Hanseatic League · the series
It was called because too few towns had turned up the year before to finish an agenda drawn up in 1662. Its concrete business was rebuilding a burnt house in London and arguing about who would pay. Nothing in the protocol reads like a farewell.
Rostock bought itself free of imperial occupation until 1628 for 14,000 Reichstaler. [CR] A contribution, in the language of that war, was what an army in occupation or in the neighbourhood demanded from a town in cash, against the alternative of having the soldiers quartered on it or of being stormed. Rostock paid rather than find out.
The Thirty Years' War did three separate things to the Hanse, and each of them took away something different.
The first was that meeting became impossible. Wismar had been militarily unfree since its capitulation treaty of 1627 [CR], and Wallenstein had picked it as the base for an imperial fleet on the Baltic; Danish ships blockaded the bay, and the garrison ate the town's finances. Stralsund was under siege from imperial troops from the same year, fighting engagement after engagement and facing demands that were ruining it. [CR] Stralsund was sent an invitation to the assembly of 1629, and Stralsund did not answer. That is what the loss of assembly looked like in practice: two of the most important towns in the association could not put a man on a road. The recess of that assembly gave the reason in its own words. Not all the towns could come because of the narrowness of the time. [CR] That is a phrase about roads and armies, written by men who had got through, about men who had not.
The second was that membership stopped being affordable. Lüneburg was spared the troop movements and still paid 33,600 Reichstaler in war contributions in 1628 and 1629 alone [CR], from a town that had lost about half its people to plague between 1624 and 1626. Magdeburg faced a contribution demand of 133,000. [CR] When it asked the assembled towns for help against it, two of them pleaded their own burdens, and only Hamburg and Lübeck offered anything at all. A town that cannot buy off one army has nothing to spare for the common privileges of a trading association.
The third moved the ground out from under several member towns. At the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 Sweden received Hither Pomerania, the town of Wismar, and the prince-bishoprics of Bremen and Verden, all of them as imperial fiefs with seat and vote in the Reichstag, besides a war indemnity of 5 million talers. [CR] The Bremen in that list is the prince-bishopric and not the city. Bremen the city kept its own claim to imperial immediacy, which meant holding directly of the Emperor with no lord in between, and it spent the decades after the peace defending that claim against exactly this settlement. Wismar and Stralsund now had a Swedish territorial lord over them. An association of towns cannot easily bind members who owe allegiance to a foreign crown, and after 1648 several of the towns still in it did.
The Peace of Westphalia took the Hanseatic north apart and handed pieces of it to a foreign crown. At the same congress, in Article XVII, sections 10 and 11 of the peace instrument, the Hanse achieved the first recognition it had ever had in public law. [CR]
On 29 November 1629 eight towns met at Lübeck: Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Rostock, Magdeburg, Braunschweig, Hildesheim and Lüneburg. [CR] The recess calls them the Hanseatic towns seated more nearly at hand, which is an accurate description of how they had been selected. Wismar and Stralsund were the ones absent for considerable causes. These were the usual participants of the assemblies of the preceding years, and these were the men who would determine the policy of the Hanse in the years that followed. [M]
The meeting was about the emergency. It dealt with threatened towns and obstructed trade routes, with Magdeburg's position, and with petitions to the Emperor. [CR]
Somewhere inside that agenda sat a short item. Because the war had made regular general diets impracticable, the three honourable towns of Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg were amicably requested and asked, on behalf of all the Hanseatic towns, to take this weighty business upon themselves, to keep watch as occasions arose, and in all things to have regard to the common welfare. [CR] By virtue of the recess they were given full power for every Hanseatic concern, and the three of them accepted.
