Fourteen Towns

A list nobody made for us

A German merchant landing a cargo at Boston in the 1460s put the same question to the officer who met him at the quay, and the officer had to settle it before anything came ashore: at what rate was this man to be charged? English customs did not treat everyone alike. A denizen paid the duties an English subject paid. An alien paid more, on more goods, and had fewer grounds on which to argue about it. Hanseatic merchants held the right to be charged at or near the denizen's rate, and that right is the reason anybody had to establish who they were. The gap between the two rates was wide enough that a man who could pass as a Hansard at the waterside had every motive to try, and the crown had a better one to stop him.

The English took their answer in writing. From 1463 the Steelyard issued certifications of membership at the Guildhall: documents in which the London house vouched that a named merchant belonged to the Hanse and was therefore to be charged at the Hanse's rates rather than a foreigner's. [CR] The certificates were enrolled, and the enrolment kept running. Year by year, customs district by customs district, from 1463 to 1474, the series sets down the name of every Hanseatic merchant trading with England and the town he came from.

Nobody made it in order to count the Hanse. It was made because officers at ports up and down the English coast needed a rule they could apply in the time it takes to unload a ship, and the Steelyard was the only body in England that could supply one. A certificate is a revenue instrument, and what it says about who was Hanseatic is a by-product of what it was for.

Which produces an odd situation. The association kept no register of its own members and ran no admission procedure worth the name. Its assemblies had been meeting for generations without ever writing the list down, and no diet could have said with any authority how many towns belonged to it. So the closest thing to a roster of Hanseatic towns that survives from the fifteenth century was compiled by clerks working for a foreign king, for a purpose of his own, because he needed an answer the association had never needed.

That is not unusual for this subject. Nearly every long, continuous, countable record of Hanseatic trade was kept by a government taxing the trade rather than by the towns doing it, which is what the surviving quantitative record looks like almost everywhere in this story. What is unusual is that two obvious questions come apart the moment they are set beside each other. How many towns were Hanseatic? And how many of them are in here?

One hundred and sixty-four

The first question has no answer until somebody decides what would make a town one. There was no roster to consult and no authority to appeal to, and the modern counts range widely enough that this series gave the range rather than a figure when it opened. The spread comes entirely from how much participation a historian requires before writing a town down: attendance at diets, a share in a kontor, a merchant abroad with a privilege in his hand.

Walther Stein stopped asking who was a member and asked what a member did. Take a Hanseatic town to be one whose merchants used the Hanse's privileges overseas, and the question turns tractable, because using a privilege leaves traces. A grant claimed at a foreign port. A rate demanded and allowed. A case brought in a kontor's court by a man who could show he was entitled to bring it. Counting the towns whose merchants did that, Stein arrived at one hundred and sixty-four. [M]

The number is a property of the test. It is a decision about what to count, applied consistently and then totalled, and the consistency is the whole of its authority. Loosen the criterion to take in towns whose merchants traded abroad without ever invoking a Hanseatic privilege and the figure rises. Tighten it to towns that sent their own men to diets and paid what the diets voted, and it falls a long way. A different test gives a different number. That is why the counts in circulation disagree so widely without any of them being wrong: they answer different questions in the same words, and the words do not warn you which question you have been handed. Stein's is one test among several possible ones, and its virtue is that he said plainly what it was.

Set his criterion beside the Guildhall certificates and the two turn out to be made of the same material. The criterion asks whether a town's merchants used the Hanse's privileges overseas. The certificates record exactly that act, in writing, for one destination, across the run from 1463 to 1474. One is a definition applied to a continent by a scholar working through centuries of records. The other is a list of men who walked into an English customs house and said whose rates they were entitled to. It is rare to get both, and rarer still to be able to lay one on the other.

Fourteen

Fourteen towns appear in the certifications, across the whole run of the series rather than in any one year of it.

They are Lübeck, Cologne, Danzig, Hamburg, Bremen, Dortmund, Duisburg, Riga, Soest, Stralsund, Braunschweig, Dinant, Münster and Nimwegen. [M]

That list is not a summary anybody wrote at the time. It is what falls out of tabulating the certification entries year by year across the run, sorting each entry by the home town it names, and counting the towns that come up. The towns are on the documents. The list of towns is modern work on the documents, and the work is the reason the fourteen can be stated at all.

