Encyclopedia
The
Hanseatic League comprised an alliance of
trading guilds that established and maintained a trade
monopoly over the
Baltic Sea and most of
Northern Europe for a time in the later
Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, between the
13th and
17th centuries.
History
Historians generally trace the origins of the League to the foundation of the Northern German town of
Lübeck, established in 1158/1159 after the capture of the area from the Count of Schauenburg and Holstein by
Henry the Lion, the Duke of Saxony.
Exploratory trading adventures,
raids and
piracy had occurred earlier throughout the Baltic — the sailors of
Gotland sailed up rivers as far away as
Novgorod, for example — but the scale of international economy in the Baltic area remained insignificant before the growth of the Hanseatic League.
German cities achieved domination of trade in the Baltic with striking speed over the next century, and Lübeck became a central node in all the sea-borne trade that linked the areas around the
North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The 15th century saw the climax of Lübeck's hegemony.
Foundation
Lübeck became a base for northern German merchants from Saxony and Westphalia to spread east and north. Well before the term
Hanse appeared in a document , merchants in a given city began to form
guilds or Hansa with the intention of trading with towns overseas, especially in the less-developed eastern Baltic area, a source of
timber, wax,
amber,
resins,
furs, even
rye and
wheat brought down on
barges from the hinterland to port markets.
Visby functioned as the leading centre in the Baltic before the Hansa. For a hundred years the Germans sailed under the Gotlandic flag to Novgorod. Sailing east, Visby merchants established a branch at Novgorod. To begin with the Germans used the Gotlandic Gutagard. With the influx of too many merchants the Gotlanders arranged their own trading stations for the German Petershof further up from the river — see a translation of the grant of privileges to merchants in 1229. They helped establish key towns on the east Baltic coast: Danzig Reval ,
Riga and Dorpat , all founded under Lübeck law, which provided that they had to appeal in all legal matters to Lübeck's city council. Before the foundation of the Hanseatic league in 1358 the word
Hanse did not occur in the Baltic. The Gotlanders used the word
varjag.
Hansa societies worked to acquire special trade privileges for their members. For example, the merchants of the
Cologne Hansa contrived to convince
Henry II of England to grant them special trading privileges and market rights which freed them from all
London tolls and allowed them to trade at fairs throughout
England. The "Queen of the Hansa", Lübeck, where traders trans-shipped goods between the North Sea and the Baltic, gained the Imperial privilege of becoming an Imperial city in 1227, the only such city east of the River
Elbe.
Lübeck, which had access to the Baltic and North Sea fishing grounds, formed an alliance in 1241 with
Hamburg, another trading city, which controlled access to salt-trade routes from Lüneburg. The allied cities gained control over most of the salt-fish trade, especially the Scania Market; and Cologne joined them in the Diet of 1260. In 1266
Henry III of England granted the Lübeck and Hamburg Hansa a charter for operations in England, and the Cologne Hansa joined them in 1282 to form the most powerful Hanseatic colony in London. Much of the drive for this co-operation came from the fragmented nature of existing territorial government, which failed to provide security for trade. Over the next 50 years the Hansa itself emerged with formal agreements for confederation and co-operation covering the west and east trade routes. The chief city and linchpin remained Lübeck; with the first general Diet of the Hansa held there in 1356, the Hanseatic League acquired an official structure and could date its official founding.
Expansion
Lübeck's location on the Baltic provided access for trade with
Scandinavia and
Russia, putting it in direct competition with the Scandinavians who had previously controlled most of the Baltic trade routes. A treaty with the Visby Hansa put an end to competition: through this treaty the Lübeck merchants also gained access to the inland
Russian port of Novgorod, where they built a trading post or
Kontor. Other such alliances formed throughout the
Holy Roman Empire. The League never became a closely-managed formal organisation. Assemblies of the Hanseatic Towns met irregularly in Lübeck for
Hansetag, from 1356 onwards, but many towns chose not to send representatives and decisions did not bind individual cities. Over time, the network of alliances grew to include a flexible roster of 70 to 170 cities .