Hähnlein, who transcribed the passage, describes it as a short agenda item of an assembly of eight Hanseatic towns, and the description is exact. [M] The arrangement it set up was already running. Real decisions had already been moving between assemblies to those same three towns, and Hanse research grants the diets of the years before the war only the character of an administrative act, since the deciding had gone elsewhere. [M] What the eight towns did was write down who had been deciding. Hähnlein calls the three of them trustees of the common business, which is as far as the recess goes: it delegated continuing action under emergency conditions, and it transferred nobody's rights, property or sovereignty to anything new. [M]
On 24 February 1630 Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen concluded a defensive alliance for ten years, renewed repeatedly afterwards and open to any town willing to bind itself to mutual assistance. [CR] Ahasver von Brandt declined to treat that alliance as a constitutional basis for anything, on the ground that it was a pact made for a purpose and limited to a term. [M]
Between 1630 and 1648 the three of them met thirteen times. [M] The contemporary records do not call these meetings diets. They call them Konvente, the smaller working meeting of a few towns, and the distinction is the participants' own. Those meetings took up wartime trade, safe passage, seizures abroad, the tolls, the houses at London, Bruges, Antwerp and Bergen, the common cash, urban defence and representation at the peace congress. [CR] Of the thirteen, one left an official recess signed by everybody present. [CR] At another the participants declined to draw one up at all, partly so that a discussion of a possible alliance with the Dutch Republic would not reach the Emperor. [CR]
Bremen's instruction for one of those conventions proposed that a diet be called. The reason it gave was that the union was feared to be falling into oblivion, and that a burgher of Braunschweig had already enquired whether the Hanse still existed at all. [CR] According to the minutes the point was raised shortly before the end of the session, and no reaction from the other towns was recorded. [M]
The request of 1629 had been made before, in almost the same words.
At the diet of 24 June 1418, with thirty-four towns represented, Lübeck and its neighbours were asked for nearly the same thing and for nearly the same reason. [CR] Attending was burdensome for the remoter towns, so the towns close at hand should look to der stede unde copmannes beste: the best interests of the towns, and of the common merchant.
In 1629 the eight towns asked the three to have regard to die gemeine wolfahrt, the common welfare.
The towns are in both sentences. The merchant is in one of them.
Both requests are answers to the same practical problem, which is that a body whose members are spread from the Zuiderzee to the Gulf of Finland cannot get them all into one hall very often, and had never pretended otherwise. Both hand the standing business to a small core near Lübeck, for the same stated reason, in the same deferential formula. The difference is who made the request. In 1418 the request came from a diet that had filled; in 1629 it came from the towns that could still reach the building. And what they were asked to look after had moved.
Hähnlein reads the omission as an indication that the representation had by then become a political one rather than a mercantile one. [M] One word in one clause of one recess is a thin thing to hang an argument on, and she offers it as an indication rather than as proof. It is still the word that dropped out, and it dropped out of the one sentence in which a merchants' association had to say, in writing, what it wanted looked after while it was not meeting.
The recess of the last Hanseatic diet opens by explaining why there was one. At the Hanseatic assembly summoned at Lübeck in the year just past, it says, the points drawn up already in 1662 for common counsel did not receive their full discussion, because of the unexpectedly small number of towns appearing; the greater part of them were held over for a stronger gathering, and thereupon another diet was summoned for about the middle of May of the current year. [CR]
The last Hanseatic diet was a re-run of a meeting that had failed to fill. It was called to make quorum. The gathering of 1668 had brought Lübeck, Bremen, Hamburg and Braunschweig to the same table, with Hildesheim and Osnabrück instructed or represented through others, and it had no competence to settle the general questions the 1662 points raised. [CR] Nor was the Steelyard's condition going to wait. The destruction of the London house in the Great Fire of 1666 was one immediate reason the towns tried again. [CR]
It sat in the New Chamber of Lübeck's town hall. [CR] Accounts that place it at Hamburg have confused the frequent venue of the three towns' smaller meetings with a general diet of the Hanse. Substantive sessions began on 29 May 1669. The protocol records nineteen of them through 11 June; post-negotiations went on through the morning of 13 June; the recesses were sealed at about one o'clock that afternoon, and the engrossed protocol bears the date 20 June. [CR]
Who was in that room has been printed as six towns and printed as nine, and both counts are reporting something real.
