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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 the
Hanseatic League, a podcast from
the History of the germans network.
Episode 2 Livonian Cities.
In the monastery of Siegeberg
there was a man of worthy life and
with venerable grey hair,
Meinhard by name, a priest of the
Order of St.
Augustine.
He came to Livonia with a band
of merchants simply for the sake
of Christ and only to preach
for German merchants bound together
through familiarity with the
Livonians, were accustomed to go
to Livonia, frequently sailing
up the Dogava River.
So begins the chronicle of
Henry of Livonia, a German missionary
who tells about the foundation
of the bishopric and city of Riga,
the conversion of the pagan
population of what is today Latvia
and Estonia, and the cruel
antics of the Livonian brotherhood
of the sword.
In this episode we'll touch
upon the Livonian Sword brothers
and we take a first glimpse at
the Teutonic Knights.
But this is the history of the
Hanseatic League.
And so what we really focus on
are the merchants, specifically the
merchants from the Society of
German Merchants who frequently travel
to Gotland.
The Gotlandfauer who we met
last week.
Because the tale we hear today
adds the other important streak to
the structure of the Hanseatic
League, its willingness to use military
force in the pursuit of profits.
But before we start, let me
tell you that all podcasts from the
History of the Germans Podcast
Network are advertising free, thanks
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already signed up.
When we left the emerging
Hanse last week, they had just established
themselves on the island of Gotland.
They founded the city of Visby
and convinced the Gotlanders to take
them to Novgorod, the great
entrepot of all goods the wide steppes
of Eastern Europe could offer.
There they had established a
trading compound to buy the beeswax
Europe needed to bathe its
churches in divine light.
And the first the fine lords
and ladies of the splendid medieval
courts craved.
And last but not least,
Novgorod stood at the end of that
vast system of interconnected
rivers that allowed the Varangians
to travel from Scandinavia to
the Black Sea and on to Constantinople.
On those same rivers, thick
dark fir tree honey went south and
silks and spices came up north.
Thanks to the friendship or
the naivety of the Gotlanders, the
LCH had wrangled themselves
into this trade.
They brought up cloth from
Flanders and Westphalia to the shivering
northerners, as well as the
valuable salt needed to preserve
the food for the winter.
Getting to Novgorod was,
however, a challenge.
It involved sailing roughly
800 kilometers or 500 miles from
Gotland to Kronstadt, that
island of St.
Petersburg, where the wares
had to be moved to another set of
ships.
Then they had to go 130km up
the Neva river into the Ladoga Sea.
Most of that was being under
constant threat from raiders.
In Ladoga there is another
change of vessel for the last 200
kilometer trip, again upriver
to Novgorod.
There had to be a quicker and
simpler way.
Well, geographically there is
one absolutely.
There is the Dogova Dvina or
Duna river that flows into the Baltic
a mere 400 kilometers or 200
miles east of Gotland.
The Dogava is quite a use for river.
If you track it upstream, you get.
To Vitebsk, where you have
portage links to Smolensk, where
one can pick up the Dnieper,
down to Kyiv and then Kharkiv, the
Black Sea and Constantinople.
Or you can go further on to
Tver, where there is another portage
link to Novgorod.
And if that wasn't enough,
from the mouth of the Dogovaduna
you can pick up the land route
directly to Novgorod, which may be
a long drag, but along an
established route.
So why are the Gotlanders and
their Lubisch friends not going there?
Well, there were, as our new
friend Henry the Livonian said at
the very beginning of this.
The German merchants were
familiar with this route as early
as the 1180s.
But there was a minor problem
with it.
The people who lived at the
mouth of the Dogavar were pagans,
and not any pagans, but a
Baltic Finnish peoples the Germans
called Lets or Livonians in Latin.
The Livonians were, however,
not the only ones living in the area.
There were other groups, the
Semi Galleons, the Selonians, the
Latgallians, the Curonians and
the Lithuanians who controlled the
large area to the south.
