A Rule England Enforced

A war the League did not fight

In 1454 Danzig advanced 28,750 Hungarian florins to the estates of Prussia and 21,500 florins to the king of Poland. [CR] [M] Two counterparties, in the same year, out of one town's treasury. The estates were fighting a war; the king was being asked to take the province off them. Danzig was funding both halves of the same transaction.

It went on paying. Money laid out to buy garrisons out of the castles they were holding came to something like 90,250 florins, or 144,400 Prussian marks. [M] [E] Foltz, reconstructing the whole of Danzig's expenditure across the war of 1454 to 1466, arrived at about 470,000 florins, or 752,000 Prussian marks. [E] Each figure is given here in the unit its source gives it, and the two totals in both units because the source gives both. Nothing on this page is converted into anything else.

What the money bought was a revolt. In 1454 the Prussian Confederation, which was Danzig, Elbing, Kulm and Thorn together with the Prussian gentry, rose against the Teutonic Order and placed itself under Casimir IV of Poland. [CR] The fighting lasted thirteen years and closed in 1466. Danzig supported the revolt with ships, with credit, with taxes and with political leadership, and the modern judgement on its part is that the revolt could not have been sustained without it. [M]

The Hanse was not a belligerent. Hanseatic and ecclesiastical mediators went in and out of the negotiations, Lübeck's own bishop among them in the final phase [CR], and that was the extent of the League's part in it. Four of its member towns fought a thirteen-year war against the lord who had chartered them, and the association they belonged to appears in the record as a well-meaning third party.

Now set Danzig's spending beside the largest war bill the League's leading town could put a figure to. Lübeck's identified expenditure on the Danish war, which you met earlier in this series, is smaller by an order of magnitude. One member town, on a war the League did not declare, did not finance and did not fight, spent many times over what Lübeck could account for on a war it had declared, sailed and won.

That comparison is made in words rather than in figures, and deliberately. Both sides of it are reconstructions: somebody went through what survives, decided which payments belonged to the war and which did not, and added them up. Printing two such totals side by side would suggest a precision neither of them has.

The Danzig figures carry a further caution. All three come from a single research dossier, and all three sit outside the set of numbers this series has been able to check independently, which covers economic series of a different kind. The label on Foltz's total says what kind of number it is. The appendix says where the three came from and what could not be done with them. They are printed rather than dropped because without them there is no way to see the scale of what one town did here, and the scale is the whole point.

Danzig gets a king

The Second Peace of Thorn was signed on 19 October 1466. [CR] Royal Prussia — Chełmno Land, Danzig Pomerania and the Marienburg region — passed to the direct sovereignty of the Polish king and crown, and kept its own coinage, its own diet, its own military and German as the language of its administration. [CR] [M]

Read that as a list of what a province was allowed to keep. Money, an assembly, an armed force and the language business was done in are most of the working parts of a polity, and Danzig was the largest town inside the province that kept them. The Order had been the counterparty for everything the town did beyond its own walls, and the Order was out of the picture. What took its place was a crown at the far end of the Vistula, whose grain had to come down the river past Danzig to reach anybody at all.

For Danzig the change was worth having. It acquired a sovereign whose interest in the Vistula trade ran with its own instead of against it, and a constitutional position closer to that of a small state than to that of a member town.

From there it is tempting to write Danzig out of the Hanse, and popular accounts do, usually with a phrase about the town beginning to drift away. A place with its own coin, its own diet and a king who wanted its grain moving does look like a place that has outgrown an association of towns. It is the kind of inference that needs no evidence to feel sound, which is a good reason to go and look for some.

Danzig did not leave the Hanse. It was at the diets through the sixteenth century. When the League at last got round to assessing what its members owed it each year, Danzig was among the towns carrying the heaviest assessments. And it sent its own delegate to the diet of 1669 [CR], the last one ever held.

What the record supports is narrower than an exit. After 1466 Danzig's most valuable relationships ran to Kraków and to Amsterdam, and Hanseatic membership became one asset among several rather than the frame of the town's politics. A membership held on those terms is not being abandoned. It is also not what it was: the difference between a town that needs the Hanse and a town that finds it useful is not visible in any document, and it decides everything about how such a town behaves when the League asks it for something.

While Thorn was being settled, clerks at the London Guildhall were certifying which merchants belonged to the Hanse, and the next part of this series reads their lists.

