Medieval European union
Chris Bowlby explains how the Hanseatic League came to dominate a continent’s trade routes
was one of the most successful trading blocs in history – a union of towns and merchants’ guilds that dominated northern European trade in the medieval period. The League’s innovative methods included information-sharing and sophisticated payment mechanisms. And if that didn’t work? Well, it could always turn to brute force
The early 15th century was a bad time to be a Russian squirrel. As many as half a million animal skins – mainly belonging to the bushy-tailed rodent – were transported every year from Russian towns like Novgorod. They were packed into special barrels and loaded onto ships in huge consignments – as many as a hundred thousand at a time – before being ferried across the Baltic’s pirate-infested waters to German port cities. The poor animals would then be turned into fashionable garments and trims for western Europe’s increasingly affluent consumers. They were even used as an alternative currency.
It was a lucrative business for the merchants at its centre, families like the Wittenborgs of Lübeck, whose trading tentacles stretched from England to Russia. The Wittenborgs would take cloth from, say, Flanders and luxury goods from the Mediterranean, then transport them to eastern markets. In return, they would pick up furs, timber, corn, wax for candles, and fish – especially cod and herring – which they salted and sold on, or devoured themselves. “The Germans are enormous eaters,” one Venetian traveller was said to have commented – and their feasts were famously lavish.
But this money-spinning operation was not just about enterprising individuals. Lübeck, and families like the Wittenborgs, lay at the centre of an extraordinary medieval trading network. The Hansa, as that network was known, sought to dominate east-west trade in and around the Baltic from the 12th to the 17th centuries. And it largely succeeded: at the height of its power, up to 200 towns and cities were part of this extended network.
The scramble for trade
The Hansa’s ways of doing business – including innovative payments mechanisms such as offering borrowers lines of credit – seem in many ways remarkably modern. And although its influence waned from the 15th century, its memory is still cherished in northern Europe today – not only in the proudly ‘Hanseatic’ towns of Germany but as far afield as London and King’s Lynn.
The cause of the Hansa’s emergence in the mid-12th century was the rise of the Baltic as a powerful trading hub, one that provided new goods for Europe’s expanding, urbanising and ever more demanding population. Such demand created opportunities, but it also sparked tensions, as rival merchants jostled to secure a stake of these lucrative new markets.
In 1161, as rivalries grew and occasionally escalated into violence, merchants in the Gotland city of Visby decided to collaborate in a trading network designed to further and protect their interests. The great Baltic trading island of Gotland off today’s Swedish coast had built on older Viking networks to grow wealthy on trade with the east, as can be seen in Visby’s beautifully preserved medieval centre today. Others now wanted a piece of the action.
Soon the Visby merchants had been joined by trading towns and cities across Europe (see map overleaf) – from Gotland in the north to cities like Cologne and Krakow in the south, and from the Netherlands in the west to the territory of the modern Baltic States in the east (where Germanic economic influence was already strong, courtesy of the crusading campaigns of the
Teutonic knights in the 13th century, which paved the way for aristocratic Germanic settlers.)
By 1259, this network had evolved into a powerful transnational group, the
Hanseatic League.
So what explains the Hansa’s rapid growth? The answer lies, in part, in the benefits it conferred on its members. It created a network of trusted associates in far-flung parts of the European market, a network that any individual Hanseatic trader could turn to for advice and protection. Because they often lived together in trading bases, or convened at Hanseatic gatherings, members could tap into information about the availability of goods for trade – from Russian wax to Baltic grain – and their changing market value. Convoys were formed to defend shipping against piracy. The Hansa also oversaw the manufacture of new ships ideally suited to Baltic trade.
Key to the Hansa offering was quality control – whether that be in the standard of the goods being traded, the avoidance of counterfeiting, or the standardisation of weights and measures. And, by the mid-14th century, regular meetings of the Hansa were being held to regulate their affairs. Although it had a sometimes fluid membership, and no formal constitution or central government, the Hanseatic organisation did develop a set of customary practices and laws, and from 1373 a kind of court of appeal was based in Lübeck to settle disputes.
Resorting to force
For all the benefits that Hansa membership offered European traders, it’s important to remember that these benefits weren’t designed for everyone. The Hansa was not aiming to create a free trade utopia but rather to protect its privileges. Members used their collective power to try to negotiate the most favourable terms possible for trade in foreign markets – terms designed to give them an advantage over their rivals. The Hansa as a group could try to enforce its will by boycotting its enemies commercially, notably against Flanders in the 14th century. And if that didn’t work, they sometimes resorted to force.
So merchants became not only traders but sometimes soldiers. A 19th-century historian of the Hansa, Helen Zimmern, wrote that in a typical Lübeck merchant’s house “it was usual to see helmet, armour and sword hanging up above stores of codfish, bales of herrings, casks of beer, bales of cloth, or what not besides”.
And it wasn’t just rival trading blocs or Baltic pirates that felt the force of such weapons. Often, the Hansa found itself at loggerheads with governments.
There’s little doubt that the Hansa’s rise to power was facilitated by the weakness of many medieval governments, a weakness exacerbated by the desire of cities to free themselves of the
“It was usual to see helmet, armour and sword hanging up above stores of codfish, bales of herrings and casks of beer”
restrictions medieval rulers placed upon them, ranging from taxes to bans on what kinds of weapons they could carry. In fact by the mid-14th century, with its laws and courts of appeal, the Hanseatic League had itself started in some ways to resemble a government. So, when it found itself at war with the Danes in the 1360s – following the Danish sacking of the strategically vital Baltic port of Visby in 1361 – the stakes were incredibly high.
The Hansa did not take any kind of defeat lightly. When one member of that great fur-trading Wittenborg family, Johann, failed in his attempt to defeat Danish forces, he was executed in Lübeck’s market place. In the end however the Hansa prevailed, imposing the 1370 Treaty of Stralsund in which the Danes were compelled to concede Hanseatic privileges. For some historians, this marks the height of Hanseatic power.
That power gave the Hansa the scope and the ambition to develop an early version of the logistics chains so prominent in international commerce today. Warehousing was a key to this, providing secure places to store, weigh and assess goods in locations linked to transport networks.
One such warehouse can still be seen in King’s Lynn on the Norfolk coast. This is England’s best-preserved part of the Hanseatic network, an impressive beamed building constructed in the late 15th century by merchants mainly from the Hanseatic town of Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland). It was, as one historian has observed, a “little piece of Germany in England”, creating a rich trade connection between the English port and merchants from Danzig. Intermarriage between the populations of the two towns helped reinforce the relationship.
Grateful English kings
London was not a member of the Hansa but it was home to a major Hanseatic base, the ‘Steelyard’, situated on the site of what is now Cannon Street station. The Steelyard was a self-contained community and compound, including storage space for goods, a weighbridge, accommodation, a wine cellar and a garden.
Security was tight. Only Hansa merchants were permitted to enter by means of a password (“bread and cheese”), a curfew was enforced, all women excluded. Its traders enjoyed privileges given to them by grateful English monarchs in return for financial favours. Edward III pawned his crown jewels in the Hanseatic city of Cologne between 1339 and 1344 to fund the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War. In return the king granted the Hansa privileges including concessions in many of the Cornish tin