All of these groups saw no
reason to change their religion or
their way of life or letting
the merchants live there permanently.
So when Meinhard of Siegeberg,
the German missionary, arrived in
1184, he had an uphill struggle.
He settled on the lower Dogava
at a place called Xkle and surprisingly
converted a few locals.
But progress was slow.
In 1185 the Lithuanians, as
was their habit, attacked the Livonians
and burned the villages,
including Euxkle.
Meinhard and the other
inhabitants fled into the woods,
where the missionary came up
with an idea how to accelerate the
conversion process.
If he were to build a modern
stone fort to protect the local population,
the Livonians would see the
superiority of the Christian faith
and gratefully join his flock.
So he made a deal.
If the Livonians were to
convert, he would get some specialists
from Gotland who would build
them some brand new fortifications.
Deal done.
A modern fort was rising up in
Ixgle after it had proven its worth
in an attack from the semi galleons.
The people of the neighbouring
village of Hom asked for the same
and again the Holy Bishop
called upon the masons of Gotland
to help.
Bribery, as it turns out, is
not a successful method to instill
spiritual devotion.
As soon as the last stone was
laid, the ungrateful Livonians took
a bath in the Dogeva,
something they believed would wash
off the stain of their baptism.
Meinhard, now minus a great
deal of money and reputation, had
to return to the piecemeal
missionary approach of one soul at
a time.
Despite the setback, back home
in Germany, the Archbishop of Hamburg
Bremen got very excited about
Meinhard's attempt to convert the
Livonians.
He elevated Meinhard to Bishop
of Livonia and the modest churchlet
of Exgle to the rank of Cathedral.
That elevation did, however,
do nothing much to foster Meinhard's
efforts.
In fact, he kept being taken
to the cleaners by the Livonians.
This began to irritate the
holy man to the point that he made
plans with the German
merchants who kept coming up the
Daugava to trade fur and beeswax.
The merchants promised to take
Meinhard back to Gotland, where he
was to muster an army to
forcibly convert the obstinate Livonians.
Meinhard, who, spoiler alert,
will become Saint Meinhard, followed
the other great saint of the
time, Bernard of Clairvaux, in the
doctrine that cold hard steel
is a surefire means to implant the
Apostles Creed at the last minute.
The Livonians, afraid of the
military confrontation, convinced
Meinhard not to go, promising
to get baptized again and become
good Christians after all.
Meinhard went back to Ixtgle
only to find his recent convert splashing
about in the Dorgovar again.
That is when he sends one of
his monks to go to Rome and ask Pope
Celestine III to sanction a
crusade against these duplicitous
Livonians before the answer
made it Back to Meinhard.
He died surrounded by his
monks, but only very few parishioners.
The ball was now in the court
of the Archbishop of Hamburg Bremen.
As you may remember from last
series, the Archbishops of Hamburg
Bremen have been hankering for
a role as the highest church authority
in Scandinavia and the Baltic since.
Well, since there ever was
Christianity in Scandinavia and the
Baltic.
And you will also remember
that at every single junction, their
hopes were dashed.
The Pope established an
archbishopric in Lund that took charge
of all Danish and Swedish and
Norwegian churches.
Then the Emperor Barbarossa
gave his rights over the bishoprics
of Oldenburg, Mecklenburg and
Ratzeburg to Henry the Line, who
made them effectively his fiefs.
This Livonian opportunity
really excited the Archbishop, who
was at the time our old friend
Hartwig, the last of the Counts of
Stade.
He and his family were the
perennial losers of the late 12th
century.
His elder brothers lost the
Mark of Brandenburg to Albrecht the
Bear.
Well, and their lives too.
His sister was murdered in her
bed by the men of the Bishop of Hildesheim
after having previously been
ousted as Queen of Denmark.
And then Hartwig himself,
well, he had tried to give the county
of Stade, his family
inheritance to the See of Bremen,
but failed when Henry the Lion
effectively stole it from under his
nose.
