Hanseatic League

8 Key excerpts on "Hanseatic League"

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  Sovereigns of the Sea

  The Quest to Build the Perfect Renaissance Battleship

  • Angus Konstam(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Trade Paper Press

    (Publisher)

  kontors (trading posts) were established in what is now the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the Baltic states. By the time Störtebecker began his activities the Hanseatic League was at the height of its powers, an economic empire that dominated northern Europe. However, a series of clashes with the Russians, the Danes, and the Teutonic Knights affected trade, while the growing economic powerhouse of Italy began to undercut Hanseatic domination of European marketplaces.

  The pirate attacks had damaged the ability of the league to export Baltic grain through Hamburg and the Netherlands, so Burgundian (Dutch) merchants tried to establish their own Baltic trading links with eastern Europe. This led to a hard-fought war in 1438, culminating in a series of sea battles that the Dutch won. The result was a breaking of the Hansa monopoly. Although the Hanseatic League survived into the early sixteenth century, and it could still gather a reasonably impressive fleet if it needed to, it was no longer a political force to be reckoned with. Instead, cities such as Lübeck hired out their naval forces to the highest bidder—rather like the Victual Brothers before them. They still controlled some of the most important and busiest ports in the Baltic, and most of the largest ships. These could easily be converted into warships when required, while the cities themselves became regular employers of veteran German mercenaries.

  A cog on a Hanseatic seal

  Because the Hanseatic cities relied on maritime trade, their city seals almost always depicted a ship. As the ships changed, so too did the seals, which leaves us with a fantastic record of the development of Hanseatic ships throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. The vessels of the mid-fourteenth century are most definitely cogs, clinker-built, and equipped with a single large, square sail. However, a seal dated 1400 showing a ship from the Hanseatic port of Danzig demonstrates that in the Baltic, the cog had been replaced by a version of the hulk. The ship still has a single mast, but the sterncastle is most definitely part of the hull, while the ship also has a noticeable forecastle. It makes sense that the Hanseatic cities would keep abreast of the latest trends in shipbuilding design, even if they no longer led the way.

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  Trade and Civilisation

  Economic Networks and Cultural Ties, from Prehistory to the Early Modern Era

  • Kristian Kristiansen, Thomas Lindkvist, Janken Myrdal(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Hanseatic trade reached its zenith in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries with the foundation of permanent trading posts, or Kontore, at Novgorod in the east, Bergen in the north, and London and Bruges in the west.Together, they formed a dynamic commercial and cul- tural network, which stretched the length and breadth of Europe and beyond (Figure 14.1). Raw materials were exchanged from the east and finished/semi- finished products from the west, stimulating the wider long-distance market (Dollinger 1970; Hammel-Kiesow and Puhle 2009). The transportation of raw and processed material and finished goods inevitably also necessitated the movement of people. In addition to traders, wholesalers, and retailers, members of the aristocracy, administrators, crusaders, churchmen, and craftsmen – shipbuilders, altarpiece-carvers and potters – were prepared to migrate long distances, with the prospect of exploiting new markets for their products.Thus, the social and cultural networks, which devel- oped between trading partners, towns, and family members the length and breadth of the North Sea and Baltic regions, were perhaps as influential as the market forces that enabled the economic and technological dominance of the Hanseatic League (Gaimster 2005, 2007;Verhaeghe 1998). THE Hanseatic League AS AN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL PHENOMENON 391 391 Hanseatic merchants who settled in overseas ports created diaspora com- munities, forging translocational cultural practices, whereby familiar identi- ties, allegiances, and material culture heritage were transferred and embedded in the place of residence (Curtin 1984; Naum 2013). German traders settled the southern Swedish coastal port of Kalmar from the mid-twelfth century, and German speakers dominated the burgher group between the late thir- teenth and early fifteenth centuries.

