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Though the Hanseatic League ended formally in 1669, this medieval associations of merchants still casts a spell. Many cities along the Baltic and North Sea -Lubeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Rostock, Wismar, Riga, Tallin, bergen to name a few are proud to call themselves Hanseatic. But what was it about this organisation (if it even was one) that had no permanent institutions, not even a register of members and started out at the far fringes of the global trading system that feels still so relevant. This podcast series tries to get to the bottom of this.
This podcast is part of the broader History of the Germans podcast that aims to track the history of the German people from the Early Middle Ages to Reunification in 1991. If you enjoy this show, check out any of the other seasons or follow the main show.
So far I have the following seasons:
The Ottonians (919 AD-1024 AD)
Salian Emperors and Investiture Controversy (1024 AD-1125 AD)
Fredrick Barbarossa and Early Hohenstaufen (1125-1190)
Frederick II Stupor Mundi (1190-1268)
Saxony and Eastward Expansion
The Hanseatic League
The Teutonic Knights
The Holy Roman Empire (1250 AD -1356 AD)
The Reformation before the Reformation (1356AD -1439 AD)
The Empire in the 15th Century
The Fall and Rise of the Habsburgs (1439AD -1519 AD)
Hello and welcome to episode
one of the Hanseatic League podcast,
which is also episode 108 of
the History of the Germans podcast.
If I put the word Hanseatic
into Google search, I get as result
number four, Hanseatic King's Lynn.
Visit West Norfolk.
Now I can say with absolute
confidence that it is not a single
German individual, place or
organization that a small town in
England would chose not just
to associate with, but to incorporate
itself into its history, save
for the Hanseatic League.
The English may play Zadok the
priest at the coronation, but that
is because both Handel and
Prince Charles are considered English
with German roots.
King's Lynn calling itself a
Hanseatic city is a different thing,
and it happens in many other places.
Bergen is proud of his
Hanseatic past as his Visby and Gotland
and the Dutch former members
of the League.
The love of all things
Hanseatic goes so far that it even
overrides the German's
fascination with all things car related.
As you may know, the German
system of number plates is strictly
hierarchical, as so many other things.
The first one, two or three
letters indicate the place where
the vehicle is registered at
the time.
The more letters, the smaller
the town or county of registration.
So, for instance, WES stands
for Wesel and STD for Stade, two
of the smaller members of the
Hanseatic League.
The two letter cities are
bigger and plentiful.
LG for instance, stands for
Luneburg and BS for Brunswick.
And only the largest cities
get to proudly display just one single
letter.
For instance, K for Cologne, B
for Berlin and F for Frankfurt.
But what about Germany's
second largest city, the free and
Hanseatic city of Hamburg?
Does your honorable Hamburg
merchant drive round in a car ostentatiously
displaying a proud single H?
Well, no, of course he doesn't.
His number plate is HH
standing for Hanse Hamburg, leaving
the single H to the Inland
Hanoverians and other Hanseatic cities
like Bremen, Lubeck, Wismar,
Rostock Greifswald and Stralsund
also proudly carry an
additional H on their number plate,
a subtle reminder to everyone
that their hometowns are different
and, dare one say, superior to
other cities.
How can an organization that
had hardly any permanent institutions,
that traded rather pedestrian
commodities like grain, herring,
furs and beesmax and ceased to
exist in 1669 still stir so many
people's hearts with pride?
That is what we will try to
figure out in this podcast series.
But before we start, let me
tell you that all podcasts within
the History of the Germans
podcast network are advertising free
thanks to the generous support
from patrons, and you can become
a patron too and enjoy
exclusive bonus episodes and other
privileges on the price of a
latte per month.
All you have to do is sign up
at patreon.com historyofthegermans
or on my website
historyofthegermans.com youm find
all the links in the show
notes and thanks a lot to Corrie
M, Daniel R, Christopher W.
And William S.
Who have already signed up.
A history of the Hanseatic
League normally begins with the story
of the foundation, the
destruction and Refoundation of Lubeck.
This series will not do that.