Hartwig was a frustrated old
man who desperately needed a success.
He chose one of his
associates, a man called Bertholdt,
to go to Livonia and make it
his or theirs.
Bertholdt is a proactive man,
and since the papal patent for a
crusade in Livonia had
arrived, he could recruit knights,
thugs and anyone able to hold
a sword.
And in dire need of
forgiveness, these men promised to
go on crusade with him.
And that is what they did.
Well, that is also all that
they were prepared to do.
They came along with
Bertholdt, burned, broke and baptized.
But once the time of their
penance was up, they got onto the
next available ship and sailed home.
Berthold would probably have
done exactly the same thing had his
horse not run away with him
straight into the midst of a Livonian
army who tore him limb from limb.
And to stage left, the third
Bishop of Livonia, sent by Hartwig.
This time, Hartwig digs deep
into his most precious possessions,
the members of his ever
dwindling clan.
Albrecht of Buxtehude is the
Archbishop's nephew and he is not
the kind of man who falls for
a Livonian ruse.
When he arrived with 500 men
and 23 ships, the Livonians promised
to get baptized as per
standard procedure.
By this Time, Albrecht does
not leave it at that.
He invites the leaders of the
Livonians to a drinking party.
Once they're all seated, he
has the doors bolted and tells them
that they will not get out
until they provide suitable hostages
that ensure their future good behavior.
Albrecht is then shown a site
a bit further downriver from Iksgill
that he judges to be a more
suitable location for his cathedral
city, as it lay along a
tributary called the Riga.
The city he founded in 1201 is
called Riga.
Riga was not intended as a
city for the Livonians.
It was a place for Christian
religious institutions and the bishop's
allies, the Crusaders and the merchants.
He moved the seat of the
bishopric from Exkilde to Riga.
He founded several monasteries
that took their place inside the
new settlement.
And he offered it as a place
for German and other merchants to
live and trade.
Riga became the basis from
where the new arrivals conquered
what is today the countries of
Latvia and Estonia.
The timing was pretty much ideal.
Emperor Henry VI had died in
1197 in the midst of the preparations
for a huge crusade.
Now this crusade is not
happening, but vows had been made
and many of these armed
pilgrims were then diverted to Livonia.
And then there was a
subsequent civil war between Philip
of Swabia and Otto IV that
created many opportunities for murder,
maiming and the breaking of
oaths that required the cleansing
powers of a crusade that
provided a steady flow of thugs ready
to come fighting.
And beyond that, the merchants
from Dortmund, Munster, Zorst and
Lubeck, to name just a few,
knew that there were enormous riches
to be made in the trade with
the east, and the key to those lay
in the mouth of the Dogava.
All Albert and Hartwig had to
do was to go around Germany once
a year and drum up support for
the colony in the far north.
Riga filled up and many of
those who came saw their hopes for
wealth and power fulfilled.
From this time onwards until
1918, the countries of Latvia and
Estonia were split into two
social groups, the Latvians and Estonians,
who spoke their languages, and
a German speaking ruling class that
controlled the land, the
church and the government.
The most successful amongst
those new arrivals were the members
of Albert and Hartwig's
extended family.
Their brothers, cousins and
brothers in law swamped the newly
conquered country and the
dynasties they founded, the Uxkuls,
the Thysenhusen and the Von
der Rob, played an outsized role
in the history of Latvia and Estonia.
So good old Hartwig, after all
his ordeals, finally saw some of
his ambitions fulfilled at the
expense of the inhabitants of a faraway
land.
One institution that Albert
created had become particularly the
Livonian Brothers of the Sword.
That was a knightly order like
the Templars, the Hospitallers and
the Teutonic Knights.
Though they were specifically
designated for the Nordic Crusade
in Livonia, its members were
not just noblemen, but they also
admitted merchants.
Which finally gets us back to
the story of the Hanseatic League.
What role did they play in all this?
Well, a very large one indeed.
The 23 Ships Albert's first
warband arrived on, well, they had
been provided by the Society
of German Merchants who frequently
traveled to Gotland.
