Hanseatic League
The Hanseatic League (German: die Hanse) was an alliance of trading cities 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 century.
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History
The origins of the League are generally seen as the foundation of the new town of Lübeck in 1158/1159 after the capture of the area by Henry the Lion of Saxony. There had been exploratory trading adventures, raids and piracy throughout this area - the sailors of Gotland sailed up rivers as far away as Novgorod - but the scale of international economy in the area was insignificant before the Hanse. German domination of trade in the Baltic was achieved with striking speed over the next century and Lübeck became a central node in all the sea trade that linked the areas around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea.
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 (1267), 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, resins, furs, even rye and wheat brought down on barges from the hinterland to port markets. Visby on Gotland was one of the earliest Hansa and also one of the most notable. Going east they established a branch at Novgorod - see a translation of the grant of privileges to the merchants in 1229 here [1]. They helped establish key towns on the east Baltic coast - Reval (Tallinn), Riga, Danzig (Gdańsk) and Dorpat (Tartu).
These societies worked to acquire special trade privileges for their members. For example, the merchants of the Cologne (Köln) Hansa were able 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 in 1157. The Hanse creation, Lübeck, through which goods were transhipped between the North Sea and the Baltic gained the Imperial privilege of becoming an Imperial city in 1227, the only one 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 that controlled access to salt routes from Lüneburg. The allied cities were able to gain control over most of the salt fish trade and were joined by Cologne in the Diet of 1260. The Lübeck and Hamburg Hansa were chartered by Henry III in 1266 in England, and joined with the Cologne Hansa in 1282 to become the most powerful Hanseatic colony in London. Much of the drive for this cooperation was the fragmented nature of national government which was failing to provide security for trade. Over the next 50 years the Hanse itself emerged with formal agreements for confederation and cooperation 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 had an official structure and could date its official founding.
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. Competition was ended through a treaty with the Visby Hansa through which the Lübeck merchants also gained access to the Russian port of Novgorod, where they built a trading post or Kontor. Other such alliances formed throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The League was never a closely managed formal organisation. Assemblies of the Hanseatic Towns met irregularly in Lübeck for Hansetag, the first being in 1356, but many towns chose not to send representatives and decisions were not binding on individual cities. Over time, the network of alliances grew to include a flexible roster of 70 to 170 cities (Braudel 1984).
The league was able to establish additional Kontors in Bruges (Belgium), Bergen (Norway), Copenhagen (Denmark) and London (England). These trading posts were significant enclaves. The London Kontor was established in 1320 and located just west of London Bridge near Upper Thames Street. Cannon Street station occupies the site now. 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. It is first referred to as the Steelyard (der Stahlhof) in 1422. In addition to the major Kontor, individual ports had a representative merchant and warehouse. In England these were found in Boston, Bristol, Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn, the sole remaining Hanseatic warehouse in England), Hull, Ipswich, Norwich, Yarmouth and York.
The primary goods for trade were timber, furs, resin (or tar), flax, honey, wheat and rye from the east to Belgium and England with cloth and increasingly manufactured goods going in the other direction. Metal ore (principally copper and iron) and herring were sent south from Sweden.
German colonists under strict Hanse supervision built numerous Hanse towns in the Baltic like Reval (Tallinn), Riga, and Dorpat (Tartu), some of which are still filled with buildings and bear the style of their Hanseatic days. Livonia (presently Estonia and Latvia) had its own Hanseatic parliament (diet), and all of its major towns were members of the Hanseatic League.
Eventually, the Hanse capital was moved to Gdańsk (Danzig), which was the main port for merchandise brought up the Vistula river. Other important cities which were members of the Hanse were Toruń (Thorn), Elbląg (Elbing), Königsberg, and Kraków.
The League was fluid in nature, but its members shared some traits. First, most of the Hanseatic League (or Hanse) cities either were founded as independent cities or gained independence through the collective bargaining power of the League. Independence was, however, limited; it meant that the cities owed allegiance directly to the respective Emperor, without any intermediate tie to the local nobility. Another similarity was that the cities were all strategically located along trade routes. In fact, at the height of its power in the late 1300s, the merchants of the Hanseatic League were able to use their economic clout (and sometimes their military might - trade routes needed protecting, and the League's ships were well-armed) to influence Imperial policy.