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  The North-Eastern Frontiers of Medieval Europe

  The Expansion of Latin Christendom in the Baltic Lands

  • Alan V. Murray(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Initially the towns of Livonia took an active part in the formation of the Hanseatic structures and politics. Although the towns of Livonia were subordinated to the main towns in northern Germany, the interests of the Livonian towns and the Hanseatic League overlapped considerably. As a matter of fact, we can say that it was the Hanseatic League that created and constituted Livonian towns. However, from the second half of the fifteenth century, protectionist measures contradicting the general policies of the Hanseatic League were implemented. Attempts by the leading Hanseatic towns to control the commercial policies of other members of the League resulted in various confrontations and was a major cause of the rise of regionalism. Thus, along with many other factors, the decline and fall of the Hanseatic League was the result of perhaps excessively centralized Hanseatic politics which neglected the interests of the regions. If there is any lesson to be learned from Hanseatic history today, it is that the relationships defined by policies of centralization and regionalism must be kept in mind when considering the future of regional cooperation.

  Endnotes

  1 P. Spufford, Power and Profit. The Merchant in Medieval Europe (London 2002) p. 16ff.

  2 In German literature the term ‘Old Livonia’ (Alt-Livland ) is widely used; it was coined by historians to discern the medieval Livonia states from the later province that was only a part of the former area. J. Kreem, The Town and its Lord: Reval and the Teutonic Order (in the fifteenth century ) (Tallinn 2002) p. 9.

  3 P. Johansen, ‘Die Bedeutung der Hanse für Livland’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter , 65/66 ( 1940/1941) pp. 1–55 (henceforth HGBIL ). N. Angermann, ‘Die Bedeutung Livlands für die Hanse’, in: N. Angermann (ed.) Die Hanse und der deutsche Osten (Lüneburg 1990) pp. 97–115.

  4 H. Stoob, Die Hanse (Graz, Vienna, Cologne 1995) p. 76.

  5 E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades: The Baltic and Catholic Frontier 1100–1525 (London 1980) p. 69.

  6 Ibidem , p. 106. E Benninghoven, der Order der Schwertbrüder (Cologne, Graz 1965) p. I43ff.

  7 N. Jaspert, The Crusades (New York, London 2006) pp. 131–132.

  8 A. Kursis, ‘Latvijas vietvardi Zviedrijas runakmenos’, Archivs, 13 VIII (1968) pp. 79–96.

  9 E. Andersons, ‘Danijas sakari ar Baltijas zemem no IX lidz XIII gadsimtam vēstures avotu gaisma’, Latvijas PSR Zinatnu Akademijas Vestis

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  War and Peace in the Baltic, 1560-1790

  • Stewart P. Oakley(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  The duchies of Pomerania and Mecklenburg, economically poor, were socially and politically dominated by a powerful landowning nobility, which controlled the hereditary dukes through estates. Pomerania was to disappear as a political unit in the course of the next hundred years, by which time the south-east Baltic lands or ‘Livonia’ were to be carved up and shared out between their neighbours. Around 1550, however, they still consisted of a complex of competing jurisdictions, as already described (see above, p. 9).

  The Hanseatic League was in the middle of the sixteenth century still an important naval power, and also able to use its wealth to raise troops to defend its interests; it could be a useful ally and a dangerous enemy. But, while the merchant marine which its members commanded in terms of number of ships remained considerable throughout the sixteenth century, and component cities like Riga, Danzig and Lübeck were flourishing trade centres, its commercial significance had waned rapidly in face of Dutch competition, and lack of a permanent central organization weakened its political effectiveness; since the crushing defeat of its fleet by Denmark and Sweden in the socalled Count’s War in the 1530s, it was only a minor power in the Baltic, and never again was it to fight as a League.6

  There was considerable rivalry between the Livonian cities, led by Riga but including also Reval, Dorpat (Tartu) and Pernau (Pärnu), who guarded jealously their control of trade with the interior of Muscovy, and the ‘Prussian’ or ‘Wendish’ cities led by Lübeck, who were anxious to regain some share of this trade for themselves, were more strongly opposed to the growing activities of the Dutch merchants and were less inclined to take seriously the threat from Muscovy.7

