The Baltic Sea as a Contact Zone: The Hanseatic League
The Hanseatic League, originally an ad hoc association of travelling merchants, had since the thirteenth century developed into a mighty alliance of cities, which for about 300 years largely controlled trade, shipping and politics in the North Sea and Baltic regions.
The Old High German word Hanse meant ‘crowd’ or ‘community’, and in the twelfth century it designated a cooperative association of long-distance traders who mostly came from the same region or town. Many local Hanse associations existed before the German Hanseatic League of the thirteenth century made its first appearance on the political stage. Merchants from Cologne who operated a branch in London were the first to join together as an association. Their London branch, the Guildhall, and the goods they traded in, were granted a special privilege by the king in 1175.[620] But perhaps more important for the history of the Hanseatic League were the processes that began to play themselves out in the Baltic region during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These included the founding of Lübeck and many other cities in the Baltic region as Germans settled there and the founding of the German company of merchants travelling to Gotland (Gotlandfahrergenossenschaft).The founding of Lübeck (1143-59) provided German long-distance Baltic traders with a headquarters and enabled more local merchants from Lower Saxony and Westphalia to access markets in the Baltic region and Russia without having to trade through Scandinavian or Slavic middlemen. For many years, for example, the farmer-merchants on the island of Gotland had dominated trade with Russia. Lübeck, and the advantages it provided for German long-distance traders, represented a real challenge to the Gotlanders. The German merchants were better financed, better trained in the techniques of trade, and better organised, and they possessed a boat - the cog - with a larger carrying capacity than the Gotlanders had at their disposal.
Hanseatic trade proceeded from east to west along a line dotted with their trading centres in Novgorod, Reval, Riga, Visby, Danzig, Stralsund, Lübeck, Hamburg, Bruges and London, and its existence was based on the trade between the suppliers of foodstuffs and raw materials in Northern and Eastern Europe and the commercial producers of finished products in northwestern Europe. Ships and shippers from the coastal cities transported the commodities from the west to the east and vice versa, whereby Lübeck served as entrepot in this exchange. The merchants, however, went well beyond their function as middlemen between east and west, first by trading in the products manufactured by the Hanseatic cities themselves and then by penetrating deep into the Baltic hinterlands south of the coast. As a result, not only did they open up trade with Bohemia and Silesia by way of the Elbe and Oder Rivers, they also followed the Vistula through Krakow and via Lemberg (Lviv/Lwow) connected with trading partners in the Black Sea.[621]
Demand and production determined the specific regions to which merchants travelled and ships sailed. The range of commodities the ships transported was broad, and included both mass-produced goods for daily life and luxury products for a small, wealthy clientele. The most important products were wool, woollen and linen textiles, pelts and furs, herring and dried cod, salt, wax, grain, flax and hemp, wood and forestry products (ash, pitch, tar), and beer and wine. Pelts, wax, grain, flax, wood and beer flowed westward, where they were exchanged for needed textiles, salt, wine, metal products, spices and other luxury goods. Fish was sold throughout the Hanseatic region.
We can identify two interconnected economic regions in the east: on the one hand, the Russian trade region, centred in Novgorod with its pelts and furs; and on the other the Livonian urban region around Reval, Dorpat and Riga along with the Daugava hinterland, which supplied mainly flax and hemp. Demand for furs was heavy throughout Europe, from expensive sable to cheap squirrel, as it was for wax for illumination.
Hemp was needed for rope and flax for linen in all ports of the Hanseatic region. In Eastern Europe, Flemish textiles and sea salt were in high demand. Another trade region south of Livonia was controlled by the state of the Teutonic Order and the Prussian Hanseatic cities of Danzig, Elbing and Thorn. They made available to Hanseatic trade the products of the Lithuanian and Polish hinterland by way of the Vistula and Memel Rivers. The Lithuanian regions contributed wax, pelts, wood and flax; Poland produced mainly grain and timber products. The latter supplied shipbuilders with wood for masts and planks; herring fisheries, breweries and salt works needed wood for barrels, while numerous manufacturers were dependent on steady supplies of pitch, tar and ash. The primary export product from the Prussian Hanseatic cities, however, was grain, which nourished the population living in the highly urbanised centres of Western Europe. Luxury products like amber were gathered along the Sambian coast of the Baltic. The Teutonic Order had a monopoly on the amber trade, and they exported amber to Lübeck and Bruges, where amber turners worked them into luxurious rosaries. Salt, herring and textiles were the most important Prussian imports.In the western part of the Baltic, Sweden contributed iron, copper, butter and cattle and cowhides to the Hanseatic trade, although, with the exception of metals, Sweden stood in the shadow of Denmark. Since the fifteenth century, Denmark had become an important exporter of horses, oxen and butter. Earlier, Hanseatic trade with Denmark had primarily concentrated on Scanian herring, schools of which were in the fourteenth century said to be so thick that the fish could be caught by hand. During the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the decline in Baltic and North Sea herring amplified the importance of Dutch herring fishers. The other important fish supplier, Norway, which at the time belonged to Denmark, was profoundly dependent on Hanseatic imports.
Hanseatic merchants supplied grain, flour, beer, malt, hops, salt and linen, and they exported primarily dried cod and small quantities of cod liver oil, walrus tooth, skins and other goods. When, toward the end of the fifteenth century and during the sixteenth, consumers came to prefer Icelandic dried cod, Hanseatic trade with Norway receded in importance.Trade with England, the original domain of Hanseatic merchants from the Rhineland and Westphalia, continued to be brisk. They exported Rhine wine, metals and the dyes madder and woad to England and imported tin and English wool for the textile industry in Flanders and Brabant, and later also English textiles. The Hanseatic cities of the Baltic coast, in turn, provided wares typical of the east, including pelts, wax, grain and wood as well as Scandinavian fish and metals. The most important market in Western Europe, however, was the Netherlands. Flanders and later Brabant were not only important textile producers, they also established key trade connections with the Mediterranean basin. The Hanseatic merchants bought goods in Flemish and Brabant cities, primarily woollen textiles of high and medium quality, as well as trousers from Bruges. They also acquired spices, figs and raisins from southern Europe. France contributed oil and wine as well as bay salt. This sea salt, harvested from the Atlantic, became increasingly important as a preservative. Prussian and especially Dutch ships made regular bay salt runs, then used it as ballast on the way to the Baltic, where they traded it for grain and wood for the Western European market. By doing so, they undermined Lübeck’s monopoly as an intermediary in trade.[622]