There's already a whole
episode on the foundation of Lubeck
in the main podcast the
History of the Germans.
If you want to listen to it,
go to episode 105 over there.
Despite its rather tumultuous
origin story, the foundation of Lubeck
is still just the foundation
of a city.
Do not get me wrong, Lubeck is
a stunning city, and its rathaus
and the magnificent churches,
including the astounding Marienkirche,
tell us about the wealth and
civic pride of its inhabitants.
But then, Bruges is an even
more astounding merchant city, as
are Antwerp, Amsterdam, and,
not to speak of Florence and Venice.
What I mean is that if Lubeck,
Bremen, Hamburg, Gdansk and Riga
had just been successful
trading cities in the Middle Ages,
the city of King's Lynn would
not remind everyone of their old
business relationship.
It isn't the size and beauty
of its cities that makes the Hanseatic
League, it is the way they
cooperate it.
And that does not begin with
the foundation of Lubeck, but with
something that happened
shortly afterwards in 1161.
Being a merchant in the 12th
century isn't a job for sissies.
These traders aren't spindly,
bespectacled men passing their days
making long entries in their
accounting books or piling up gold
coins in the counting house.
Merchants in the 12th century
are part traders, part adventurers
and part pirate.
And at that stage most of them
cannot ride but are a dab hand with
a sword.
Their life is incredibly
dangerous if the risks associated
with sailing the Baltic seas
at the outer edge of the seasons
isn't going to get you.
The locals may take a sudden
dislike to you, robbers may steal
your wares, or some greedy
local ruler may decide it's time
to levy some new tolls or some tows.
When the Emperor Frederick II
wanted to curb violence, he banned
everyone, including his
nobles, from going about town with
swords and knives.
The only civilians exempt from
the rule were the merchants, because
they really need the weapons
and these guys were hard as nails.
Only a bunch of merchants can
come up with the concept of the carroccio,
the ox driven war cart the
Italian communes used as a rallying
point during their battles.
These machines were far too
heavy and too ungainly to flee the
battlefield, forcing the
merchant citizen warriors to fight
until the very bitter end,
whilst their knightly opponents ran
away as soon as the bannermen
had fallen or turned tail.
Travelling within one of the
more settled political entities,
like say, Sicily or the
Contado of one of the major Italian
city republics, was already a challenge.
But going about in what used
to be the stem Duchy of Saxony, where
imperial power was non
existent and the central ducal power
disappeared in 1180, was
already a lot more challenging.
Now going across the Baltic,
where the largest power, Denmark,
was caught up in an almost
incessant civil war, where large
parts of the coast were still
occupied by pagans with little sympathy
for western merchants, and
where your target is Novgorod, whose
ruler is only loosely
connected to the western monarchs,
that is way up the maybe not
such a good idea scale.
Plus the distinction between
honorable merchant and freebooter
was rather fluid.
Imagine you're a merchant and
you have set out to buy cloth and
currants at the great fairs of
champagne, but the winds were distinctly
not in your favor, or
something broke on your boat.
I can tell you stories about that.
So you get there late, or you
know that you will be late, all the
good stuff will be gone.
And if you come home empty
handed, you face ruin.
So what do you do?
You place your ship at the
mouth of the Rhine or the Schelde
rivers and wait for the next
colleague who comes up, board his
ship, take his goods and be off.
The only other alternative is,
well, you press onto somewhere.
Nobody from your corner of the
world had yet gone, and if very lucky,
you come back yourself and you
bring back some fabulous new products
everyone will pay top dollar for.
There were some people who
were up to this task, and that were
the inhabitants of Gotland.
Gotland is that large Swedish
island halfway up the Baltic, and
according to many, the
original home of the Goths.
Gotlanders were a tough people
and had been trading across the Baltic
since time immemorial.
By the 12th century, their
ships had gained almost a monopoly
on the transport of wax and
furs from the far north of the Baltic
to Schleswig and from there to
Western Europe.
The Gotlanders were merchants
in the style of the Vikings, or more
precisely, there were Vikings.
