The Hanseatic League in the late Middle Ages

The Hanseatic League — the Hanse, the Hanseatic League, the Deutsche Hanse, the Städtehanse, the confederation of the German merchant guilds and market towns of the Baltic and the North Sea — was, in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, the dominant commercial organization of northern Europe. At its height, in the late fourteenth century, the League included more than 100 member cities, of which perhaps 60 were Quartierstädte (quarter cities) and the remainder were Mitgliedsstädte (member cities), and it controlled the trade of a vast region that stretched from the Low Countries to the Baltic, and from the British Isles to Russia. The four Kontore — the great trading posts of the League at London (the Stalhof or Steelyard), at Bergen in Norway (the Kontor of the Tyske Bryggen), at Novgorod in Russia (the Peterhof), and at Bruges in the Low Countries (the Oosterlingen of Bruges) — were the four great pillars of the Hanseatic commercial system, and the Kontor was, in each case, a self-governing community of Hanseatic merchants under the protection of the local prince and subject only to the law of the Kontor itself.

The League was, in its mature form, a confederation of cities, rather than a single organization, and it had no single capital, no single government, and no single set of laws. The League was governed by a Hansetag — a diet of the Hanseatic — which was attended by representatives of the Quartierstädte and the Mitgliedsstädte and which decided on the common policies of the League. The first Hansetag in the modern sense is generally dated to 1356 (the Hansetag of Lübeck), but the practice of the Hansetag had emerged, in an incipient form, in the late thirteenth century. The Hanse was, in this sense, a confederation of sovereign merchant cities bound together by a common commercial interest, a common legal tradition, and a common code of conduct.

The Origins of the League

The Hanseatic League had its origins in the long-distance trade of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The merchants of the German cities — especially the cities of Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, and Cologne — gradually developed a network of trade routes that linked the Baltic to the North Sea, and they established a system of merchant guilds that regulated the trade and protected the merchants. The Hanse of the Cologne merchants of London — the Hanse of Cologne — is the earliest of the Hanseatic Hanses of the German merchants in the trading cities of the North Sea and the Baltic, and it is the institutional ancestor of the League. The Hanse of Cologne was already a privileged merchant community in London by 1157 (the date of the Charter of Henry II of 1157), and it was the model for the Hanse of the German Merchants in other cities.

The Hanse in Bruges was established in the late twelfth century, and the Hanse in Bergen in Norway and the Hanse in Novgorod in Russia were established in the early thirteenth century. The Hanserecesse — the principal documentary record of the Hanse — preserve the institutional history of the League. The work of Philippe Dollinger, of Donald Logan, of John Le Patourel, of the late Jean-Pierre Molénat, of the late Robert Stallo, of the late Jean-Pierre Bénoit is the principal monument. The new commercial history of the Hanse has been transformed by the systematic work on the Hanserecesse, on the Stadtbücher of the Hanseatic cities, on the Handelskammerakten of the Hanseatic cities, and on the Rezeßakten of the Hansetag of Lübeck, of the Hansetag of Cologne, of the Hansetag of Brunswick, of the Hansetag of Magdeburg, of the Hansetag of Dortmund, of the Hansetag of Danzig, of the Hansetag of Riga, of the Hansetag of Lübeck, of the Hansetag of Hamburg, of the Hansetag of Bremen, of the Hansetag of Rostock, of the Hansetag of Wismar, of the Hansetag of Stralsund, of the Hansetag of Lüneburg, of the Hansetag of Stade, of the Hansetag of Buxtehude, of the Hansetag of Kiel, of the Hansetag of Lübeck, of the Hansetag of Hamburg.

The Structure of the League

The Hanseatic League was, in its mature form, a confederation of cities of three kinds. The Kontore — the four great trading posts of the League at London, Bergen, Novgorod, and Bruges — were the principal external institutions of the League, and they were governed by their own officials and had their own system of laws. The Quartierstädte — the major cities of the League — were organised into four quarters: the Wendish quarter (Lübeck and the Baltic cities), the Saxon quarter (Brunswick, Magdeburg, and the central German cities), the Westphalian quarter (Cologne, Dortmund, and the western German cities), and the Prussian-Livonian quarter (Danzig, Riga, and the eastern Baltic cities). The Mitgliedsstädte were the smaller cities and towns of the League, and they were the most numerous of the three classes.

The Hansetag was the principal deliberative body. The Hansetag decided on the common policies of the League: the war and the peace, the Kontor and the Hanse, the Stapelrecht and the Gastrecht, the Marktfreiheit and the Zollfreiheit, the Kaufmannsrecht and the Stadtrecht. The Hansetag of 1356, the Hansetag of 1361, the Hansetag of 1364, the Hansetag of 1367, the Hansetag of 1370, the Hansetag of 1373, the Hansetag of 1375, the Hansetag of 1376, the Hansetag of 1377, the Hansetag of 1378, the Hansetag of 1379, the Hansetag of 1380, the Hansetag of 1381, the Hansetag of 1382, the Hansetag of 1383, the Hansetag of 1384, the Hansetag of 1385 — were the principal Hansetage of the late fourteenth century.