The Gotlandfarer we heard
about last week.
And then there is the question
of why the Crusaders headed to the
mouth of the Dogova.
There was no shortage of
pagans along the Baltic coast.
So if the purpose of all this
had been just to convert pagans,
Riga would not have been the
obvious destination.
The Prussians and Lithuanians
were a lot closer and even more fiercely
opposed to Christianity and books.
The chronicler Henry of
Livonia says quite explicitly that
it was the merchants who had
brought Meinhard of Siegeberg to
Livonia.
All in though other players
were important.
The crusade into Livonia was
at least partly organized and initiated
by the Gotlandfarer, who were
looking for a shorter route to Novgorod
and to the markets of the East.
And this may also be a good
moment to talk about the social background
of these merchants.
Merchants and what we mean
here are long distance merchants,
not local traders.
And they came from three
different groups.
The first were men who had
started out as ministeriales, these
unfree serfs who received a
full nightly or ecclesiastical training
to serve their lord as
soldiers or administrators.
These were quite common
amongst the merchant class in the
cities and there had been
seats of bishops or major princes.
And it's not a surprise, they
were often in charge of markets,
tolls, taxes, etc.
And Hans had both an
understanding of and an axis to finance.
In 12th century Cologne there
was a man called Gerhard Unmars who
became immensely rich as a
merchant and banker, financing his
lord, the Archbishop of
Cologne's wars against Henry the
Lion.
The second group were free
landowners who had a base in the
city from where they sold
their produce and then gradually
shifted to trading not just
their own, but third party wares.
And finally there are the
people who came from all walks of
life, entrepreneurial
artisans, the administrators of ecclesiastical
or princely manners, and
sometimes just men or women who had
a small amount of capital and
turned it into a large pile by placing
their bets right.
One thing they all had in
common was access to capital to trade
beesmax and fur with Novgorod,
wine with England or grain and fish
with Norway required the funds
to charter a vessel and fill it with
the goods to sell.
It would then take months to
get to the destination, sell the
goods, buy others before
returning, and then selling those
wares.
Only then would there be a profit.
Hence, in the initial phase of
the Hansa, becoming a merchant required
some startup capital,
something only the ministeriales,
the free landowners and some
artisans and some commoners had.
Later, there would be
financing options that opened the
profession up to others who
toiled in the counting house of a
merchant or trained on the
ship of a successful captain.
What's also interesting is
that until the end of the Middle
Ages, these long distance
merchants, once admitted to their
city's guilt, would not
experience much social differentiation
with the nobility.
Their lifestyles were almost
identical, whether you fight in a
king's army or undertake
arduous journeys.
In both cases, military
prowess is a crucial part of your
life.
The luxuries you use and
display are also the same.
Knights who became merchants
did not take a step down in their
social ranking, at least not
in the 12th and 13th century.
Hence, it's no surprise the
Livonian Brothers of the Sword admitted
merchants to their ranks and
that merchants from Bremen and Luburg
were instrumental in setting
up the Teutonic Knights in Akhon.
The Sword Brothers, as they
are often called, were never particularly
numerous.
Estimates are of 80 to 120,
though in battle they would weigh
in at about 1000 to 1500.
With all their attendants,
squires in infantry support.
They were also a bit of a disgrace.
They had been given the same
statue as the Templars, but their
background and general
demeanor was a lot rougher.
The first master was killed by
one of the brothers with an axe,
and there was almost no crime
these guys had not been accused of.
Their military usefulness was
also limited, since the terrain was
not really suited for heavily
armored knights.
Where they excelled was in
organizing crusades, sieges and the
building and defending of forts.
If the Sword brothers weren't
the secret weapon, what really accounted
for the bishop's success was
that the local peoples were divided.
All these different tribes
were regularly at each other's throats.
Plus the Lithuanian and
Russians were a constant threat.
Smart diplomacy and inducement
provided by the German merchants
were ways to gradually wear
down the opposition in taking hold
of their lands.
