The Hanseatic League and northern trade

The story

Merchants united against dangers

While Italian merchants traded in the Mediterranean, in northern Europe other merchants did business in the Baltic and the North Sea. They sold grain, fish, timber, furs, wax, amber, salt, beer and wool cloth. But travelling was dangerous: the seas were full of pirates, the roads full of bandits, and every lord wanted to charge tolls. A merchant on his own was in difficulty.

For this reason the German merchants of the northern towns began to join in groups, called “Hansa”, an old word meaning “company” or “group”. They helped one another, travelled in convoy, agreed prices and together asked rulers for privileges and protection. Soon it was not only the merchants who joined together, but also the towns they came from.

Lübeck, queen of the Baltic

The capital of the League was Lübeck, a town founded on the river Trave, near the Baltic. It had a perfect position: it was linked by land to Lüneburg, and so to Hamburg and the North Sea, by the “salt road”, and from its port one could sail into the Baltic towards the east. After being refounded in 1159 by the Duke of Saxony, Henry the Lion, it became the centre of trade.

Around 1300 the towns that made up the Hansa numbered dozens: Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Rostock, Gdańsk, Riga, Cologne and many others; at the time of greatest growth, in the 1300s and 1400s, there were quite a few dozen, with perhaps two hundred places connected. From about 1356 they had a regular assembly, the “Hansetag”, which met at Lübeck to take common decisions. There was no king of the League and no real army, but a pact of alliance between free towns.

Ships, warehouses and factories abroad

The typical means of transport was the cog (in German Kogge), a broad sailing ship with a single mast, a flat bottom and high sides, able to carry a heavy load with a small crew. One of these ships, built in 1380 and found in the mud of the river Weser in 1962, can be seen today in a museum at Bremerhaven, in the state of Bremen.

The League also had permanent bases in foreign towns, called “Kontore”: large walled quarters, with warehouses, houses, offices and sometimes even a church, where the German merchants lived. The main ones were in London (the Steelyard), in Bruges, in Bergen, in Norway, where you can still visit the historic district of wooden warehouses called Bryggen, and in Novgorod, in Russia. There the merchants lived by strict rules: in Bergen, for example, young apprentices could not marry and had to follow a very harsh discipline.

War, when needed

The League was not made for war, but sometimes it fought. In 1361 the King of Denmark Valdemar IV conquered the island of Gotland and plundered the town of Visby, with no regard for the merchants' privileges. The towns of the Hansa allied, defeated him and with the Peace of Stralsund of 1370 obtained great trading privileges in the Baltic. For a time the League had a political weight equal to that of the neighbouring kingdoms.

Famous too are the pirates of the northern seas, such as Klaus Störtebeker, who was captured in 1401 and executed in Hamburg. There are many legends about him, and historians still argue about them.

The decline

From the 1500s the League weakened. Dutch and English merchants became stronger, the voyages of discovery shifted trade towards the Atlantic, and national kingdoms, such as Sweden and Russia, wanted to trade on their own. The last assembly was held in 1669. Today Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck are still called “free and Hanseatic cities”, and the old town of Lübeck has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.