Six towns sent their own delegates: Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Braunschweig, Danzig and Cologne. [CR] Two more authorised somebody else to hold their power, and in both cases the man was a Lübecker: Rostock authorised the syndic Heinrich Michaelis, Osnabrück the councillor Nicolaus Schomer. [CR] That is eight towns certainly represented. The ninth is Hildesheim, in whose name Braunschweig voted after prior consultation, and about which Michael Schütz argues, from Hildesheim's own files, that the formal power which would have made Braunschweig its proxy was never issued. [CR]
Six, then, and eight, and nine. The three numbers answer three questions: how many towns sent a man of their own, how many were represented by an authority nobody disputes, and how many the meeting worked as though it had. Anybody who writes that only six towns came, or that only nine towns were left, is reporting half of a distinction the record itself makes. The seating order survives, and the Lübeck file can be checked against instructions and papers in several of the towns that sent to it; the disagreement is not about what happened in the hall. It is about which of those three questions the word “attended” is being asked to answer.
The nine of 1669 are close to the eight of 1629, with Danzig, Cologne and Osnabrück added and Magdeburg and Lüneburg gone. War and peace in between had not much changed who turned up. They had changed how the towns got there.
The figure below draws three assemblies on one frame and hands you the rule. The marks stay where they are; the totals move.
One mark per town, in the order the source prints them. The 1669 row is the only one whose source distinguishes how a town was there, which is why it is the only row a counting rule can move.
| Count the towns that… | 1418 | 1629 | 1669 |
|---|---|---|---|
| sent their own delegates | no total | 8 | 6 |
| were certainly represented | no total | 8 | 8 |
| were in the working representation, including the disputed proxy | no total | 8 | 9 |
The 1669 row in words. Own delegates: Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Braunschweig, Danzig, Cologne. Power held by another town's man: Rostock, by the Lübeck syndic Heinrich Michaelis; Osnabrück, by the Lübeck councillor Nicolaus Schomer. Disputed: Hildesheim, in whose name Braunschweig voted after prior consultation, and whose formal power Michael Schütz argues was never issued.
The recess lists ten principal matters. [CR] Renewal of the confederation of 1604; the rebuilding of the Steelyard and how it was to be financed; arrears and future annual contributions; election of a general syndic; a resident at The Hague; Lübeck's expenses at Antwerp; the Steelyard housemaster's account; the status of Bruges; the welfare of Baltic and North Sea trade; renewal of the French privileges. The protocol adds a closer defensive alliance with the imperial cities, Bergen, and a dispute about inferior woollen cloth. [CR] That is a working agenda, drawn up by people who expected to go on working.
The item with a specification attached is the second one. The recess sets it out: that for a certain term of years the three honourable towns of Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg should treat and conclude nomine Hansae, in the name of the Hanse, with a model of how it should be built settled by them beforehand; and that every Hanseatic member town should keep equal access to the rebuilt premises, without preference. [CR] Those two words carry the whole constitutional device of the late Hanse. They are the formula by which three towns bound an association that could no longer assemble to authorise them.
Equal access without preference is a generous clause to put into a document about a building the signatories could not agree to pay for. They wrote it in a year when the accounts laid before them showed that some of the towns entitled to that access had paid neither their annual contributions nor their share of the old debts. [CR]
The delegates agreed in principle that the London property remained common and should be preserved. Then they divided. Whether rebuilding would ever repay its cost was disputed, and so were Hamburg's claims against the revenues of the site. [CR] The argument spread to arrears, to lower quotas in future, to money Lübeck had laid out and never been repaid, and to which towns would accept a renewed union at all. [CR] The men for Danzig and for Rostock and others found repeatedly that they had no authority to conclude, and reserved the points for their councils. [CR] In the end the house was handed to Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen for further management rather than settled or wound up. [CR]
The last recorded business of the Hanseatic League was how to rebuild one house in a foreign city, on whose behalf it should be rebuilt, and who among them would pay for it.
The recess is a short document and it was shortened deliberately. Lübeck observed that contradictions on many points were preventing conclusions, and the assembly cut the record down. [CR] The union that had been projected was lifted out into an instrument of its own, because a union needed the delegates' signatures and seals while a recess only recorded what had happened and could be sealed by the directorate. [CR] What the shortening left out was the hardest of the financial and constitutional business, which had not been settled. [M] The protocol behind the recess runs to several times its length, and the disagreements are in there. Anyone who reads only the sealed document will come away believing the diet agreed on more than it did.
If a meeting called to make quorum spent nineteen sessions failing to settle its own finances, and came away with an agreement in principle about a building nobody would undertake to pay for, how did nobody in the room notice that this was the end?