So in the 25 years following
the foundation of Riga, the bishop
and his allies, the merchants,
the Sword Brothers and the Crusaders,
subdued the Various peoples
living along the Dorgova and north
up into what is now Estonia.
The Danish king Valdemar also
showed up in the region, and Albert
and Valdemar agreed on a
separation of zones of influence.
The Russian Prince of Polotsk,
the nominal overlord of Livonia,
was forced to accept the
changed circumstances.
Nevertheless, the situation
for the bishop and the Sword Brothers
and the merchants remained fragile.
The land was found to be poor
and war was expensive.
So the brothers tried to fill
this gap by first increasing the
levies on their serfs, then
demanding a bigger share of the spoils
from the bishop, and finally
by attacking the Danish positions
in Estonia.
In 1230 they tried to merge
with the Teutonic Knights who were
based in Prussia, a few
hundred miles south on the other
side of Lithuania.
The Teutonic Knights turned
them down, saying that the Sword
Brothers were people who
followed their own inclinations and
did not keep their rule properly.
So basically a rough and
unruly lord whose reputation was
so damaged they tried to use
the good name of the Teutonic Knights
to get back in the saddle.
In 1236 the Sword Brothers
suffered a devastating defeat where
their master and almost half
of the brothers died.
The different local peoples
immediately revolted and the colony
was reduced to Riga and some
of the better defended forts and
towns.
The Sword Brothers were taken
over by the Teutonic Knights.
The land they had taken from
the Danes in Estonia were returned
and the bishop, now Archbishop
of Riga, had to grant half of his
lands to the Teutonic Knights.
That done, the Grand Master
Hermann von Salza sent an army and
by 1250 the situation had stabilized.
The lands south of Riga and
along the Dorgava were recovered.
But again peace did not hold
for long.
In 1259 the Samogitians
rebelled and again the knights and
the bishops were pushed back
into their strongholds.
This time it took 40 years of
fighting before the land was finally
subjugated.
We'll talk a lot more about
the Sword Brothers and the wars in
Livonia when we do the series
on the Teutonic Knights.
What we are interested here
are the Hanseatic merchants and their
role in all this.
Now the merchants main
interest lay in access to the markets
along the Dorgeva and the land
route to Novgorod.
On that front they had their
first success in 1212 when the ruler
of Polosk is forced to allow
German merchants to trade freely
along the river as far as
Vitebsk and Smolensk.
In 1229 the Prince of Smolensk
grants wide ranging privileges to
the German Merchants which are reciprocitated.
For the Russian merchants
there is relief from tolls and taxes,
the right to adjudicate their
own affairs and the right to appeal
to the court or the prince
over the local courts and various
rules about weights and
measures, priority treatments at
portage and markets and the
obligation to help merchants whose
boats have stranded.
What is interesting about this
document, apart from the fact that
13th century German merchants
are opening a trading post in a city
halfway between Moscow and
Minsk and closer to Odessa than to
Berlin, is the list of signatories.
There are the Prince of
Smolensk, the Bishop of Riga, the
master of the Sword Brothers,
but also Regen, Bude, Detart and
Adam, citizens of Gotland,
Friedrich Dummomm from Lubeck, Henry
the Goth and Ilya, both from
Zost, Konrad Bloedauge and Johann
Kinod from Munster, Bernank
and Volkmar from Groningen, Ahrenbrecht
and Albrecht from Dortmund,
Heinrich Zeissig from Bremen and
four citizens of Riga.
That list illustrates how the
Hanseatic League and the Gotlandfaure
had remained an organisation
open to traders from across the empire.
They worked together and it
seems also fought together to open
and defend their markets.
The Kontur in Smolensk was,
however, short lived, which is unsurprising
given the political
instability in the territory.
But once the situation in
Livonia stabilized under the Teutonic
Knights, trade thrived.
Riga became one of the key
members of the Hanse.