That meant they spent Most of
the year, as farmers, with the seafaring
activity more of a side
hustle, they lived on their farms
and during the season took
their Viking ships, called knaris,
up to the great trading city
of Novgorod, picked up what they
needed, and then returned
either home or somewhere where there
was a market for it.
Now, where a merchant would go
with his wares depended on two things.
Firstly, whether there would
be willing buyers prepared to compensate
you for your troubles, and
secondly, whether you are likely
to make it out of there with
all your cash and all your limbs.
Henry, the line Duke of Saxony
and Bavaria, who had just wrestled
the side of Lubeck from the
Counts of Holstein, seems to have
understood this very well.
If he wanted this new
settlement to grow and produce lots
of fine gold for him, he
needed for the Goatlanders to come
there, and for that he needed
to create both a source of demand
for goods and a guarantee for
the safety of these foreign traders.
The former was created
relatively easily.
South of Lubeck lay his great
Duchy of Saxony and beyond it, the
rest of the Holy Roman Empire.
All that he needed was people
willing to use this new route.
But as he was the Duke of
Saxony, his power stretched all the
way to Westphalia and the two
great trading cities there, Zoest
and Dortmund.
He invited merchants from
there to trade in Lubeck, and if
they wanted to settle there,
now he needs the second leg to that
trade, the Gotlanders.
And it seems things there had
gone badly pear shaped.
In 1161, just three years
after re founding of Lubeck, Henry,
the line wrote to the in the
name of the holy and undivided Trinity,
Henry, by divine benevolent
grace, duke of the Bavarians and
Saxons, all present and future
faithful of Christ, should learn
in their wisdom how, out of
love for peace and respect for the
Christian religion, but
especially out of contemplation of
eternal retribution, we have
resolved the discord that has long
been bad between the Germans
and the stirred up by the spirit
of evil.
We reestablished the ancient
unity in concord and also how we
resolved the many evils,
namely the hatred, enmity and murders
that arose from the discord of
the two peoples, with the helping
grace of the Holy Spirit in an
eternal stability of peace, and afterwards
kindly accepted the
Goatlanders into the grace of our
reconciliation.
Clearly things had gone very badly.
Hatred, enmity and murder are
not the kind of things you want to
experience in a trading city.
And so Henry goes and
personally guarantees their safety.
He writes, the Goatlanders
should have a firm peace throughout
the entire dominion of our
power, so that they should obtain
full justice and amendment
from our judicial power, whatever
the loss of their property or
injuries suffered within the borders
of our rule, with the added
benefit that they should be exempt
from tolls in all our cities.
He then lists all the various
ways he is going to punish any of
his subjects should they harm
any of the Goatlanders.
So far, so good.
He's now solved the problem of
getting the Goatlanders to come.
But that does not yet get him
what he really, really wants.
Because since he's just freed
the Goatlanders traders from paying
taxes and tolls, he now needs
his own merchants to undertake lucrative
journeys to faraway lands.
Merchants that he can ask to
line his pockets.
And so he puts in another last
clause that reads rather innocuously
as follows, and last of the
same benefits and rights, namely
this treaty that we have
decreed for our merchants, we stipulate
faithfully in perpetuity also
for all Goatlanders, and should maintain
it inviolably as long as they
in grateful reciprocity grant the
same to us, visiting us and
our land more frequently in our port
in Lubeck more often.
End quote.
So it basically says all this
protection applies only if you grant
the same level of protection
to our merchants when they visit
Gotland.
And a Please come often.
Several historians have
suggested that this passage was only
added later, namely in 1225,
the date of the oldest remaining
copy of this document, which
by the way, is called the Treaty
of Outlenburg.
And maybe that's true, because
in 1161 Henry was in no position
to demand anything from the he
needed them, they did not need him.
They could continue to trade
via Schleswig.
It was a bit slower, but not
really a problem.
But even if it was not written
down explicitly, the Gotlanders knew
that if they wanted to trade
through Lubeck and get their Bismarcks
quicker down to the great
monasteries of Westphalia, it would
not be helpful slaughtering
German merchants arriving on Gotland
and nicking their stuff.