The alliances that would not hold

Membership survived a change of sovereign because there was so little of it to survive. That was not for want of trying. Since 1418 the towns had been attempting to build a membership that carried obligations, and the instrument they kept reaching for was the tohopesate: a joining together, which in practice meant a sealed defensive alliance among named towns, for a stated purpose and a stated term, with each member's contribution of money or force assessed in advance.

At a Lübeck diet in 1418 they developed one against princely arbitrariness. Disputes between members would go to mediation; members would supply money or force against whoever broke the peace. Roughly forty towns were in the negotiation. [M] Nothing durable came out of it. Princely arbitrariness was not an abstraction, either. It meant a lord seizing the goods of a town's merchants over a quarrel with the town, and no court either party would agree to be heard in.

In 1443 a tohopesate was ratified at last, and it bound only the towns of the Lübeck third. [M]

In 1451 came the great one: twenty-eight allied towns, the most important in the Hanse, for a term of six years, with assistance organised through regional contingents and cash alternatives to sending men. [M] The Prussian towns were not in it.

Two things were wrong with all of them, and neither was apathy.

The first is that every version was partial, along the fault line the wars of these decades kept opening: the Wendish core in, the Prussians and Livonians and the Zuiderzee towns out. An alliance that cannot include Danzig cannot defend the Baltic, and an alliance limited to one third cannot claim to speak for the rest.

The second is that a term-limited alliance is the wrong instrument for an open-ended problem. Ahasver von Brandt, writing about the arrangement a later century put in the same place, refused to treat it as a constitutional basis at all, on the ground that it was a Zweckvertrag: a contract for a purpose, with an expiry date on it. [M] The objection voids 1451 as squarely as it voids the later one. A constitution that runs out is a treaty. A town that has signed for six years has signed for six years, and the assembly that wants it bound for a seventh has to go back and ask.

So the great alliance of 1451 left out the town that, three years later, began paying for a thirteen-year war on its own account. The instrument meant to make members answerable to one another was, in its best version, an agreement the Prussian towns had not signed. The towns went on trying afterwards, and the last of those attempts, made when there was no foreign treaty to lean on, comes later in this series.

An arrest in London

The League could not bind its own members by agreement. In the same stretch of years it got a foreign king's treaty to bind one of them for it, and the route by which that happened starts in London.

Some Danzig ships took part in an attack in the Sound, sailing under Danish colours. A few English witnesses swore that Lübeck and Stralsund ships had been in it as well, though their complicity can probably be ruled out. [M] Danzig's authorities were writing to the Steelyard to disclaim responsibility before the news had reached England. [CR] That letter tells you what everyone involved expected to happen next. Losses at sea were charged to the German merchants in London as a body, because collective liability was the ordinary treatment of a foreign community, and a town that thought it might be blamed wrote ahead of the complaint rather than after it.

On 23 July 1468 the Steelyard's officials were notified that the next day they were to answer before the king and council for complicity. [CR] [M]

They did not get a hearing on the privileges. The Chancellor brushed those aside and demanded sureties of £20,000, the alleged total of English losses, as the alternative to arresting the merchants and seizing their goods. [CR] [M] A surety is a third party who pledges to answer for another man's liability if he does not answer for it himself, and £20,000 is a sum that requires several of them, each of whom must be found in England and must be willing. Sureties were the ordinary alternative to imprisonment, which is what makes the demand legible: an everyday English procedure was being applied to men whose charters said that English procedure did not reach them.

No Englishman would stand. The council then accepted the merchants' own recognisances instead, a recognisance being a man's formal undertaking, entered before a court or council, to pay a stated sum if he fails a stated condition. Then it reversed itself. [CR] [M] Which left them where they had begun, with a demand outstanding and no lawful way to meet it.

Nothing in that sequence is arbitrary. It is what a privilege is, working normally. A privilege is a grant, made by a power that had reasons for making it and can find reasons for setting it aside, and its value on any given morning is the value of that power's forbearance that morning. The Steelyard's charters had been confirmed by one English king after another, and the men summoned had traded in London under them all their working lives. In the room where the Chancellor was speaking the charters did not survive the opening.

What followed was war at sea and a long, broken negotiation, none of which is narrated here. It ends at a conference that resumed at Utrecht, and in a treaty whose most consequential clause is one that was taken out of it.

