The Constitution That Came Too Late

One pastor, four ordinances

Johannes Bugenhagen travelled with a draft in his luggage. A Pomeranian pastor out of Wittenberg, he became the man northern German councils sent for once they had decided to reorder their churches and found that they did not know how to write it down. What he wrote for them was a church ordinance: a written order, enacted by a town council, setting the form of worship, the running of the schools and the relief of the poor for that town. He drafted in Low German, the language the diets had always kept their recesses in.

The first in the region was not his. In 1525 the council of Stralsund issued an ordinance drawn up by Johann Äpinus, who had been with Bugenhagen in the reforming circle at Belbuck abbey. Bugenhagen wrote Braunschweig's in 1528 and Hamburg's in 1529. Lübeck's was published on 27 May 1531, after the council, the citizenry and the preachers had negotiated over the text between them. In 1537 the change reached Norway, and with Norway it reached Bergen [CR].

Every one of these was a statute. A council adopting a church ordinance was legislating about property, appointments, schooling and poor relief, and enforcing the result through its own court. The ordinances travelled the way Lübeck law had travelled, by being copied into places that wanted the same arrangement and trusted the version they could already see working.

Why the Hanseatic towns went early is a question about councils rather than about doctrine. Three pressures ran together. Councils wanted more room against the territorial princes whose lands surrounded them, and a church establishment answering to a bishop was one of the princes' handholds inside the walls. Within the walls there was a second quarrel, older than the Reformation: burghers against the patrician families who monopolised the council, and a reordering of the church was a reordering of who held appointments and who held property. And there was a broad anticlericalism to draw on, of the ordinary kind that resents an exempt neighbour with a court of his own.

One large member did not go. Cologne's council and its archbishop stayed Catholic, and Cologne stayed Catholic through everything that follows. When the reformed Hanse came to fix what each of its members owed, in 1604, Cologne stood at the head of the list beside Lübeck, at the same rate. The organisation's confessional map and its financial map did not match, and nobody in it proposed that they should.

What the Reformation interrupted

Something else was under way in those years, and the Reformation ran over it.

By 1518 the towns had built up the idea of an annual contribution: every member paying in each year, on a scale that distinguished the small towns from the large ones [M]. That is the association's first attempt to give itself a subscription, and it was already worked out far enough to have a graded membership inside it. Then the Reformation arrived in the towns, and the work stopped. It was not resumed until the middle of the century.

The usual account of why the Hanse could never fund itself arrives from outside, in Dutch hulls and Prussian grain and other people's capital. This one was derailed from inside the Hanseatic world, by Hanseatic councils, decades before any of that.

The Reformation reached the machinery a second time, and further in.

The Hanse as a body had no religion. It had no patron, no commemoration of its dead and no feast of its own, so there was nothing there to reform. Its kontors were another matter. Each had an oath sworn on joining, a brotherhood, masses said for dead members and a calendar of feasts, and at Bergen the confraternity's rules were the mechanism by which a man became part of the community and was held inside it. Lutheran reform removed part of that apparatus.

What it did to the kontors as communities is not something anybody can say from the literature as it stands. No study follows it through. The field's own survey of what still needs work lists the spread of the Reformation in the Hanseatic towns and outposts among the open areas, which is to say that nobody has yet sat down with the sources and asked what a reformed church did to a body that reproduced itself through oaths and requiem masses.

One fact does survive the silence, and it cuts against the obvious guess. Several of the merchants' own guilds at home outlasted the League by a long way, the Bergenfahrer among them. Whatever the reform did to the brotherhoods abroad, it did not dissolve the brotherhood as a form.

Wullenwever

Jürgen Wullenwever had been arguing the case of Lübeck's Lutheran citizenry since the beginning of 1530, in a town where the citizenry's grievances against its council were older than the sermons. In 1533 a popular movement broke the patricians' hold on the council, and he became mayor. Nothing about the appointment was ordinary. He came in on a rising, with a programme, in a town that had run Baltic policy for generations and had lately been losing at it.

His first answer was a war. Dutch shipping was taking trade Lübeck regarded as its own, and he licensed privateers against it. Then he went further, into the Danish succession, on the side of the deposed Christian II and the towns' own interest in who held the sound. The Count's Feud ran from 1534 to 1536: Lübeck and the burgher parties of the Danish towns against the Danish nobility and the duke who became Christian III, with Lübeck paying for the war and fighting it.

What he was after is usually described as the recovery of what Stralsund had given the towns: a hold over who could be received as king of Denmark, and a hold over the straits. That description belongs to modern historians, and it points at a resemblance rather than a plan. He held no Scanian castle, renewed no fifteen-year term and invoked no charter. What survives of his own intentions is thinner than the description, and a good deal of what survives is a confession extracted under torture, which cannot stand as evidence of what it alleges.