Read the names slowly, because their shape says more than their number does. Lübeck, Cologne, Danzig, Hamburg and Bremen are the ones anyone expects, and they are the towns this story has been turning on since it began; Riga was planted on the Livonian coast by a crusading bishop, and Stralsund was one of the towns that took Lübeck's law. Then the list goes inland and stays there. Dortmund, Soest, Münster and Braunschweig are inland towns with no sea of their own. Duisburg and Nimwegen sit on rivers running down to the Dutch coast. Dinant lies further off still, up the Meuse, nearer the Ardennes than any harbour. The men certified at the Guildhall came from places a long way behind the water as well as from places on it, and the far end of the list is nothing like the near end of it.

Six of the fourteen are represented by a single merchant. [M] For six of these towns, the entire recorded presence in the English trade over those years is one name. A town on that footing is in the English customs the way a household is in a parish register, through one person. Which six they are is not something the count comes with. The tally of single-merchant towns and the list of fourteen names were drawn from the same work on the same series of certification entries.

The series also carries a residue of entries that cannot be assigned to a home town at all. They belong to the certifications as fully as any of the entries that name a place, and they sit in the record under no town's name. They are not among the fourteen. Fourteen is a count of the towns the entries can be assigned to.

And the certificates record one thing. They record Hanseatic merchants trading with England, at English ports, under English customs, in the years the Steelyard was certifying men at the Guildhall. The certification existed because English officers needed to know what to charge, so the series covers the men who came to England and nobody else. It was not asked about anywhere else, and it answers about nowhere else.

That is the whole of what the documents say.

What that is and is not evidence of

One hundred and sixty-four towns pass Stein's test. Fourteen appear in the Steelyard's certifications. A hundred and fifty do not. [D]

The subtraction is this page's own, which is what the label on it means. Nobody in the fifteenth century performed it. Neither did Stein, who was counting towns across the whole life of the association, nor the Guildhall clerks, who were certifying men so that somebody could charge them the right duty. Two numbers arrived at independently, for unrelated purposes, have been set against each other here. The arithmetic is trivial. The sentence written underneath it is not.

Stuart Jenks, whose editions of the English customs accounts are the reason any of this can be counted at all, drew the inference the gap invites: if the England trade was representative of overseas trade generally, then roughly a hundred and fifty towns had stopped trading overseas. Jenks himself calls that assumption “admittedly shaky”. [M] [E] The qualification is his, printed beside the finding, in the same breath as the number. The certifications are the best evidence anybody has for who was still using the privileges abroad, and Jenks is the historian who made them usable; the step he takes from them is not a careless one, and he does not present it as more than it is.

The reason it is shaky is concrete. England was one market among several, and not the one most Hanseatic merchants worked. A Reval man could spend a career between the Gulf of Finland and Lübeck and never enter an English port. So could a Rostock man, or a Wismar man, or anyone whose business ran east and south rather than west. The certificates would look exactly the same whether such a man was doing a great deal of business or none at all, because they were not built to see him. That is the property of the record the assumption has to get over, and the assumption is the only thing that gets over it.

Take the assumption out and what remains is smaller and much harder. Across the certification years, merchants from fourteen towns traded with England, six of those towns through one man each, and the other hundred and fifty towns on Stein's list are not observed in this record. Not observed is a statement about the record. It leaves what those towns were doing exactly where the documents leave it, which is unsaid. That is a poorer sentence than the other one, and it is the sentence the certificates will carry without anybody's help.

Both sentences are on the page above and neither is offered as the correct one. Choosing quietly between them is the efficient way to make a soft number look hard, so the choice sits in a control instead, where it can be made and unmade with a finger.

Which leaves the question that ought to be nagging by now. If the fourteen are not evidence that most of Stein's towns had given up overseas trade, what are they evidence of?