So Gotlanders and German
merchants enjoyed safety and support
in each other's ports.
As time went by, not only did
Gotlanders come to Luberg, but merchants
from the Holy Roman Empire
also came to Gotland.
They founded something they
called the Society of Germans, who
frequently sailed to the Gotland.
The first and most prevalent
reason that merchants pulled together
was safety.
If they traveled in a convoy,
pirates and even hostile states would
find it more difficult to
capture and rob them.
It is a system that is as old
as trade.
Every caravan trundling along
the Silk Road is based on this Logic.
The members of the convoy or
caravan pledge each other's support
in case of an attack.
And since the Gotlandfara went
several times a year on the same
route, the structure was more
institutionalized and the mutual
assurances were likely given
in the form of elaborate oaths.
These arrangements are,
however, only useful when they can
be enforced.
There is no point to having a
member of the Society who takes flight
as soon as the pirate fleet
appears over the horizon, leaving
his fellow merchants to fight
the battle on.
What can also not be tolerated
is that the member brings the Society
into distribute by cheating
his negotiation partners or making
himself a nuisance on Gotland.
So the Society likely had
rules of behavior and means to enforce
them.
The Treaty of Adlenburg has a
side letter where Henry the Lion
appoints a certain Alderich as
his bailiff and representative and
gives him the right to
adjudicate between the members of
the guild.
Alderich is likely an alderman
that the merchants had themselves
elected, and who now possessed
the right to sit in judgment over
his fellow society members
even allowed to order physical punishments
in the duke's name.
As the organization
consolidates further, they become
a legal entity.
We know that in 1226 they had
their own seal showing a lily as
a symbol of royal protection.
In many aspects, the Society
of Gutlandfahrer resembled the Italian
communes in the Middle Ages.
In Italy too, the roads were
dangerous and the merchants were
ganging up to protecting themselves.
As their system of mutual
support became more and more institutionalized,
these communes gradually took
over the management of the cities
where they were based.
In.
In the end, the term commune
went from meaning a group of merchants
to meaning the citizens of a
specific town.
But that is where the
Gotlandfarer and its successor organizations
differed from the Italian
communes in most other societies,
guilds or other merchant
organizations of the Middle Ages,
the Gotland Fara were not
exclusively from Lubricant.
The society was open to all
merchants from the Holy Roman Empire.
Why they were so open, it's
quite easy to understand.
The city of Luberg was only a
few years old, and many of its inhabitants
had come from elsewhere.
Moreover, the capital needed
to fund the building of ships and
the purchase of goods to trade
had to come from somewhere, certainly
not from Luberg, which was
still in ruins from the fire.
It came from established
trading cities like, for instance,
again Dortmund and Zost in Westphalia.
In Italy, the great cities
like Milan, Cremona, Pavia, Venice
and Genoa already had a
sizable population when long distance
trading started out in earnest.
So they did not have to be
open to new members.
But out here on the Baltic
shore, everything was new and everything
was in flux.
The Gotland Fire Society did
not enforce restrictions based on
whether an applicant was a
citizen of Luberg.
Anyone could join after having
been properly scrutinized.
In fact, even though the
society was explicitly called a society
of Germans, they did admit
Gotlanders to their ranks.
Seemingly, the initial
quarrels and murders had been quickly
forgotten.
The German merchants settled
on Gotland in the city of Visby.
For a time there were two
cities with separate councils in
seals, one for the Gotlanders
and one for the German merchants.
But they soon merged.
But the council of the unified
city of Visby was still elected separately
by each of the communities.
The Gotlander merchants had
initially lived on their farms all
across the island, but now
Visby had become the center.
The city grew rapidly and in
the middle of the 13th century had
acquired 11,200ft of city
walls enclosing 90 hectares.
Inside were at least 18
churches, more than in any other
Swedish medieval city.
The biggest of these churches
was the Church of St.
Mary of the Germans.
What made Visby rich was the
trade with Novgorod, a city lying
about 200 km southeast of
modern day St.