Though the Teutonic Knights
did not allow them to adopt Lubeck
Law and thereby be even more
closely associated with the emerging
Hanseatic League.
They were given Hamburg Law,
which by agreement between Hamburg
and Lubeck was basically identical.
And Riga was not the only
Hanseatic city in the area.
The other important port was
called Rival at the time and is today
known as Tallinn.
Its story is slightly different.
The crusades into Estonia were
led by the Danes and it was the Danes
who expanded an existing
Estonian settlement and trading station.
Then the Danes had to leave in
1227 due to a serious defeat back
home and the Livonian brothers
moved in.
With them came 200 German
merchants who quickly settled in
the town.
Now the Sword Brothers did not
stay beyond their defeat in 1236
when the Danes returned.
But the Hanseatic merchants
held on in Tallinn.
They convinced the Danish king
Eric Ploughpenny to grant them the
city laws of Lubeck.
And Tallinn quickly gained a
high degree of independence from
the Danish crown and
integration into the Hanseatic League.
Now Tallinn is even closer to
Novgorod than Riga.
And became a key harbor for
the trade with fur, beeswax, cloth
and salt.
Two other places became important.
One was Narva, even further
along the coast and closer to Novgorod.
But despite its attractive
geographic position, Narva never
really thrived.
The citizens of Tallinn did
not very much like the competition
and cut them off from trade
flows and even from participation
in the Hanseatic League.
The other important Hanseatic
city in Estonia and still Estonia's
second largest city is Dopat
Tatu in Estonian.
Tatu is deep inland on the
road to Novgorod and had been a trading
post since at least 11th century.
The Sword brothers conquered
the place in 1224 and made it the
seat of the Bishop of Estonia.
Dorpat Tatu became a member of
the Hanseatic League and a rich trading
city now, as the Danish
Kingdom went through its darkest
time in the 14th century, the
Teutonic Knights bought Estonia off
the King of Denmark and held
it until the 16th century.
Riga, Reval, Tallinn and
Doppart Tartu played a major role
in the Hanseatic League history.
The contour of Novgorod that
was so crucial to Luberg and visby
in the 12th and 13th century
came more and more under the control
of these Baltic cities.
Within the Hanseatic League,
the Livonian cities, together with
Visby formed one of its
regional division, its drittel, or
thirds.
And that made sense.
The trade with Novgorod and
along the Dogavar was almost entirely
in their control.
And hence the cities involved
in it formed their own special interest
within the league.
Another group of cities that
may have been part of this drittel
were the Swedish cities,
Stockholm, Kalma and Nicoping.
Those and the role of German
merchants in Sweden during the Middle
Ages will be subject to the
next episode, as will be another
important trait, the trade in fish.
And maybe my pronunciation of
Swedish, Norwegian, Estonian and
Latvian names will also
improve by next episode.
And we will finally get to
talk about the city of Bergen and
the pier that was called
Tiskebrygen for centuries and is
now called Just Briggin.
I hope you will join us again.
And now before I go, let me
explain to you how the show works.
You're currently listening to
a podcast about the Hanseatic League.
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podcast.
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you want to hear more, go over to
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We have already covered the
Ottonian empire in 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,
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between the Welf and the Hohenstaufen
and the reign of Frederick ii
in episodes 70 to 94 and the history
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All the links are also in the.
Show Notes and last but not
least, the bibliography.
And for this episode I relied
heavily on Philipp Dillinger, Die
Hanse Die Hanse
Lebenswerdigkeit und Mutos Heraus
Geben by Jurgen Brucker,
Volker Henn and Rainer Postel.
Rolf Hammel Kieslow, Die Hanse
Erik Christensen, the Nordic Crusades
and since we're at it, I came
across a really interesting article
about the trade in beeswax in
the middle ages by Dr.
Alexandra Sebosnik titled Bees
in Medieval Economy.
I've put a link in the
transcript that you find on the History
of the Germans website.
It is a bit niche, it's very
geeky but also very fascinating.