yards were effectively small fortresses. The merchants were well aware that they were in enemy territory and that the locals could at any time come and burn down their establishment. It had strong walls, much stronger than the walls of the local aristocratic compounds and even featured a watchtower. As the trade with Novgorod grew the “Merchants of the Holy Roman Empire” established their own yard, the yard of St. Peter in Novgorod. It centred around a church which was used not just for worship but also as a storeroom for the trading goods. Each night two men, who must not be related nor working for the same merchant company were locked up inside the church to guard the goods.

The Alderman’s main job was to ensure the community stayed safe. That meant posting guards and maintaining good relationships with the city authority, which I am sure include the occasional bribe. But even more importantly he had to ensure discipline amongst his fellow merchants so as not to provoke their hosts. Misbehaviour, such as brawling with locals and chasing girls was strictly forbidden. But it also involved making sure that the merchants maintained good standards of probity. Wax was the good most prone to fraud. Sellers and traders would often mix in some other fats made from acorns, peas or resins. Neither the sellers, nor the traders were prepared to guarantee the quality of the product and complaints were widespread. The yard therefore maintained various forms of quality control mechanisms including a wax examiner to ensure goods bought and sold were meeting minimum standards.

For a long time the community of merchants bore collective responsibility for the debt of any of its members. Each merchant was also limited to buy and sell no more than the equivalent of 1,000 mark. That was a demand from the Novgorod authorities who wanted to avoid becoming dependent on one or few importers for their crucial supplies, but still have the recourse to a large capital base. Though meant as a restriction, it also worked for the foreign traders. The constraints limited the volume of imports and kept prices high, making the arduous journey to Novgorod lucrative, even for mid-sized merchants.

Another provision the authorities in Novgorod insisted upon was that no trader stays in the city all year around. That forced the merchants to break up into two groups. There were the winter merchants who came down in early autumn, just before the rivers were freezing over and stayed until the spring. Staying over the winter allowed them to acquire the best furs that were mostly hunted in the snow when the prey was easier to spot. Just as they left, the summer contingent would arrive, bringing fresh supplies of salt and cloth and buying beeswax and oriental luxuries.

Because the winter and summer merchants were completely separate, they also had separate financial arrangements. When say the Winter merchants returned in spring, they took with them their strongbox that contained the money collected for the maintenance of the St. Peter yard and the expenses such as bribes etc. This strongbox was then deposited in the church of St. Mary in Visby until the fleet would gather again in early Autumn to go to Novgorod again. The strongbox only opened when four keys were present and these keys were held by the representatives of Lübeck, obviously, but also Visby, the main settlement on Gotland, Soest near Muenster in Westphalia and Dortmund. Yes, Dortmund. Today best known as a major city in the Ruhr and a world power in Football, but Dortmund was also one of the founding members of the Hanseatic League and one of its leaders.

And here we are, back in Visby. The “Society of Germans who frequently travel to Gotland”, the Gotlandfahrer and the subsequent organisation of the St. Peter’s yard in Novgorod are the earliest forms of the Hanseatic League. And they bear many of the hallmark of the organisation that will gradually emerge.

It is first and foremost an association of long-distance traders who have got together to protect themselves against the innumerate dangers they experience on their journeys. But, other than the Italian medieval communes or the great cloth merchants of Flanders, access to their association or guild wasn’t limited to men from a particular place. It was open to all traders from the Holy Roman Empire. We have records of traders from the tiny townlet of Medebach in the Sauerland – to translate that for our US audience – that would be Muscogee/Oklahoma. These guys could travel all the way from the back and beyond in Westphalia to the arctic circle and return, all under the protective shield and using the trading privileges of the German merchants in St. Peter’s Yard Novgorod.

And we get another crucial element, the commercial discipline and branding. If you came to Novgorod on your own, assuming you made it at all, it would have been very difficult for you to sell your wares at a good price. Your clients will ask: Is that cloth you sell really the high-quality material from Bruges and not the cheap stuff from Ypres? That salt, could it be mixed with something? Where do I go when I have a complaint and you have gone home?

The members of the St. Peter’s Yard maintained or at least pretended to maintain strict discipline amongst their ranks and if one of their customers had found themselves cheated by one of these merchants, they knew where to go for redress. This created what we would today call a brand. Merchants who came with the that fleet became seen as trustworthy. They may be a touch more expensive, but you get what you were hoping to get.

Moreover, the discipline inside the Yard created a network of trust between the merchants. They had travelled together through the Neva River and up the Volkov. They had selected two amongst their number to be their aldermen and these men had proven to be unbiased, even though they may not have come from the merchant’s hometown. They saw fellow merchants who cheated or brawled being punished or even expelled, making you believe that all of those still inside the yard must be honourable.