A market one step up

Jenks's own answer is about how goods reached buyers. Across the fifteenth century a hierarchy of markets took shape in northern Europe. Traders concentrated on the market one step up the chain from wherever they stood, and more and more towns contented themselves with supplying that market rather than sailing further themselves. [M]

A merchant in a small inland town did not need to reach London if Cologne would take his goods and Cologne's men would carry them the rest of the way. He stayed in the trade, one link back from the sea, and the man who sold to him stayed in it a link further back again. Each of them was dealing with somebody he could reach in a few days, on terms he could enforce, in a market he knew. The alternative was to fit out for a foreign port, learn a foreign customs regime and wait a season for his money. None of this required anybody to decide to stop. It is what a chain of markets does to the people standing in it, once each link is reliable enough to be trusted with the next one's goods.

The kontors are where the change shows, because they went on hosting merchants from an ever-shrinking number of towns while the goods kept moving through them. A house at Bruges or London saw fewer home towns represented in its own hall each decade and saw no less cargo. That is the pattern the Guildhall certificates put on paper at the English end, and it is what Jenks reads them for.

Concentration is compatible with total trade rising, and that has to be said once and left standing. Fourteen towns instead of one hundred and sixty-four is a fact about where merchants sailed, not about how much moved. Volumes and town counts are separate measurements, and the best-counted commodity in the whole story, English cloth, was counted by the king's officers for the king's revenue and answers only the first; what it shows belongs to the part of this series on what moved.

Follow Jenks's assumption forward and it says something uncomfortable about the next time the League tried to charge its members for anything. Most of the towns on Stein's list would by then have had no overseas trade for generations, and would be asked to pay for a service they had long stopped using. That is a later part's business.

Whether an association that had narrowed to this shape is best described as a cartel, a network or a proto-state, and who captured what it earned, is a question this series sets aside for a piece of its own.

Novgorod, closed by a state

Ivan III built a fortress on the Narva at Ivangorod, on the Russian bank, facing the Livonian castle across the water. It was to be a Russian outlet on the Baltic, standing on Russian ground.

In 1494 he closed the Peterhof. The house was shut on his order, its goods were seized, and the forty-nine traders who were in it at the time were deported to Moscow. [CR] Forty-nine is a modern count, worked out from the names in the surviving records rather than taken off a list somebody made that winter.

The story usually told about why runs through Reval, where Russians had been executed, and makes the closure Ivan's revenge for it. Elena Bessudnova and Anti Selart reject that reading. They place the closure inside Ivan's assertion of his own sovereign standing against Livonian and Hanseatic jurisdictions, and treat the Reval affair as a usable pretext rather than an adequate cause. Moscow did not want less foreign trade. It wanted the trade on its own terms and at its own port, and it had just finished dismantling the republican institutions that had made Novgorod the least governable thing in the new Russian state. Shutting the German house and building at Ivangorod are one policy seen from two ends.

Set that beside what the towns themselves had done in living memory. Between 1443 and 1448, during the war between Novgorod and the Livonian Order, they blockaded the city and left the house standing empty. [M] That was a withdrawal they chose, and could end when it suited them, and they ended it. In 1494 nobody on the German side chose anything.

Across these decades the map of where Hanseatic merchants went was being redrawn by merchants who were deciding, cargo by cargo, what was worth sailing to and what could be sold one step closer to home. At Novgorod it was redrawn by a sovereign deciding what would be there at all. One kind of change is an aggregate of private decisions and leaves no document of its own anywhere. The other has a date. In a series of records the two look alike, because in both cases a place stops appearing, and they are not remotely the same event.

Everything else here stops at 1500. The reopening does not, and it belongs on the page anyway. A new concession in 1514 let the house open again, into a Novgorod that was no longer the hinge it had been. [M] What came back was smaller, and it depended on whatever Moscow and the Livonian towns were willing to allow in a given year; the revived operation never recovered the position the old one held. Read without that, 1494 gives an ending that looks final, which is how it usually gets retold, and it was not one.

So there are two ways a place drops out of a record like this one. Merchants can stop choosing it, one at a time, for reasons that never get written down anywhere. Or a state can stop allowing it, on a particular day, in an order that survives. The Guildhall certificates can see the first kind of change only where it touches England, and they could never have seen the second at all, because it happened in a place their clerks had no reason to look.