The Baltic as a Dutch Lake

Hanseatic trade suffered setbacks on all fronts at the turn of the sixteenth century. The old trading system based on privileges proved inadequate in the face of growing economic competition and the increasing power of the European monarchies.

as Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund and Greifswald, on the other, which saw their position threatened in the intermediary trade and freight transport along the east-west route. One important prerequisite for the expansion of Dutch shipping and Dutch business in general dur­ing the fifteenth century was the natural environment itself. Because their mediocre soil and the high cost of drainage made grain cultiva­tion unprofitable, the Dutch concentrated on alternative products. The peasants specialised in livestock husbandry and dairy farming; they also cultivated industrial crops and fodder crops such as flax, madder and rapeseed along with tobacco, hops and turnips. Many of these products were sold mainly to businesses in the cities. Fishing and shipping, which were traditional activities, also expanded. The Dutch traded their own products to finance their continuous need to import grain. Over time, they garnered fairly significant shares of the market for their beer, tex­tiles, North Sea herring and a number of cheaper variants of branded Flemish and Hanseatic products.^[623] The increasing demand for freight capacity for the burgeoning trade opened the door to the Baltic for the Dutch and Zeelanders. By 1580, half of all Danzig imports and exports were transported by Dutch ships, and the proportion of Dutch shippers in the Baltic trade grew from 60 percent to 70 percent during the seven­teenth century.^[624]

Starting in the sixteenth century, the Baltic cities began to limit their assortment of wares, concentrating on the export of bulk products, such as grain and wood.

The Baltic trade was of central significance to the Dutch economy for such a long period of time that they rightly viewed it as the moedercom- mercie (mother of all commerce). The grain imported from the Baltic region fed approximately one-third of the Dutch population and freed up Dutch agriculture for more profitable production. In the end, that trade enabled the Dutch to find a footing in completely different areas of commerce. For example, the Dutch were able to exploit their Baltic grain monopoly when crops failed in Western and Southern Europe toward the end of the sixteenth century. As a result, they came to control not only grain and wood exports from the Baltic, but also the export of Western manufactured and luxury products in the other direction. The Hanseatic cities in the Baltic region had to make do with a small proportion of the east-west trade because of their higher freight tariffs and lower trans­port capacities, although they continued to dominate trade and shipping within the Baltic itself.^[626]

The second important Baltic export, wood, was, like its by-products pitch, tar and ash, used in shipbuilding and other types of production. Dutch shipbuilding was already innovative.

Dutch dominance, which was based on their trade in grain, timber and forest products and the shipping capacity needed to make that trade flow, remained unrivalled until the second half of the seventeenth century, when the English Baltic trade began to surge. Over the course of the six­teenth century, Dutch imports of grain alone grew from approximately 19,000 lasts in 1500 to 80,000 lasts in 1567. (A last of grain, it should be noted, was approximately two metric tons, varying somewhat from loca­tion to location.) The volume of trade, especially grain trade, continued to increase in the waning years of the sixteenth century and the begin­ning of the seventeenth, but it then diminished during the second half of the century.^[627]

The development of a ship called the fluyt (flute) or fly-ship, which according to one popular legend was first built in 1590 in Hoorn, is credited with sparking the Dutch boom in the Baltic trade. The fly-ship conferred a number of advantages on Dutch shipbuilders and shippers. It was built of light wood, and it was constructed in large numbers based on a standardised design. It was also suited to many different types of use.^[628] The standardisation minimised not only production costs but operational costs as well. In the following century, the fly-ship became the model for Baltic shipbuilders because Dutch shipwrights brought their expertise with them when they were hired by the ship­yards of Altona, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Danzig, Riga and later even St Petersburg to modernise the local industry. Hanseatic shipbuilding guilds forbade Dutch shipbuilders from being hired or even presenting their knowledge, which slowed down the adoption of state-of-the-art technology.

The export curves for timber and forest products such as potash, pitch and tar, which served the needs of shipbuilders and businesses in Western Europe, approximated those of grain exports. They had risen since the end of the sixteenth century and reached a high point in the 1630s and 1640s, after which they receded. They then grew continuously after the last quarter of the seventeenth century, which often brought about significant changes in the importance of the various ports and hinterland areas. Although Danzig remained the most important port for the export of grain and wood over the entire period, other ports exceeded it from time to time for certain prod­ucts. These included the ports of Konigsberg (for wood), Riga (wood, flax, hemp) and Narva (wood) as well as smaller Swedish and Finnish ports (for tar).^[629]