The League also wielded power abroad: between 1368 and 1370, the League's ships fought against the Danes, and forced King Valdemar IV to grant the League 15 percent of the profits from Danish trade (Treaty of Stralsund) and an effective trade monopoly in Scandinavia. They also waged vigorous campaign against pirates. Between 1392 and 1440 maritime trade of the League was in danger from raids of Victual Brothers and their descendants, a mighty brotherhood of privateers hired in 1392 by Albrecht of Mecklenburg against the Danish queen Margaret I. Their monopoly was broken by the Dutch-Hanseatic War (1438-1441) where the merchants of Amsterdam sought to obtain free access to the Baltic and were ultimately successful. 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. In most foreign cities, the Hanse traders were confined to certain trading areas and to their own trading posts. They were seldom, if ever, allowed to interact with the local inhabitants, except in the matter of actual negotiation. Moreover, the power of the League was envied by many, merchant and noble alike. For example, in London there was continuing pressure from the local merchants for the Hanseatic League's privileges to be revoked. This tension was exacerbated by the refusal of the League to offer reciprocal arrangements to their English counterparts. The league's privileges were reconfirmed by King Edward IV in 1474 despite this hostility. This was at least in part thanks to the significant financial contribution the League made during The Wars of the Roses. A century later, in 1597, Queen Elizabeth I expelled the League from London and the Steelyard was 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.
The Hansa was not spared the economic crises of the late 14th century, but its eventual rivals were 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, where silver coin changed hands rather than bills of exchange.
At the start of the 16th century, the League was in a weaker position than it had known for many years. The Baltic monopoly was being actively challenged by Dutch and English merchants. The rising Swedish Empire had taken possession of much of the Baltic. Denmark had regained control over its own trade, the Kontor in Novgorod had shut and the Kontor in Brugge was effectively defunct. The individual cities which made up the League had also started to put self interest before common good. Finally the political authority of the German princes was starting to grow and so constrain the indepence of action which the merchants and Hanseatic Towns had enjoyed.
The League attempted to deal with some of these issues. The League 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 were made spelling out the duties of towns and progress was made. The Brugge Kontor was moved to Antwerp and new routes attempted. However the League was unable to halt the progress around it and so started its long decline. The Antwerp Kontor was shut in 1593, the London Kontor in 1598. The Bergen Kontor continued until 1754 and is the only Kontor still remaining (see Bryggen).
By the late 16th century, the League imploded and was unable to 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 the Empire itself. Only nine members attended the last formal meeting in 1669 and only three (Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen) remained as members until its final demise in 1862.
Despite its demise, several cities still maintain the link to the Hanseatic League. 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 was also, as the other main cities, a "Free and Hanse City" as is still, for example Bremen. This privilege was removed by the Nazis 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. He later referred to Lübeck always as "the small city close to Bad Schwartau".
Lists of former Hanse 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 in The Perspective of the World, 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." It is worthy of note that several women were Deputy Aldermen of the Hanseatic league, Roberta Pemberton was head of English trade within the league from 1340 to 1349. She was described in historical accounts as being short, readheaded and loud in speech.
Please bear with us while the cities are sorted into their appropriate categories.
Members of the Hanseatic League
Wendish and Pomeranian Circle
Saxony, Thuringia, Brandenburg Circle
- Braunschweig (Brunswick, Chief City)
- Berlin
- Bremen
- Erfurt
- Frankfurt an der Oder
- Goslar
- Magdeburg
Poland, Prussia, Livonia, Sweden Circle
- Danzig (Gdańsk, Chief City)
- Breslau (Wrocław)
- Dorpat (Tartu)
- Fellin (Viljandi)
- Elbing (Elbląg)
- Königsberg (Kaliningrad)
- Reval (Tallinn)
- Riga
- Stockholm
- Thorn (Toruń)
- Visby
- Kraków
Rhine, Westphalia, Netherlands Circle
Counting Houses
Principal Kontore
Subsidiary Kontore
- Antwerp
- Boston
- Damme
- Edinburgh
- Hull
- Ipswich
- King's Lynn
- Kaunas
- Newcastle
- Polotsk
- Pskov
- Great Yarmouth
- York
Other cities with a Hanse community
See also
References
- P. Dollinger The German Hansa (1970; repr.1999).
- Braudel, Fernand, The Perspective of the World, vol. III of Civilization and Capitalism 1984
- E. Gee Nash. The Hansa. 1929 (Reprint. 1995 Edition, Barnes and Noble)
External link
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