  In the middle of the sixteenth century Muscovy was not yet a Baltic power of any rank. It stood, however, as a brooding presence on the borders of Sweden (in Finland), Livonia and Lithuania. Its contacts with its neighbours were not intimate, and what little was known about its system of government and its military potential aroused a mixture of fear and contempt, with which was intermixed religious bigotry; some in the west even doubted whether Russian Orthodoxy was Christian at all. Its neighbours were particularly anxious that it should not be strengthened by gaining access to western technology and weaponry, while its more ambitious rulers were equally keen to secure such advantages.8 In fact the way in which Muscovy was governed was not all that unlike that found elsewhere in eastern Europe. The Grand Prince of Muscovy (tsar only after 1546) inherited his title, but was advised by a number of high officials and a Council of noble boyars, intensely jealous of their privileges. The Council was afforced if necessary to create a form of Diet or Zemsky Sobor, containing representatives of the lesser nobility, towns and church, but its form and functions were ill defined and it never became an established institution. After a minority of fourteen years, during which the boyars had ruled unopposed, Ivan IV had to re-establish the authority of the crown and reform the administration so as to limit boyar influence; during the 1550s the powers of local governors were limited, the duties of the service nobility (dvoryanstvo) defined, government centralized through the creation of ministries (izby) with a variety of tasks and beginnings made with the creation of a standing army.9

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  The Baltic

  A History

  • Michael North, Kenneth Kronenberg(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  25 Copenhagen and Stockholm, each with between 5,000 and 6,000 inhabitants, lagged far behind. Because of their economic and demographic growth, the social struc-ture of the Hanseatic cities was generally more balanced than, say, in southern Germany. In L ü beck, Hamburg, Rostock, Wismar, Stralsund, and elsewhere, there was a considerable upper class of merchants (12–22 percent of the population) followed by an artisan-trader middle class (30–45 percent), and a lower class, which in Rostock comprised more The Hanseatic League and the Monarchies 77 than 50 percent of the population. 26 Associations played an important role in terms of social and economic cohesion and exclusion. The upper class of council families congregated in the companies of the merchants who traveled to Scania, Novgorod, and Bergen; in the exclusive Com-pass Society in L ü beck; in the Brotherhood of St. George, which met in the Artushof, in Danzig; or in the Brotherhood of Blackheads in Riga and Reval. In contrast, the guilds bound the artisans together by en-suring them livelihoods. These guilds served not only to control the quality of production, they also took care of their members and their families in emergencies. At the same time, the guilds fought against maladministration and abuses of power by the merchants and their rep-resentatives; given their cohesiveness, unjust financial policies, unfair taxes, nepotism, irregularities in the election of councilors, and costly external political entanglements, guilds carried the potential for open revolt. In some cities, the guilds even managed for a time to partici-pate in city governance—until the old council, usually with the sup-port of other Hanseatic cities, managed to wrest control again. Brick Gothic and the Founding of the Universities Scandinavian architecture began to absorb western European influ-ences as early as the twelfth century.

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  The Archaeology of Medieval Europe, Vol. 2

  Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries

  • Jan Klapste, Jan Klápste, Martin Carver(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Aarhus University Press

    (Publisher)

  The origin of this confederation of German cities can be traced back to the foundation of Lübeck in 1158. In the wake of conquest by the Teutonic Order, German merchants rapidly colonised the lands to the east during the course of the following century and founded such towns as Rostock, Stralsund, Gdansk and Riga. Hanseatic trade reached its zenith during the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries with the foundation of permanent trading posts or Kontore at Novgorod in the east, Bergen in the north, and London and Bruges in the west. Together they formed a dynamic economic and cultural network, which stretched the length and breadth of Europe and beyond (Bracker et al 1999; Caune & Ose 2009) (Box 8.2). The Hanseatic trading system which had emerged by the late thirteenth century drew the west, the east and the north of the Continent together by acting as an inter- mediary for the exchange of goods between two very different patterns of production: raw materials from the east and finished/semi-finished products from the west, and by stimulating the wider long-distance market. Despite their dispersed geographical posi- tion, a new type of ship, the cog, which developed around 1200, enabled the Hanseatic merchants to maintain economic superiority over the Continent for centuries. It was Kalmar Stockholm Åbo Oslo Copenhagen Edinburgh Paris Amsterdam NORTH SEA Berlin Stettin Wismar Rostock Danzig Elbing Riga Reval Dorpet Königsberg Thorn Stralsund Hamburg Lüneburg Osnabrück Soest Leipzig Münster Deventer Zwolle Lübeck Visby Dortmund Köln Kampen Stavoren London ENGLAND Warszawa = HANSA CITY Wien Fig 8.6 Map showing the location of the Hansa cities. 340 Medieval Archaeology This page is protected by copyright and may not be redistributed more capacious and more stable than previous models, and at around 200-300 tons, could carry two to three times the cargo (see above, p 332). As well as raw and processed material and finished goods the ships also carried people.

