THE HANSEATIC TRADING EMPIRE
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mines. The German traders – also known as ‘Easterlings’ – had a reputation for sound money and may have given us the name ‘sterling’ for our modern British currency.
Given such a strong position and extensive facilities, it’s hardly surprising that many Hansa fortunes were made in England, and that Hansa merchants went on to dominate the country’s cloth export trade. Hans Holbein famously painted the portraits of Hanseatic merchants operating out of 16th-century London (see image on page 59). These men exude status, wealth and, above all, great confidence in their future as well as their illustrious past.
However, the privileges that these merchants enjoyed – including freedom from arrest and exemption from many customs duties – caused resentment. The Hanseatic League was accused of “crocodile-like behaviour”, showing only its head and teeth, while the rest of the body remained concealed beneath the water. In England, rival trading groups, such as the Merchant Adventurers, began to flex their lobbying muscles. Worse still, so did the government itself. Fears that Hanseatic dominance of shipping was threatening England’s emerging maritime prowess provoked a backlash from some of the most powerful figures in the land. In 1597 Queen Elizabeth I forced the Hansa to leave the Steelyard – albeit temporarily – and the site never regained its significance before being destroyed in the Great Fire of London.
By then, the Hansa’s fortunes were also under pressure in continental Europe. The Reformation led to disputes among its members. And there was the rise of new regional powers, such as the Swedish monarchy: a war between King Gustavus I and Lübeck in the 1530s led to the end of the Hanseatic trading monopoly in the Baltic Sea. New Dutch, Italian and southern German traders – and commercial operators like the Fugger banking family – also challenged the Hansa families’ commercial position.
Added to all that was a reorientation of European trade towards new opportunities opening up in southern Europe, Asia and across the Atlantic. And a shift in the natural world had an impact. Due to changes in sea temperature, huge shoals of herring, a staple of Hanseatic trade and diet (and once said to be so thick in places that they could be caught by hand) moved in the 15th century out of the Baltic and into the North Sea.
States fight back
But it was the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century that perhaps marked the final straw for the era of Hanseatic prosperity, as trade was disrupted by conflict, and newly emerging nation states – no longer cowed by Hanseatic power – asserted their rights ever more strongly. In 1669 the final formal gathering of the Hanseatic League took place in its pre-eminent city, Lübeck.
That might have been the end of the story.
The Prussians and Nazis attempted to exploit Hanseatic history as an example of Germanic racial expansion
But, during the Napoleonic invasions of German territory, the memory of the Hansa was revived as an ideal of robust Germanic independence. The Prussians and Nazis also attempted to exploit Hanseatic history as an example of Germanic racial expansion.
It is the purely economic achievements of the Hansa that are the focus today, as northern German towns and cities such as Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg proudly proclaim their Hanseatic roots. The name lives on too in the German airline Lufthansa and the football team Hansa Rostock. And along the eastern Baltic coast the memory is still potent. In the Estonian capital, Tallinn, the Hanseatic past is celebrated through architecture and cuisine in a way shrewdly designed to appeal to German tourists.
Champions of the European Union have tried to celebrate the Hanseatic League as a kind of prototype version of continental unification. However, historians point out that the Hansa never had the kind of political or economic integration associated with the EU. And it is striking that a group of northern EU members, collaborating today informally under the name the ‘New Hanseatic League’, support ideas of liberal and thrifty economics and freer trade rather than EU centralisation.
Meanwhile, memories of a simpler but evocative kind can be found in the remains of Hanseatic architecture, such as elegant old salt warehouses in Lübeck or formidable churches built by prosperous Hanseatic merchants in Baltic towns like Stralsund, decorated with images such as bearded Russians arriving at trading posts with mounds of furs. The squirrel trade, like so much Hanseatic activity, faded over time, due partly to overhunting. The trading network had – in that particular field – been too successful for its own good.
But it had shown the enormous potential of linking businesses, families, ports and urban centres, which others went on to exploit. And it reminds us why trade is so significant in global history. Chris Bowlby is a journalist who produces documentaries for the BBC. His BBC Radio 4 documentary on the Hanseatic League,
The Hansa Inheritance, presented by Chris Morris, is available on
BBC Sounds: bbc.co.uk/sounds