Because it looked like every meeting before it. Hanseatic assemblies had been postponing their hardest business for as long as there had been Hanseatic assemblies. Delegates had always arrived with instructions that stopped short of authority to conclude, and the machinery for turning immediate disagreement into a matter reserved for the councils at home was old and worked smoothly. Deferral was ordinary. [M] There is no farewell language anywhere in the protocol or in the towns' instructions, and the delegates expected, or at any rate contemplated, a further assembly. [CR] 1669 became the last diet because no successor was ever convened, and not because anybody voted the Hanse out of existence.
Angela Huang and Henning Steinführer, who reconstructed the meeting from the Lübeck file and the papers of the towns that sent to it, put both halves of that into one conclusion: the diet was the end of the Hanseatic assembly culture, and the people in the room did not know they were standing at an end of anything. [M]
How many diets there had been by then depends on what counts as one. Huang and Steinführer count thirty-six general diets between 1550 and 1669, on the rule that at least four towns from at least two of the regional thirds or quarters had to be represented. [M] Other scholars count on other rules and reach other totals; all three counts are in the appendix with the rule that produced each, and none of them converts into another.
Whether any of this amounts to a decline, and where anybody should date one, is argued in a separate piece on this site.
In 1684 the Emperor called for a Hanseatic diet to be convened, to raise aid against the Turks. In 1687 he called for one again. [CR] Fifteen years after the last diet, and again three years after that [D], the imperial chancery was still writing to the Hanse as a body capable of assembling and of raising aid. A summons of that kind implies a list of addressees, a clerk who keeps the list, and an expectation that the towns on it will come. Nobody appears to have written back that there was nothing left to assemble. That is the best contemporary evidence that nobody had noticed an ending: the imperial chancery had not been told, and neither, it seems, had anyone else.
Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen went on acting together, in diplomacy and over property. From 1629 they had been charged with the representation of Hanseatic interests and the administration of the inheritance in London, Antwerp and Bergen [M], and that was the whole estate: one house shut long since, one burnt, one still trading. The short item of 1629 outlasted the assemblies that had passed it, because it was the only part of the arrangement that did not require anybody to travel.
The kontor at Bergen passed to Norwegian citizens in 1754. [M] The title to the Steelyard, held by the three towns, was sold in 1853. [M] Two dates, both belonging to the houses abroad rather than to the meetings, and both of them a long way past the last meeting there was.
Nothing was ever dissolved. No instrument closed the Hanse, no assembly voted it out, and no ruler revoked it, because there had never been an instrument to undo. The association that took a treaty off a kingdom without a charter, a capital, a treasury or a founding date turns out to have had no ending date either. The last thing it did was postpone something to a stronger gathering.
Labels: [CR] contemporary record · [M] modern scholarly tabulation of contemporary records · [E] scholarly estimate · [D] derived on this page. One figure on this page is derived, and its arithmetic is shown in its row.
| Figure | Label | Source | Verification status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Narrative chronology: 24 June 1418, 1624–26, 1627, 1628, 29 November 1629, 24 February 1630, 1630–1648, 1648, 1662, 1666, 1668, 29 May 1669, 11 June 1669, 13 June 1669, 20 June 1669, 1684, 1687, 1754, 1853. Where one of these years also carries a figure of its own, it appears again in that figure's row below | [CR] where an instrument dates them, otherwise [M] | Cross-checked across reorganisation_claude_a §7, reorganisation_pro_dossier area 7 and reorganisation_deep_research §“The end and whether anyone noticed” | unverified as a body; individual years cross-checked between the three runs |
| Wismar militarily unfree from the capitulation of 1627; Stralsund besieged from 1627 and not answering the invitation to the 1629 assembly | [CR] | reorganisation_claude_a §7.1, from Hähnlein pp. 46–49; reorganisation_pro_dossier area 7 | unverified; two runs agree |
| Rostock pays 14,000 Reichstaler to buy itself free of imperial occupation until 1628 | [CR] | reorganisation_claude_a §7.1, from Hähnlein | unverified |