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  The World Encompassed

  The First European Maritime Empires c.800-1650

  • G. V. Scammell(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2

  The Hanse

  I   The German east

  The maritime supremacy of the Scandinavians in northern waters was destroyed, replaced and ultimately surpassed by the seapower of a society of a radically different order – urban, bourgeois, commercial, culturally undistinguished and almost uniquely averse to the acquisition of territory. This was the Hanseatic League,1 an association of north-German towns and cities, and one of the most remarkable manifestations of a more extensive European, and in the end German, push to the East. The Europe of the Romans had, at least in the military sense, ended on the Rhine and the Danube. But under their Germanic, and soon Christian, successors there began a long and arduous eastward expansion. In the early Middle Ages the Saxons of the wooded and swampy lands beyond the Rhine were, with difficulty, subjugated and converted by the great Frankish warrior and ruler Charlemagne (768–814). The following century they in turn assaulted their Slav and pagan neighbours beyond the Elbe with such vigour and brutality as to provoke before long a rising violent enough to throw the linquistic barrier back to where it had been in Carolingian days. Then, in the early 1100s, the whole process re-commenced and within 200 years the Germans had brought under their control eastern lands roughly equal in size to two-thirds of their original territories, the products and needs of whose inhabitants were to form, as with later colonial societies elsewhere, the basis of an impressive maritime economy.

  This astonishing achievement was but one aspect of the expansion of Christian Europe in the high Middle Ages, an expansion reflecting in part the growth of the continent’s population between c

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  Studies in English Trade in the 15th Century

  • Eileen Power, M.M. Postan, Eileen Power, M.M. Postan(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  This organization of trade explains a great deal of what is otherwise unintelligible in the history of the commercial settlements and factories abroad. Above all it accounts for the conspicuous place which the problem of foreign factories occupied in the commercial policies of the time. The English settlement in Danzig and the Hanseatic settlement in England were largely composed of agents trading on behalf of merchant firms at home. These agents were— to use an expressive middle-German term—”liggers”. They were resident factors spending most of their time in the foreign centres. Their commercial activities were vitally affected by the condition of their residence and their rights of trade; these, in their turn, depended upon the organization and the status of the factory. Viewed in this light, the English and the Hanseatic claims on behalf of their respective settlements merely embodied the conditions required for the smooth functioning of the system of resident factors. It was because of that system that the commercial policies of the fifteenth century were so much concerned with the problems of corporate organizations and communal centres for the merchants abroad.

  Of the actual organization and routine of the factories we know relatively little, though, thanks to the work of Lappenberg, Weinbaum, and Engel, we know more of the German settlements in England than we do of the English settlement in Danzig. At one time there was a whole chain of Hanseatic factories in England. The evidence of the thirteenth, and the early fifteenth, century suggests the existence of over twelve branches. In the fifteenth century, however, only four seem to have functioned—London, Lynn, Ipswich, and Boston, and these settlements were the only ones concerned in the transactions and land-transfers carried out under the treaty of 1475. In origin, and to some extent in behaviour, the provincial factories were independent of the Steelyard, but in theory the Steelyard was regarded as the headquarters of the Hanse in England, and successive measures in the fifteenth century strengthened its control over the provincial factories. The latter were dominated by merchants of the central and the eastern towns, while in London, at any rate prior to 1475, the majority of the members and the leading part in the government belonged to Cologne. In the fifteenth century the membership of the Steelyard was, for the purposes of government, divided into three parts—the western with Cologne at its head, the Westfalian-Saxon, and the Prusso-Livonian. The division was designed to prevent the domination of any separate group of towns in the government of the factory, for each part was to be represented by the same number of members in the governing court. But the method of election, by which the part under-represented among the members could have its places at the court filled by the other towns, gave Cologne much more than her constitutional share in the government of the Steelyard.104

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