Petersburg.
Novgorod was the entry point
into the markets of this vast landmass
that is today Russia, Ukraine,
Belarus, Georgia and beyond.
The main exports from Novgorod
were fir and beeswax.
Now, beeswax is in very high
demand in the west, mainly because
the monks and bishops chapters
needed it to light their churches
during their nightly prayers.
Interestingly, the honey that
came from the same source as the
beeswax was not sent
westwards, but south to Constantinople
and then down the Silk Road.
The bees had fed on the vast
forest of pine, spruce and fir that
cover large parts of Russia.
The honey they produce is
hence dark and viscous features much
valued in the Orient.
The honey went along the great
river systems down to Constantinople,
and from there east along the
Silk Route as far as Baghdad and
China.
This export was seemingly so
lucrative that Novgorod would replace
its own honey with imported
honey from the Baltic that was usually
much lighter.
It still astounds me that
relative commodities like honey and
beeswax could be transported
over thousands of miles to their
end users in the 12th century,
when roads were terrible or non existent
and there were constant
dangers from robbers and local rulers.
This is the same time when the
journeys to the Holy Land were always
preceded by the making of
wills and generous donations to the
church.
And still many of the pilgrims
did not survive the trip.
Now taking Such a long
journey, not for the guaranteed ticket
to paradise, but just for the
markup on a half ton of honey.
Doing it not once in life, but
annually, takes a particular kind
of person.
The traders who took the honey
down to Constantinople came back
with spices, silks and other
luxuries from the east, which they
would then sell to the German
and Gotland traders who took them
westwards.
So when King Henry II had his
mutton generously peppered and the
lovely Eleanor clad in the
finest silks, that pepper and that
silk was as likely to have
come via Kiev, Smolensk and Gotland
as via Venice and Bruges.
Fur was also always popular,
partly as a luxury, but also as a
day to day necessity.
In winter, the furs came down
from even further north of Novgorod,
as hunters traveled up to
Karelia, the White Sea and even the
Barents Sea to hunt the most
beautiful pelted quarry.
The most valuable was the
Sable, where 100 pelts sold at 82
ducats.
In Venice, Martens came in at
30 ducats, Beaver and Ermine much
cheaper at 12 to 14 ducats,
and then it gets even cheaper with
the lynx at five and a half
ducats, otters and weasels at five,
and then the different types
of squirrels, usually three to four
ducats.
The most desirable of the
squirrels was the grey arctic ground
squirrel, whose coat could go
up to seven ducats.
I wonder what they would have
paid for the pelt of one of those
grey tree rats that have
overrun the UK and nearly exterminated
the lovely red squirrels ever
since they were introduced in the
1800s.
Now, on the other side of the
trade, Novgorod's first main importance,
apart from the honey, was cloth.
Cloth was always in demand.
The great cloth cities of
Flanders, Bruges, Ghent and Epis,
so forth, wove English wool
into the Middle Ages.
Most popular, traded good.
And there was also linen
coming up from Westphalia.
And the second equally
important import was salt, needed
to preserve food.
Fish as well as meat caught in
the summer needed to be preserved
so that there was something to
eat in the winter when the rivers
were frozen and the fields and
woods empty of fruit.
And salt may be the reason for
what happens next.
Because the Baltic Sea is not
very salty, to be Precise, Saturnation
is just 7 grams per liter of
water, compared to 35 grams in the
major oceans.
That makes it one of the
nicest places to spend a beach holiday,
but one of the worst places to
generate salt from evaporation.
To make things worse,
underground salt deposits in Europe
occur mainly in a strip going
from Southern Poland, across northern
Germany, Denmark and into the
North Sea.
Crucially, there are no
mineable salt deposits in the Baltic
north of Denmark, specifically
not on Gotland.
And that looks to me as the
main reason the Gotlanders started
to make common cause with the
merchants coming in via Lubeck.
The Gotlanders knew the way to
Novgorod and its lovely beesmacs
and furs.
The Germans could provide the
salt so desperately needed up north.
