Hanseatic League

I

Introduction

Hanseatic League (German Hanse), commercial alliance of German merchants and cities, active from the mid-12th century to the mid-17th century. At its peak in the mid-15th century, the league comprised at least 80 cities and another 100 or so affiliated towns, and it monopolized all trade in the North and Baltic seas. It grew to be the largest and most successful trade association in medieval Europe in terms of both volume of trade and profit before succumbing to the growing economic might of states such as England and the Netherlands.

As an economic community rather than a military or political alliance, the Hanseatic League offered merchants and cities the benefits associated with a large unified trading bloc, while at the same time allowing members to pursue their own political interests and alliances. In that sense, the league had much more in common with modern economic entities such as the European Union (EU) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) than with modern military alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

II

Origins and Growth of the League

The word Hanse was originally used to designate an organization of traveling German merchants. Until the early 12th century, the activity of such groups in the Baltic area was centered in the Danish (now German) province of Schleswig. There Germans traded with Scandinavians coming from the north and Slavs from the east. In exchange for their cloth, salt, and wine, western merchants received fur, wax, tar, honey, hard-husked grain, timber and other wood products, and dried and salted herring. The commodities exchanged between east and west remained fairly constant for the next 500 years, even as the character and scope of the Hanseatic League changed.

A

Early Trading Centers

The first permanent Hanseatic trading center was established in 1159, when Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, rebuilt the city of Lübeck, which had burned to the ground in 1157. Merchant groups from southern and western Germany congregated and settled in Lübeck and, using the city as a base, began to gradually expand their trade eastward.

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In 1161 Henry attained trading rights on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, and shortly thereafter German merchants founded the settlement of Visby on the island's west coast. This commercial community provided a base from which merchants continued expanding the league’s activities to the east. During the early 13th century, league merchants established trade with the cities of Rīga (in modern Latvia); Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia); and Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia). At the same time, they built up their trade with the Russians at Novgorod and the Norwegians at Bergen, as well as with the Swedes, Flemish, and English. The league then established outposts along the southern shore of the Baltic, stretching from Wismar (in northern Germany) in the west to Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad, Russia) in the east.

A major contribution to the success of Hanseatic trade was the introduction of the cog (Kogge) ship in the late 12th century. Measuring about 27 m (90 ft) in length, these ships had eight to ten times the cargo capacity of the longboats employed by Scandinavian traders. By the middle of the 13th century, the number of Hanseatic cog ships sailing eastward surpassed the number of smaller Scandinavian vessels sailing westward.

B

The Urban League

During the 13th century, the league changed from a loose association of merchants into an actual urban alliance of cities. In 1241 merchants began to adopt policies regulating their relationships with other merchants. These policies led the cities of Lübeck and Hamburg to form an alliance. By the 1270s this new alliance had become the core of an expanded league, which included merchants and towns from the Rhineland and Baltic areas, most notably Bremen and Cologne. Lübeck remained the most important city and unofficial capital of the alliance.