The Trade of the League

The Hanseatic League was, in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the dominant commercial organization of the Baltic and the North Sea. The League controlled the trade of a vast region that stretched from the Low Countries to the Baltic, and from the British Isles to Russia. The main commodities of the Hanseatic trade were: English wool, exported from the Stalhof of London to the cloth towns of the draperie of Flanders (especially Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges); Flemish cloth, exported from the Hanse of Bruges to the Baltic and the North Sea; furs, wax, honey, and timber, exported from the Peterhof of Novgorod and the Kontor of the eastern Baltic; salt and herring, exported from the Hanse of Scania (the herring of Scania was the most valuable commodity of the late-medieval Hanseatic trade) and from the Hanse of the North Sea; grain, exported from the eastern Baltic (Pomerania, Prussia, and Livonia) to the cities of the western Baltic and the North Sea; and iron and copper, exported from the Bergslagen of Sweden.

The Hanseatic merchants were also important in the trade between northern and southern Europe, and they were active in the Champagne fairs and the great Italian commercial centres. The Hanseatic merchants developed a sophisticated system of credit, and they were important customers of the Italian banking houses — the Bardi, the Peruzzi, the Acciaiuoli, the Frescobaldi, the Pazzi, the Medici. The Hanse of Bruges was, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the principal Hanse of the Hanseatic merchants in the south, and the Hanse of Lübeck was the principal Hanse of the Hanseatic merchants in the north.

The Decline of the League

The Hanseatic League began to decline in the fifteenth century, as the great nation-states of Europe developed their own commercial policies. The English kings, the French kings, the kings of Denmark, and the kings of Sweden all asserted their authority over the trade of their territories, and they gradually undermined the privileges of the Hanseatic merchants. The principal events of the decline were: in England, the progressive reduction of the Hanseatic privileges through the Carta Mercatoria of 1303, the Statute of the Staple of 1353, and a long series of Tudor and early Stuart statutes and ordinances that progressively closed the English market to the Hanse; in France, the progressive reduction of the Privilèges of the Hanse through the Ordonnances of 1351, 1413, 1461, and 1482; in Denmark, the Treaty of Stralsund of 1370 (which fixed the relative position of the Hanse and the Danish crown for a generation), the Treaty of Vordingborg of 1368, and a long series of subsequent treaties that progressively reduced the Hanse’s control of Scania and the Sound; in Sweden, the Treaty of Lödöse of 1333, the Treaty of Nyköping of 1396, and a long series of subsequent treaties that progressively reduced the Hanse’s control of the Bergslagen and of the iron; in Poland and the eastern Baltic, the Treaty of Kalisz of 1343, the Treaty of Kraków of 1454, and the Treaty of Toruń of 1466 (the Second Peace of Thorn) that progressively reduced the Hanse’s control of the Prussian trade; and the long war of the Hanse with the Vitalienbrüder — the Victual Brothers — of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (the Vitalienbrüder of 1390–1400 under the leadership of Klaus Stortebeker and Gödeke Michels), which disrupted the Scandinavian and the North Sea trade.

The final blow to the League came in the seventeenth century, when the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) devastated the German cities and undermined the foundations of the League. The last Hansetag was held in 1669, and the League was formally dissolved.

Reading the Hanse

The historiography of the Hanseatic League has been, in many respects, the historiography of the late-medieval northern European economy. The work of Philippe Dollinger, of Donald Logan, of John Le Patourel, of Edmund B. Fryde, of John H. Munro, of the late Robert-Henri Bautier, of the late Jean-Pierre Molénat, of the late Robert Stallo, of the late Jean-Pierre Bénoit, of the late David Abulafia is the principal monument. The new commercial history of the Hanse has been transformed by the systematic work on the Hanserecesse, on the Stadtbücher of the Hanseatic cities, on the Handelskammerakten of the Hanseatic cities, and on the Rezeßakten of the Hansetag of Lübeck, of the Hansetag of Cologne, of the Hansetag of Brunswick, of the Hansetag of Magdeburg, of the Hansetag of Dortmund, of the Hansetag of Danzig, of the Hansetag of Riga.

The work of the late Philippe Dollinger (whose The German Hansa of 1970, English translation, has been the principal monument of the modern historiography of the Hanse), of Donald Logan, of John Le Patourel, of Edmund B. Fryde, of the late Robert-Henri Bautier, of the late David Abulafia, of the late Jean-Pierre Molénat has, in two generations, recovered the Hanse as a documentary and an institutional object. The new economic history of the Hanse — the work of John H. Munro, of the late Jean-Pierre Molénat, of the late Robert Stallo, of the late David Abulafia — has transformed the older, more juridical and more institutional account of the League.

References and Further Reading

Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa (English edn. 1970; French original La Hanse, 1964).
Donald Logan, The Vikings in History (1983, 1991) and A History of the Church in the Middle Ages (2002).
John Le Patourel, The Norman Empire and the Channel Islands (1963) and his editions of the English treaty rolls.
Edmund B. Fryde, Studies in the Trade of the English Clothiers (1973).
Robert-Henri Bautier, Les foires de Champagne (1988).
John H. Munro, “The ‘New Draperies’ in the Low Countries and England: A Comparative View,” Textiles of the Low Countries in European Economic History (2001).
David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2011).