He failed twice over, and the second failure is the one that carries. The patrician families he had displaced worked against him at home and got their council back. The other Hanseatic towns declined to commit on Lübeck's scale: some sent something, most sent nothing, and none of them would treat a Danish succession as a common Hanseatic war. So Lübeck was fighting a war of Hanseatic ambition with one town's money, which is a thing a town can do once. He resigned in 1535.

The men who replaced him negotiated. The peace of 14 February 1536 was favourable to Lübeck, which kept its trade and its standing and lost only the ambition, so that the feud ended badly for the man and tolerably for the town. It ended worst of all for him, and not at his own town's hands. He was taken by a territorial prince, held, tried, and executed at Wolfenbüttel on 24 September 1537 [CR]. Lübeck did not kill him, and no version in which a town settled accounts with its own mayor survives contact with where he died.

Something ended in 1534 that is easy to miss, because it ended quietly. It was the last year in which a Hanseatic town tried to settle Baltic policy with a fleet. Everything the towns did afterwards to give themselves teeth was administrative: an office, a subscription list, a sealed instrument with articles in it. None of those things needs a fleet, and none of them frightened anybody. And the next thing that happened to the Hanse happened in a room in London, and happened to it.

A suspension in London

On 24 February 1552 the Privy Council gave its decision against the Steelyard. The matter had been in front of the Council before and had been put off; this time it was not. The Merchant Adventurers had made the running, and their argument was the one they had been pressing for years: that the men of the Steelyard held no corporation sufficient to hold a franchise, and that what they were exercising had grown far past anything the old grants covered.

The terms are the whole of it. The Council suspended the franchises pending proof. The merchants were to produce evidence that they ought to enjoy them, and until they produced it they would trade in England on the same footing as all other aliens [CR]. The burden had been turned around. A body that had held privileges in London for longer than anyone could remember was now required to demonstrate its entitlement to them, in a foreign chancery, on a timetable it did not control. Nothing was taken away in so many words. The old grants were still parchment in a chest by the Thames; what had gone was the presumption that the parchment settled anything. Until an English council could be satisfied about the standing of a body that had never had a founding instrument, the privileges did not operate.

Two ambassadors of the Wendish towns had reached London three days before the verdict. They stayed until July, arguing, and came away with two concessions. The decision itself stood, and the merchants went on trading in London on the footing the Council had put them on.

The second act came twenty-seven years later. In 1579 the Steelyard's privileges were revoked by royal decree, under a different sovereign and on a different footing [CR]. Retellings compress the two into a single mid-century revocation. They were two acts with different legal content: one demanded that the merchants prove what they were, and the other ended the grant. The demand for proof is the one worth stopping on, because a demand for proof assumes there is something that could be produced.

There was not. An association asked to show, on demand, the documentary basis of what it was had nobody whose business it was to hold that basis: no archive of the whole, no officer of the whole, and nobody who could be sent to England to answer for the whole with authority to bind it to the answer. Within a few years the towns set about making one.

An office, and a man who was never paid

The innovations arrived together, from 1554, and they read like an inventory of what had been missing. The annual payment was to be made in advance. The rights and duties of member towns were to be fixed in binding form. Attendance at the diets, and observance of what the diets resolved, were to be regulated rather than assumed. And in 1556 the towns made an office: a Hanseatic syndic, a council's salaried legal officer, trained in law, who drafted its instruments, argued its case and travelled on its embassies, except that this one belonged to no single council.

The same reform sorted the towns into four quarters, each division carrying a principal town that sealed and spoke for it: Lübeck, Cologne, Braunschweig and Danzig. The aim of both moves was a smaller core, bound more tightly, with somebody at the head of each division who could be held to an answer and somebody at the centre who could be sent to give one. Before 1556 an embassy to a foreign court had to be assembled out of whichever towns would send men and pay for them, and it arrived speaking for whoever had turned up.

The office found its man immediately and kept him for the rest of his life. Heinrich Sudermann was born at Cologne on 31 August 1520, took his doctorates in canon and civil law and practised at the Imperial Chamber Court, which is exactly the training a body facing the Privy Council had discovered it needed. He was appointed in 1556. He held the post for thirty-five years and went out on something like fifty diplomatic missions in the course of them [M], to England, to the Netherlands, to the imperial court and around the member towns themselves, carrying the association's case to people who wanted to know who exactly they were dealing with.

He was never paid. The salary was voted and the money did not arrive, because the money to pay it was supposed to come from the same annual contributions the towns were not making. By 1569 his outstanding claims ran past 20,000 thalers [M], and what he received against them was promissory notes: the association settling its debts to its own officer in paper drawn on revenue it had not collected. Nobody disputed the debt. It was entered, acknowledged, and carried forward from one diet to the next for the rest of his life. He died at Lübeck on 31 August 1591, the date of his own birth, still holding the post and still owed.