The clause that was deleted

The League's own sanction had been written into a treaty once, and it is worth reading in the words it was written in. The confederation the towns sealed at Cologne in 1367, to make war on the king of Denmark, carried this clause: [CR]

If any town of the Wendish side, of Prussia, of Livonia and of the German Hanse generally, of the Zuiderzee, of Holland and of Zealand will not do herein as it is apportioned and assessed by the other towns, its burghers and merchants shall have no dealings with all the towns in this confederation, so that no one shall buy from them or sell to them, and they shall seek no harbour to sail out of or into, nor to load nor to unload, for ten years.

Notice who has to carry it out. The sanction runs through the member towns severally, each on its own burghers: nobody of ours buys, nobody of ours sells, no harbour of ours opens. There was no officer of the Hanse to do it centrally, and the clause makes no provision for one. A town that wanted an offender punished had to punish him itself, and had to hope the other towns were doing the same.

In 1474 that sanction was applied to Cologne, which had stayed neutral in the Anglo-Hanseatic war. Four acts applied it, and the party performing them changes at every step.

It begins with a position. The English council was, in Lloyd's reading of its instructions, genuinely loath to abandon the Cologne men, but would do it rather than lose the treaty, provided it was done in a way which spared the king's honour. [M]

Then comes a substitution. The reference to excluding the Cologners was deleted from the main treaty, and a general provision put in its place, any town expelled from the Hanse would be denied the use of the privileges until it was readmitted. [CR] [M]

Then a declaration. The Hanse delegates stated that Cologne had been expelled. [CR] [M]

Then a date. A subsidiary treaty, signed the same day, provided that Cologne's merchants would be excluded from the franchises after 1 August 1474, the day the ratified copies were to be exchanged at Bruges. [CR] [M] Ratification is a sovereign's own confirmation of what his envoys have signed; until he gives it, their signature does not bind him.

England did not exclude Cologne. It agreed a rule, and the Hanse triggered it.

Hold that against the 1367 clause. In 1367 the towns wrote a punishment each of them would have to inflict, town by town, on its own burghers, with nothing behind it but their willingness to keep inflicting it. In 1474 an English treaty inflicted it for them.

One caution about the sequence itself. All four acts come from T. H. Lloyd, who worked the Anglo-Hanseatic war from the English side, and no other account consulted for this series corroborates the order in which he puts them. That Cologne's merchants lost the franchises is not in doubt. The drafting that got them there rests on him.

What Utrecht actually cost, on both sides

The treaty signed at Utrecht on 28 February 1474 restored and confirmed the privileges, secured the Steelyard property, provided for compensation and guaranteed access associated with Boston, Lynn and Hull. The cash indemnity, which had already come down to £15,000 in the earlier sessions, was reduced to £10,000. [CR] [M] Edward IV ratified the treaty and again confirmed the Hanse franchises on 20 July. [CR] [M]

Read as a list of terms, that is a settlement in which one side collected and the other paid, and it has generally been read that way: the men who negotiated it for England gave everything away. It is a fair reading of the paper. The privileges came back whole, the property was secured, the indemnity came down again, and a rival lost the use of the franchises on the same day.

Lloyd's answer to that reading is one sentence. The willingness of the English negotiators to surrender everything is visible in their instructions, and it has, he writes, conditioned historians into accepting the verdict the instructions suggest. “This is untrue”, and it does less than justice to the men who negotiated the treaty, for they did not give everything away. [M]

The charge Lloyd does make is heavier than the one he refuses. They abandoned the principle of reciprocity — each side granting the other's merchants the treatment its own received, so that a concession made ran both ways — which had been the main plank of English policy towards the Hanse for a hundred years. [M] What that was worth is easiest to see from the far end of the route. An English merchant trying to sell cloth in Danzig had no charter of his own to stand on; what he had was the argument that his king's grants to Hanseatic merchants in London bought his own standing in Prussia. After Utrecht he did not have it.

How often the League's sanction worked cannot be said. Nobody has assembled the expulsions that were threatened, imposed, evaded and reversed into a set that could be counted, so there is no rate to quote. What can be said is that this is the clearest documented case of it working at all.

Which leaves an asymmetry. In the same decade, the League could not get its own members to contribute to a common defence, and it could get an English treaty to carry its sanction against one of them. Both of those were true at once, and the second is not evidence that the League was strong. It is evidence that somebody else's state had the enforcement machinery the towns had never managed to build for themselves.