The league succeeded in establishing additional
Kontors in
Bruges ,
Bergen ,
Copenhagen and
London . These trading posts became significant
enclaves. The London
Kontor, established in 1320, stood west of
London Bridge near Upper Thames Street. It grew significantly over time into a walled community with its own warehouses, weighhouse, church, offices and houses, reflecting the importance and scale of the activity carried on. The first reference to it as the
Steelyard occurs in 1422. In addition to the major Kontors, individual ports had a representative merchant and warehouse. In England this happened in
Boston,
Bristol, Bishop's Lynn ,
Hull,
Ipswich,
Norwich,
Yarmouth and
York.
The League primarily traded timber, furs, resin , flax, honey, wheat and rye from the east to Belgium and England with cloth going in the other direction. Metal ore and herring came southwards from Sweden.
German colonists under strict Hansa supervision built numerous Hansa cities in the Baltic: towns like Reval ,
Riga, and Dorpat , some of which still retain many Hansa buildings and bear the style of their Hanseatic days.
Livonia had its own Hanseatic parliament , and all of its major towns became members of the Hanseatic League.
Zenith
Eventually, the Hansa capital moved to Danzig , the main port for merchandise traded along the
Vistula river. Other important cities which became members of the Hansa included Thorn , Elbing , Königsberg , and Krakau .
The League had a fluid structure, but its members shared some traits. First, most of the Hanseatic League cities either started as independent cities or gained independence through the collective bargaining power of the League. Such independence remained, however, limited; it meant that the Hansa cities in Germany owed allegiance directly to the Emperor of the day, without any intermediate tie to the local nobility. Another similarity involved the cities' strategic locatations along trade routes. In fact, at the height of its power in the late 1300s, the merchants of the Hanseatic League succeeded in using their economic clout to influence Imperial policy.
The League also wielded power abroad: between 1368 and 1370, Hansa ships fought against the Danes, and forced King
Valdemar IV of Denmark to grant the League 15 percent of the profits from Danish trade and an effective trade monopoly in Scandinavia. The Hansa also waged a vigorous campaign against pirates. Between 1392 and 1440 maritime trade of the League faced danger from raids of the
Victual Brothers and their descendants, a mighty brotherhood of privateers hired in 1392 by
Albrecht of Mecklenburg against the Danish queen
Margaret I. In the Dutch-Hanseatic War the merchants of Amsterdam sought and eventually won free access to the Baltic and broke the Hansa monopoly. As an essential part of protecting their investment in trade and ships, the League trained pilots and erected lighthouses.
Exclusive trade routes often came at a high price. Most foreign cities confined the Hansa traders to certain trading areas and to their own trading posts. They could seldom, if ever, interact with the local inhabitants, except in the matter of actual negotiation. Moreover, many people, merchant and noble alike, envied the power of the League. For example, in London the local merchants exerted continuing pressure for the revocation of the privileges of the Hanseatic League. The refusal of the League to offer reciprocal arrangements to their English counterparts exacerbated this tension. King
Edward IV of England reconfirmed the league's privileges in 1474 despite this hostility — in part at least thanks to the significant financial contribution the League made to the Yorkist side during
The Wars of the Roses. A century later, in 1597,
Queen Elizabeth I expelled the League from London and the
Steelyard closed in 1598. The very existence of the League and its privileges and monopolies created economic and social tensions that often crept over into rivalry between League members.
Downfall
The economic crises of the late
14th century did not spare the Hansa. Nevertheless, its eventual rivals emerged in the form of the
territorial states, whether new or revived, and not just in the west:
Poland triumphed over the
Teutonic Knights in 1466;
Ivan III of Russia ended the entrepreneurial independence of Novgorod in 1478. New vehicles of credit imported from
Italy outpaced the Hansa economy, in which silver coin changed hands rather than bills of exchange.
The Dutch merchants of the county of Holland aggressively challenged the Hansa and met with success. The Hansa cities of Prussia, Livonia and Poland supported Holland against the main cities of the Hansa in northern Germany. After several naval wars between the
Burgundian and the Hanseatic fleets,
Amsterdam became the leading port for Polish and Baltic grain from the late 15th century onwards. The Dutch regarded grain trade of Amsterdam as the mother of all trades .
