Hanseatic League

Hanseatic League, organization founded by north German towns and German merchant communities abroad to protect their mutual trading interests. The league dominated commercial activity in northern Europe from the 13th to the 15th century. (Hanse was a medieval German word for “guild,” or “association,” derived from a Gothic word for “troop,” or “company.”)

The origins of the league are to be found in groupings of traders and groupings of trading towns in two main areas: in the east, where German merchants won a monopoly of the Baltic trade, and in the west, where Rhineland merchants (especially from Cologne [Köln]) were active in the Low Countries and in England. The league came into being when those various associations coalesced, a process encouraged by the natural interdependence of trade in these regions and largely initiated and controlled by those towns, notably Lübeck, which had a central position and a vital interest in trade between the Baltic and northwestern Europe.

Northern German mastery of trade in the Baltic Sea was achieved with striking speed and completeness in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. After its capture by Henry III (the Lion) in 1158, Lübeck became the main base for Westphalian and Saxon merchants expanding northward and eastward. Visby, on the Swedish island of Gotland, was soon established as a major transshipment centre for trade in the Baltic and with Novgorod (now Veliky Novgorod), which was the chief mart for the Russian trade. From Visby, German merchants helped establish important towns on the east coast of the Baltic: Riga, Reval (now Tallinn), Danzig (now Gdańsk), and Dorpat (now Tartu). Thus, by the early 13th century Germans had a near monopoly of long-distance trade in the Baltic.

The dominance achieved by German traders came about largely as a result of cooperation that took two forms: (1) Merchants far from their various hometowns but with a common interest in some particular branch of foreign trade tended increasingly to form Hanses with each other; (2) German towns formed loose unions. Those towns and their policies were dominated by great merchant families, and those families were linked by kinship and by mutual interest. So it is not surprising that from the beginning of the 13th century there appeared associations of cities that increased in size and intimacy and had as their fundamental purpose the removal of obstacles to trade. As early as 1210 Lübeck and Hamburg agreed that a common law obtain between them in certain matters, and that rapprochement led in 1241 to a formal alliance to secure common action against robbers and pirates. This was only one of several such agreements, in which Lübeck was usually prominent, like that of 1259 between Lübeck, Rostock, Wismar, and Stralsund; their principal objectives were always the suppression of piracy and other threats to trade.

Western trade (to 1200)

In the meantime, merchants from Cologne and other towns in the Rhineland had acquired trading privileges in Flanders and in England. In London they enjoyed special royal protection by the end of the 10th century, and with the expansion of their economic importance in England during the 12th century, there was a corresponding growth of the power privileges of the Hanse of Cologne merchants resident in the capital. Two landmarks were the charter of privileges granted by Henry II in 1157 and the rights granted by Richard I in 1194 in return for financial aid. The situation in Flanders is not as satisfactorily documented, but probably an association of Cologne merchants regularly constituted at Brugge by the middle of the century to participate in a vast complex of trade that found a natural focus in the Low Countries.

Merging of the associations

From the mid-13th century the cooperation between north German towns became much more extensive and regularized. By 1265 all towns having the “law of Lübeck” had agreed on common legislation for the defense of merchants and their goods. Strong in their control of the Baltic trade, Lübeck, Danzig, Riga, and their satellites forced their way into the west. They entered areas where Rhineland merchants had formerly been dominant, secured for themselves the privileges formerly reserved to the Rhinelanders, and finally joined their rivals in the creation of common Hanses in London and Brugge. At the same time, the group put the final touches on their control of the Baltic by reducing Visby to subservience with the capture of Gotland in 1293 and by fusing the two great Hanses operating in Gotland into one great union largely dominated by Lübeck. The upshot was that the Hanses in London, Brugge, and the Baltic were united into a single grouping and with the association of German towns itself.

The decisive steps in this critical phase of Hanseatic history were all taken in the last half of the 13th century. The full and privileged entry of Lübeck and Hamburg into the trade of Brugge dates from their initiative of 1252 and the agreement of 1253. In London and other English centres, the same two towns first won privileges and organization distinct from those of the Cologne Hanse and then forced union upon the Cologne association, so by 1282 the two were joined in a “German” Hanse. Even before that amalgamation the Lübeck-Hamburg Hanses operating in England and Flanders had united. Finally, in the 1280s, this confederation of German merchants trading in the west was closely joined to the association of north German towns that had reached maturity by the 1260s. During that same period the German cities rounded their monopoly of the Baltic trade, linked the towns and the Hanses conducting that trade closely to themselves, and established Kontore (commercial enclaves) in Novgorod and Bergen (in Norway). By the close the 13th century, all north German trading associations and towns and their bases for foreign commerce were bound in a single league, including nearly every port from Bremen to Reval. The trade of the Baltic and of the North Sea was in the hands of German merchants, and at the same time, the habits and methods of common action were being strengthened.