Twenty thousand thalers was the arrears of one man. The sum the towns would later fix as the whole association's income for a year is smaller than that, and smaller by a great deal.

Three instruments

In 1557 the towns sealed a Konföderationsnotel: a confederation instrument that lists the member towns and the obligations each of them accepted, for a stated term. It ran to ten articles and was valid for ten years. Four towns sealed it in their capacity as quarter towns, and they sealed it for sixty-three [M].

The articles are specific, which is the point of them. Towns were to attend the diets and accept what was resolved there. Disputes between members were to go first to neighbouring towns as arbitrators and then to the diet, and members were forbidden absolutely to carry them to any outside court. Costs were to be shared: for protecting the roads and the sea routes, for embassies, and for compensating members who were attacked. Peace-breakers were to be met with joint armed action. Foreigners and idlers in the towns were to be controlled. A town that disobeyed could be shut out.

For the first time the Hanse had a text saying, precisely, what each member town could claim and what each member town owed. The association that had taken a treaty off the kingdom of Denmark with no charter, no treasury, no court and no legal personality now had a document with articles in it and four seals on it.

The immediate result was a wave of exits. Towns that had been counted in for generations read the articles, saw what they were being asked to seal, and left.

It was renewed anyway. In 1579 it came back in sixteen articles, asserting more firmly that a resolution of the diet bound the towns that had not come. In 1604 it came back again, in fifteen [M].

So if the towns wrote themselves three constitutions and sealed them, in what sense did they not have one?

The answer is procedural, and it is the entire mechanism. A town sent its envoy with limited powers. At the diet the envoy took the resolution ad referendum: he accepted it subject to his own council deciding on it at home, with the right of refusal reserved, so that his agreement bound nobody until the town said so. No article had to be broken. Every article could be agreed to, and referred, and left. The towns did not defy the rule. They routed around it.

The English name is what that attempt left behind. In the specialist German literature Hansebund has practically vanished; in English the Hanseatic League survives, and what survives in it is the effort of the later sixteenth century to remake the Hanse as a league of towns. That is why the name fits the decades between the first instrument and the last, and misdescribes the centuries around them. The towns' own habitual word for themselves was still gemener copman, the common merchant.

One thousand two hundred and eighty-three

At the diet of 1604 the towns still reckoned to the Hanse were listed, and what each of them owed a year into the common treasury was fixed against its name. The payment had a name of its own, the annuum: the annual sum a member owed in, set by rank. It was reckoned in Reichstaler, the large silver coin of the Empire and the unit the reformed Hanse assessed its members in.

The shape of the list is the shape of the organisation. Lübeck and Cologne at the head, at 100 Reichstaler each. Hamburg and Danzig at 80. Lüneburg and Bremen at 60. Then a long descending tail through the levels the list uses — 50, 40, 35, 30, 27, 25, 23, 20, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 12 and 10 — and at the bottom of the paying towns, Gollnow, at 8 [M].

A different document, from three years earlier, records the towns that carried more than the annuum. At the diet of 1601, where the annuum was fixed in the interest of the less wealthy towns, fourteen contributing towns were identified as paying both it and the special contributions on top of it: Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Rostock, Stralsund, Wismar, Braunschweig, Magdeburg, Lüneburg, Danzig, Greifswald, Stettin and Hildesheim [CR]. Six of those are among the towns whose 1604 rate is recorded. The other eight — Rostock, Stralsund, Wismar, Braunschweig, Magdeburg, Greifswald, Stettin and Hildesheim — stand in the record as contributors with no figure against their names.

Thirty-two of the towns on the 1604 list were exempt from paying anything at all. Expected income, with every rate on the list added up: 1,283 Reichstaler a year [M].

That list is worth reading twice, because the source contradicts itself over it. The dissertation that supplies the tabulation says in one sentence that all seventy-two towns still counted to the Hanse were listed, and two sentences later that thirty-two of the seventy-four were exempt. Seventy-two less thirty-two is forty, and forty is the number of bars carrying a figure in the chart printed alongside [D]. That is a consistency check and not a resolution. The confederation instrument's own appendix has not been read by anyone working on this account, and until somebody reads it the seventy-two and the seventy-four both stand.

None of it came in. Income had been reckoned at 2,045 Reichstaler a year in 1554 and at 1,214 by 1609, and neither figure was ever reached [M]. Seventy-odd towns on a membership list were seventy-odd councils, and by 1604 the traffic that could have carried a levy sat in a few of them while the list went on counting the rest.

The end of it is in the paper the towns issued to cover themselves. Between 1609 and 1614 seven of them put out bonds worth 37,950 mark lübisch, about 12,650 Reichstaler on the reckoning of the day, redeemable at five per cent a year [M]. It was written into the bonds that they held their validity only as long as the Hanseatic union still existed. The people lending to the reformed Hanse had put the possibility of its death into the contract, and priced it.