Denmark and
England tried to destroy the
Netherlands in the early 16th century, but failed.
At the start of the 16th century the League found itself in a weaker position than it had known for many years. The rising
Swedish Empire had taken control of much of the Baltic. Denmark had regained control over its own trade, the Kontor in Novgorod had closed and the Kontor in
Bruges had become effectively defunct. The individual cities which made up the League had also started to put self-interest before the common good. Finally the political authority of the German princes had started to grow — and so to constrain the independence of action which the merchants and Hanseatic Towns had enjoyed.
The League attempted to deal with some of these issues. It created the post of Syndic in 1556 and elected a permanent official with legal training who worked to protect and extend the diplomatic agreements of the member towns. In 1557 and 1579 revised agreements spelled out the duties of towns and progress occurred. The
Bruges Kontor moved to Antwerp and the Hansa attempted to pioneer new routes. However, the League proved unable to halt the progress around it and so its long decline commenced. The Antwerp Kontor closed in 1593, the London Kontor in 1598. The Bergen Kontor continued until 1754: its buildings alone of all the Kontoren survive .
The end
By the late
16th century, the League imploded and could no longer deal with its own internal struggles, the social and political changes that accompanied the
Reformation, the rise of Dutch and English merchants, and the incursion of the Ottoman Turks upon its trade routes and upon the Holy Roman Empire itself. Only nine members attended the last formal meeting in 1669 and only three remained as members until its final demise in 1862.
Despite its collapse, several cities still maintain the link to the Hanseatic League
today. Even in the 21st century, the cities of
Deventer,
Kampen,
Zutphen,
Lübeck,
Hamburg, Bremen,
Rostock,
Wismar,
Stralsund,
Greifswald and Anklam call themselves
Hanse cities. For Lübeck in particular, this anachronistic tie to a glorious past remained especially important in the second half of the
20th century. Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen continue to style themseves officially as "Free and Hanse cities". The
Nazis removed this privilege through the
Greater Hamburg Act, 1937 after the Senat of Lübeck did not permit
Adolf Hitler to speak in Lübeck during his election campaign . He held the speech in Bad Schwartau, a small village on the outskirts of Lübeck. Subsequently he always referred to Lübeck as "the small city close to Bad Schwartau".
Historic maps
Lists of former Hansa cities
In the list that follows, the role of these foreign merchant companies in the functioning of the city that was their host, in more than one sense is, as
Fernand Braudel pointed out, a telling criterion of the status of that city: "If he rules the roost in a given city or region, the foreign merchant is a sign of the [economic] inferiority of that city or region, compared with the economy of which he is the emissary or representative".
Members of the Hanseatic League
Wendish and Pomeranian Circle
Saxony, Thuringia, Brandenburg Circle
Poland, Prussia, Livonia, Sweden Circle
Rhine, Westphalia, the Netherlands Circle
...
...
...
Counting houses
Principal Kontore
Subsidiary Kontore
...
...
Other cities with a Hansa community
See also
Fictional references
- A Terran Hanseatic League exists in Kevin J. Anderson's science fiction series, Saga of Seven Suns. The political structure of this fictional interstellar version closely resembles that of the historical Hanseatic League.
- In the Perry Rhodan SF series, the trade organisation the Cosmic Hansa covers the Galaxy.
- Midgard open source content management system has often been referred to as the Hanseatic League of Open Source.
- Hanseatic League merchant caravans are used as the backdrop for,"Living History" groups in Florida and North Carolina
- has two chapters
"
Bergens Kontor" in Fort Lauderdale Fl and "
Voss Kontor" in Fayetteville NC.
Both groups Portray merchants from a
Hanseatic League Merchant Caravan originating from
kontor's and towns in
Norway.
They offer "in character
" lectures,skits and "Theatre in the round" based on the history of Hanseatic League.
For the education and entertainment of Renaissance festival patrons and local schools.
References
The German Hansa
. E. Gee Nash. The Hansa. 1929
External links