There were the large salt
mines in Luneburg and Odeslo, both
not far from Lubeck.
So the Goldlanders allowed the
German merchants to sail on their
vessels all the way to the top
of Finland.
Later the Germans would fit
out their own ships, mostly the more
modern cogs, and sail there on
their own transports for the journey.
They did not create a new
society of Germans who frequently
traveled to Novgorod.
The Gotland farrer society in
its form as a legal entity was a
one time affair.
From now on, what we will
later call the Hanseatic League will
be a much looser entity, much
harder to grasp, with limited statues
and institutions.
But there will still
altogether travel in a convoy, and
for good reason.
As I mentioned before,
Novgorod lies almost 200 km inland.
The merchants from Gotland l
and later from many cities along
the Baltic coast would sail up
in separate convoys and then congregate
on the island of Kotlin or
Kronstadt, just off the coast of
what is today St.
Petersburg.
Kronstadt would later become
the headquarter of the Russian Baltic
fleet.
But since St.
Petersburg would not be built
for another 500 years, Kronstadt
was just a port where goods
could be moved onto lighter vessels
to sail up the Neva River.
Once the fleet had gathered,
they would elect two aldermen for
the term of this trading expedition.
One was the alderman of the
yard, who was overall responsible,
and then The Alderman of St
Peter who managed transport and was
in charge of security.
They proceeded along the Neva
river, the river that flows past
St.
Petersburg as it makes its way
from the Ladoga Sea to the Baltic.
Along the shore waited
Karelian and Swedish raiders trying
to steal their goods.
Once through the Neva river,
the traders reached the town of Ladoga
at the mouth of the Volkhov River.
Here again the goods had to be
moved to new transports as there
were impassable rapids to cap
it all off.
Then they had to travel
another 200 km on the Volkhov river
until they finally, finally
reached Novgorod.
Novgorod was by then one of
Eastern Europe's largest cities.
When the Kievan Rus began to
disintegrate in the 12th century,
the princes of Novgorod became
the dominant force in what is today
Russia.
The city itself was, however,
almost independent, its politics
led by local noblemen, boyars
who lived in the city, usually inside
fortified compounds.
But merchants and artisans
also had their say.
The population in the 14th
century reached 15 to 20,000, very
much on par with the largest
cities of the Hanseatic League and
not far short of Cologne, with 25,000.
The Gotlanders had been
trading with Novgorod for probably
centuries and had acquired
their own fortified compound inside
the city, called the St.
Olav Yard, after Saint Olav,
King of Sweden.
There they hosted their new
German friends and neighbors.
These trading yards were
effectively small fortresses.
The merchants were well aware
that they were in enemy territory
and that the locals could at
any time come and burn down their
establishment.
It had strong walls, much
stronger than the walls of the local
aristocratic compounds, and
even featured a watchtower.
And as the trade with Novgorod
grew, the merchants of the Holy Roman
Empire established their own yard.
The yard of St.
Peter in Novgorod.
It centered around a church
which was used not just for worship,
but also as a storeroom for
the trading goods.
Each night, two men, who must
not be related nor working for the
same merchant company, were
locked up inside the church to guard
the goods.
The alderman's main job was to
ensure the community stayed safe.
That meant posting guards and
maintaining good relationships with
the city authority, which I'm
sure included the occasional bribe.
But even more importantly, he
had to ensure discipline amongst
his fellow merchants so as not
to provoke their hosts.
Misbehavior such as brawling
with locals and chasing girls, were
strictly forbidden, but it
also involved making sure that the
merchants maintained good
standards of probity.
Wax was the good most prone to fraud.
Sellers and traders would
often mix in some other fats made
from acorns, peas or resins.
Neither the seller nor the
traders were prepared to guarantee
the quality of the product,
and complaints were quite common.
The yard therefore maintained
various forms of quality control
mechanisms, including a wax
examiner to ensure good sport and
salt when meeting minimum standards.
For quite some time, the
community of merchants in Novgorod
bore collective responsibility
for the debts of any of its members,
and each merchant was limited
to buy and sell no more than the
equivalent of a thousand mark.