The Dutch not only imported food and raw materials from the Baltic and exported Western commodities to the area, they also transferred people, knowledge, technology and culture (art, science and life-styles). Among Western European immigrants to the Baltic we may distinguish five groups: peasants, craftsmen, merchants, sailors and artists. While Dutch Mennonite colonists, skilled in land improvement, were set­tled by landowners in the fertile marshlands of Royal Prussia, Calvinist cloth-makers emigrated from the southern Netherlands into the Baltic, revolutionising the cloth industries of Konigsberg and Danzig. Dutch immigrants innovated silk weaving and embroidery in Danzig. Most important were the communities of foreign merchants, who settled in harbour towns. Family ties were key: usually a son or a younger brother was sent from Amsterdam to Danzig to establish his residence there and to manage the family business as a resident or a citizen of Danzig. Other merchants maintained their trade relations with the help of Dutch fac­tors residing in Danzig. Their number rose from around fifty in the mid­seventeenth century to seventy-five in the second half of the century.

The last and perhaps most interesting group of Western European immigrants to the Baltic were artisans and artists. Fayenciers introduced the manufacture of delftware, furniture carpenters, embellishing bour­geois and noble houses with dernier cri furniture, and tapestry weavers arrived from the southern Netherlands. Architects such as Antoni van Obberghen, painters such as Jan Vredeman de Vries, and engravers such as Willem Hondius, settled in Danzig and received public and private commissions.^[630]

The visual arts, especially painting and architecture, were a crucial medium of cultural exchange. The effect of the art of the Low Countries on the Baltic region is reflected in the export of styles, paintings and painters. Paintings by Dutch artists or in Dutch style can be traced in royal, noble, municipal and even bourgeois collections. Dutch artists such as Jan Vredeman de Vries, Willem and Abraham van der Blocke in Danzig or Jacob Coning and Pieter van den Hult in Copenhagen worked for municipal and bourgeois patrons, but not for a public art market as in the Dutch Republic.²⁷ An example is the Steenwinckel fam­ily. Hans van Steenwinckel the Elder, who was born c. 1545 in Antwerp, became one of the master bricklayers of Antoni van Obberghen, the great architect of Danzig, who asked van Steenwinckel to assist him in the building of Kronborg castle.

When we look at the prospect of Copenhagen by Jan Dircksen after a painting by Jan van Wijck from 1611 we see many recently built mer­chant houses with gables in Dutch renaissance style. When Christian IV ‘granted’ buildings to the Copenhagen burgers, he showed a preference for the Dutch renaissance style, as can be seen in the city hall, the orphan­age, set up after a Dutch model, and the Bourse. Housing projects, again after Dutch models, were started for sailors and textile-workers. ‘Dutch’ must have symbolised modern government, modern welfare, modern

affairs, pp. 19-32; K. Ciesielska, ‘Osadnictow „ol^nderskie’ w Prusach Krolewskich i na Kujawach w swietle kontraktow osadniczych’, in Studia i materialy do dziejow Wielkopolski i Pomorza, II (Poznan, 1958), pp. 219-56; Edmund Kizik, Mennonici w Gdansku, Elblqgu i na Zulawach wislanych w drugiejpotowie XVII i w XVIII wieku (Gdansk, 1994).

²⁷ Juliette Roding, ‘The myth of the Dutch Renaissance in Denmark: Dutch influence on Danish architecture in the 17th century’, in Lemmink and van Koningsbrugge, eds., Baltic affairs, pp. 343-53; Juliette Roding, ‘The North Sea coasts, an architectural unity?’, in Juliette Roding and Lex Heerma van Voss, eds., The North Sea and culture (1550-1800), Proceedings of the international conference held at Leiden, 21-22 April 1995 (Hilversum, 1996), pp. 95-106. trade and industry. From Holland came the many engineers who laid out new towns and fortifications.

To find Dutch renaissance architecture on a similar scale as in Denmark one has to turn to the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, where Danzig attracted many architects, engineers and artists from the middle of the sixteenth century until the late seventeenth century, among them great names like Anthoni van Obbergen, who moved from Denmark to Poland in 1586, and Jan Vredeman de Vries. The buildings in Danzig were constructed with the bricks which Dutch ships took with them as ballast when they went to this town to load grain.

These architects and engineers were active not only in Danzig but in other coastal towns, and towns along and close to the rivers flowing into the Baltic Sea, as well. East of Danzig, for the period until 1650 we can mention: Elbing, Thorn, Neidenburg, Braunsberg, Pillau, Konigsberg, Memel and Riga. In northern Germany we furthermore find their influ­ence in Bremen, Rostock, Lübeck and Stralsund. So we witness indeed a Dutch-influenced Baltic Sea culture in the field of urban planning and architecture.^[631]