And as you spent the long nights of the arctic winter, playing cards or chess with your fellow travellers, standing guard inside the church with a another trader, what are you going to talk about. The same stuff we talk about. Business, politics and kids. Why not get together on the next deal, maybe we can bring your son and my daughter together to see whether they like each other, maybe your boy would like to come as am apprentice to Stralsund? One of the most valuable economic commodities began to emerge – trust.

Gradually merchants began to believe that this system of justice they had created with elected aldermen who kept order was to be trusted, whilst at the same time the aldermen knew that their term was only for this journey and that biased decisions this year could backfire badly next year when someone else was alderman.

In 1468 the English King Edward IV demanded that the Hanseatic merchants declare what they are, a society, a cooperative or a corporation? And they answered that they are none of these things. They are a firm association of cities and merchants who cooperate to their mutual benefit. They did not fit any medieval roman law category, but we do know exactly what they were. They were a network, a trust-based network. They have more in common with ebay, etsi, Airbnb, Booking.com or Amazon than with European Union or NAFTA. Like on these internet platforms, the members trade goods based on trust in each other. Like we know that an AirBNB with many and consistently good reviews is going to be a decent place to stay, a medieval merchants in the Hansa would know that ordering his goods from such and such in Stralsund will result in a timely delivery in reasonable quality. The job of the network is to ensure the minimum quality standards by expelling merchants who consistently fall short and that it is an equal playing field with reliable processes for complaints and refunds. I know, the comparison is obviously not quite right because the Hanseatic League itself did not make astronomic profits from providing this network. But the fundamental components are the same – the system of mutual trust and the confidence in the process i.e., the rule of law.

That is my current theory why the Hanseatic League was so successful. Mutual trust and the rule of law are some of the strongest engines of economic growth. We will see throughout this series whether this theory holds.

And when you see modern day companies branding themselves as Hanseatische Krankenkasse, Hanseatischer Lloyd, Hanseatischer Weinkontor, Hanseatische whatever, they try to tab into this notion that a Hanseatic merchant is a man or woman one can trust. Maybe even Kings Lynn hopes to gain a little bit of that cache when they call themselves a Hanseatic city.  It is in the end, just good business.

Next week we will talk about how this good business keeps growing. We will look at how a string of cities along the Baltic coast come into being, what they trade, who lives there and why some flourish and others disappear quite quickly. And maybe we can also cover the western leg of the trade. After all, trade is all about linking two or more places, and the places where the goods from the Baltic go are the empire, England and Flanders. I hope you are going to join us again.

And now, before I go and before I thank all of you who are supporting the show, in particular the Patrons who have kindly signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans, let me tell you about my latest plan.

I am like you a great fan of narrative history podcasts and I do listen to quite a few. What I noticed is that I find them often quite difficult to navigate. It is ok if you are a hardcore fan, because then you have listened to all previous episodes and just wait for the next one to drop. But sometimes I let things slack and suddenly there are 20 new episodes I have missed. Or I discover a new podcast that is now on episode 177 and I feel a bit intimidated.

So, my idea is to publish this and all future episodes of this series twice. Once here in the main feed and then – a day later- in a separate podcast, called The Hanseatic League – A podcast by the History of the Germans. So for you guys, who are committed listeners to the History of the Germans, nothing changes. You still get your episodes as normal. You will not miss anything on the other feed. And please, if you suddenly come across a separate podcast about the Hanseatic League, do not get angry when it turns out to be almost 100% the same episode you just listened to.

On the other hand, if you know someone who might be interested in the History of the Germans, and most specifically in the Hanseatic League, but may be put off by believing he needs to listen to 107 other episodes first, just send him there.

If this turns out to be successful, I may repurpose some of the back catalogue into separate Podcasts as well. Let’s just see.

I will explain all this in the show notes and on social media, specifically on Twitter @germanshistory and my Facebook page History of the Germans Podcast. Ah, and still a big thank you to all my Patrons. Your support is so important to keeping the show on the road.    

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

Philippe Dillinger: Die Hanse neu bearbeitet von Volker Henn und Nils Joern, 6. Aufl. 2012

Die Hanse, Lebenswirklichkeit und  Mythos, hrsg. von Jürgen Bracker, Volker Henn and Rainer Postel, 4.Aufl. 2006

Rolf Hammel-Kieslow: Die Hanse, 1.Aufl., 2000

And special thanks for the translation of the Artlenburg Privileg to Dr. Jenny Benham. Henry the Lion, the Gotlanders and the Treaty of Artlenburg, 1161 – War, Peace and Diplomacy in the Middle Ages (wordpress.com)

And special thanks to Dr. Justyna Wubs-Montzewicz whose research I found eye-opening: Dr. J.J. (Justyna) Wubs-Mrozewicz – University of Amsterdam (uva.nl)