That was a demand from the
Novgorod authorities, who wanted
to avoid becoming dependent on
one or few importers for their crucial
supplies, but still had the
recourse to a large capital base.
Though meant as a restriction,
it also worked for the foreign traders
because the constraints
limited the volume of imports and
kept prices high, making the
arduous journey to Novgorod lucrative
even for medium sized merchants.
Another provision the
authorities in Novgorod insisted
upon was that no trader stays
in the city all year round.
That forced the merchants to
break up into two groups.
There were the winter
merchants who came down in early
autumn, just before the rivers
were freezing over, and stayed until
the spring.
Staying over the winter
allowed them to acquire the best
furs that were mostly hunted
in the snow, when the prey was easier
to spot.
And just as they left, a
summer contingent would arrive, bringing
fresh supplies of salt and
cloth and buying beeswax and oriental
luxuries.
Because the winter and summer
merchants were completely separate,
they also had separate
financial arrangements.
When, say, the winter
merchants returned in spring, they
took with them their strongbox
and contained the money collected
for the maintenance of the St
Peter yard and the expenses such
as bribes, etc.
This strongbox was then
deposited in the Church of St Mary
in Visby until the fleet would
gather again in early autumn and
go to Novgorod again.
The strongbox only opened when
four keys were present.
And these keys were held by
the representatives of Lubeck, obviously,
but also of Visby, the main
settlement in Gotland, Sost, near
Munster in Westphalia and Dortmund.
Yes, Dortmund today best known
as a major city in the Ruhr and a
world power in football.
But Dortmund was also one of
the founding members of the Hanseatic
League and one of its leaders.
So here we are back in Visby,
the society of Germans who frequently
travel to Gotland.
The Gotlandfarer and the
subsequent organization of the St.
Peter's yard in Novgorod are
the earliest forms of the Hanseatic
League.
They bear many of the
hallmarks of the thing that will
gradually emerge.
It is first and foremost an
association of long distance traders
who've got together to protect
themselves against the innumerate
dangers they experience on
their journeys.
But other than the Italian
medieval communes or the great cloth
merchants of Flanders, access
to their association or guild wasn't
limited to men from a
particular place.
It was open to all traders
from the Holy Roman Empire.
We have records of traders
from the tiny townlet of Medebach
in the Saurland.
To translate that for our U.S.
audience, there would be
Muskogee, Oklahoma.
These guys could travel all
the way from the back and beyond
in Westphalia to the Arctic
Circle and return all under the protective
shield and using the trading
privileges of the German merchants
in the St.
Peter's yard in Novgorod.
And we get another crucial
element, the commercial discipline
and branding.
If you came to Novgorod on
your own, assuming you made it at
all.
It would have been very
difficult for you to sell your wares
at a good price.
Your clients will ask, is
there cloth you sell really?
The high quality material from
Bruges or not?
The cheap stuff from Ypres,
the salt, could it be mixed with
something?
Where do I go when I have a
complaint and you've gone home?
The members of the St.
Peter's yard maintained, or at
least pretended to maintain, strict
discipline amongst their ranks.
And if one of their customers
had found themselves cheated by one
of their merchants, they knew
at least where to go for redress.
This created what we would
today call a brand.
Merchants who came in with
that fleet became seen as trustworthy.
They may be a touch more
expensive, but you get what you were
hoping to get.
Moreover, the discipline
inside the yard created a network
of trust between the merchants.
As they had travelled together
through the Neva river and up the
Volkhov, they had selected two
amongst their members to be their
aldermen.
And these men had proven to be
unbiased, even though they may not
have come from the same
merchant's hometown.
The they saw fellow merchants
who cheated or brawled, being punished
or even expelled, making you
believe that all of those still inside
the yard must be honorable.
And as you spend the long
nights of the Arctic winter playing
cards or chess with your
fellow travelers, standing guard
inside the church with another
trader, what are you going to talk
about?
Well, the same stuff we talk
about business, politics and kids.
So why not get together for
the next deal?
Maybe we can bring your son
and my daughter together to see whether
they like each other.
And maybe your boy would like
to come as an apprentice to Stralsund,
one of the most valuable
economic commodities, begins to emerge
trust.
And also gradually, merchants
began to believe that their system
of justice they had created
with the elected aldermen who kept
order, was to be trusted.
Whilst at the same time the
aldermen knew then their term was
only for this journey and that
biased decisions this year could
backfire very badly next year
when somebody else was alderman in
1468.
So, quite a lot later, the
English King Edward IV demanded that
the Hanseatic merchants
declare what they are, a society,
a co operative or a corporation.
And they answered that there
were none of those things.
They are a firm association of
cities and merchants who cooperate
to their mutual benefit.
They simply.
But they do not fit any
medieval Roman law category.
But we do know exactly what
they are.
They are a network, a trust
based network.
They have more in common with
ebay, etsy, Airbnb, booking.com or
Amazon than the European Union
or NAFTA.
Like any of these Internet
platforms, the members trade goods
based on trust in each other.
Like we know that an Airbnb
with many and consistently good reviews
is going to be a decent place
to stay.
A medieval merchant in the
Hansa would know that ordering his
goods from such and such an
Strahlsund will result in timely
delivery in reasonable quality.
The job of the network is to
ensure the minimum quality standards
by expelling merchants who
consistently fall short and to provide
an equal playing field with
reliable processes for complaints
and refunds.
I know the comparison is
obviously not quite right because
the Hanseatic League itself
did not make astronomic profits from
providing this network.
But the fundamental components
are the same.
It's a system of mutual trust
and the confidence in the process
that is the rule of law.
That is my current theory why
the Hanseatic League was so successful.
Mutual trust and the rule of
law are some of the strongest engines
of economic growth.
Let's see throughout this
series whether the theory holds.
When you see modern day
companies branding themselves as
Hans Jardische, Krankenkasse,
Hans Jardischer, Lloyd, Hans Jrdischer,
Weincontur, Hans Jardischer
Whatever, they try to tap into that
notion that a Hanseatic
merchant is a man or woman one can
trust, and maybe even King's
Lynn hopes to gain a little bit of
that cache.
When they call themselves a
Hanseatic city, it is in the end,
just good business.
And next week we'll talk about
how this good business keeps growing.
We will look at how a string
of cities along the Baltic coast
come into being.
What they trade, who lives
there and why.
Some flourish and others
disappear quite quickly.
And maybe we can also cover
the western leg of the trade.
After all, trade is all about
linking two or more places, and the
places where the goods from
the Baltic go are the Empire, England
and Flanders.
I hope you're going to join us again.
And now before I go, let me
explain to you how this show works.
You're currently listening to
a podcast about the Hanseatic League.
All these episodes you get
here are also available on the main
feed under the History of the
Germans podcast.
So this episode, for instance,
is episode 108 of this main podcast.
So if you enjoy this show and
you want to hear more about German
history, go to the History of
the Germans podcast.
We have already covered the
Ottonian Empire in the episodes one
to 21, the investiture contest
in episodes 22, 42, the reign of
Frederick Barbarossa and his
immediate predecessors in episodes
43 to 66, the time of the
civil war between Welfare and Hohenstaufen,
and the reign of Frederick ii
in episodes 1794, and the history
of the Great Stem Duchy of
Saxony in the episodes 95 to 107.
Now, as you have also heard at
the beginning, the History of the
Germans and all its offshoots
are funded entirely by the generosity
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So if you feel it is worth
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You can do that face to face
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All the links are also in the
show notes and last but not least,
the bibliography.
For this episode I relied
heavily on Philipp Dollinger, Die
Hanse Die Hanse
Lebenswerklichkeit und Mutos created
by Jurgen Bracker Volker Hen
und die Rainer Postel.
Special thanks for the
translation of the AATLENBURG Privilege
to Dr.
Jenny Banham and even more
special thanks to Dr.
Justina Woops Montrovic, whose
research I found absolutely eye opening.