| Lüneburg pays 33,600 Reichstaler in war contributions in 1628–29 alone, having lost about half its population to plague in 1624–26 | [CR] | Same | unverified |
| Magdeburg faces a contribution demand of 133,000 Reichstaler; when it asks the assembled towns for help, two plead their own burdens and only Hamburg and Lübeck offer anything | [CR] | Same | unverified |
| Peace of Westphalia, 1648: Sweden receives Hither Pomerania, the town of Wismar, and the prince-bishoprics of Bremen and Verden as imperial fiefs with seat and vote, besides a war indemnity of 5 million talers | [CR] | reorganisation_claude_a §7.1; reorganisation_pro_dossier area 7, citing IPO art. X | unverified. The “Bremen” of this settlement is the prince-bishopric, not the city, whose claim to imperial immediacy remained separate and contested precisely because Sweden had received only the see. The page states this in the same breath as the list |
| The Hanse's first recognition in public law, at the Westphalian congress: IPO Art. XVII §§10–11 | [CR] | reorganisation_claude_a §7.1, from Grassmann, Hanselexikon, “Ende der Hanse” | unverified. The paradox is left standing on the page: the treaty that dismembered the Hanseatic north is the treaty in which the Hanse first achieved recognition in public law, and neither half is subordinated to the other |
| Assembly of 29 November 1629 at Lübeck, eight towns present: Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Rostock, Magdeburg, Braunschweig, Hildesheim, Lüneburg | [CR] | AHL, ASA Externa Hanseatica 237, via reorganisation_claude_a §7.3 and reorganisation_pro_dossier area 7 | unverified; the two runs agree on the eight and on the date |
| Diet of 24 June 1418: 34 towns make nearly the same request of Lübeck. The same source's own list of those present names 32 | [CR]; the gap [D] | reorganisation_claude_a §7.3, quoting Hähnlein on HR VI p. 548 | unverified. Hähnlein states thirty-four and prints a list of thirty-two, and flags the discrepancy herself. The figure draws thirty-two marks, the number the list supports, and prints both numbers on the row. No mark is drawn to close the gap, because two unnamed marks would render an inference as data |
| Defensive alliance of 24 February 1630 among Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen, for ten years, repeatedly renewed and open to any town willing to bind itself | [CR] | reorganisation_claude_a §7.3; reorganisation_pro_dossier area 7 | unverified; two runs agree |
| Thirteen Hanseatic conventions between 1630 and 1648, of which only one left a recess signed by all present | [M] | reorganisation_pro_dossier area 7 (Hähnlein pp. 53–58, 332–335) | unverified; single run, from a single named study. The contemporary sources do not call these meetings Hansetage, and neither does the page |
| The last diet: the New Chamber of Lübeck town hall; substantive sessions from 29 May 1669; nineteen sessions through 11 June; post-negotiations on the morning of 13 June; recesses sealed at about one o'clock that afternoon; engrossed protocol dated 20 June | [CR] | AHL, ASA Externa Hanseatica 247, via reorganisation_pro_dossier area 7 (Huang & Steinführer 2020, 18–20) | unverified as a body, and the strongest material in the corpus, see the note below. See also the named correction below: “July 1669” is a propagated error |
| Attendance at the last diet: six towns sent their own delegates (Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Braunschweig, Danzig, Cologne); two more authorised proxies, both Lübeck men (Rostock to the syndic Heinrich Michaelis, Osnabrück to the councillor Nicolaus Schomer); nine in the meeting's working representation if Hildesheim's disputed proxy is counted | [CR] | reorganisation_pro_dossier area 7 (Huang & Steinführer 2020, 18–19 and n.44; Schütz 2020); reorganisation_comparison §“The two questions the commissioning session asked to have pinned” | unverified; all three runs reach the same distinction. Six, eight and nine answer different questions and none of them is wrong, see the note below |
| Ten principal matters listed on the recess: renewal of the 1604 confederation; rebuilding and financing the Steelyard; arrears and future annual contributions; election of a general syndic; a resident at The Hague; Lübeck's Antwerp expenses; the Steelyard housemaster's account; the status of Bruges; the welfare of Baltic and North Sea trade; renewal of the French privileges | [CR] | reorganisation_pro_dossier area 7 | unverified; single run, read from the recess through Huang & Steinführer |
| Diet totals, each with the counting rule that produced it, see the note below, which carries all three | [M] | reorganisation_pro_dossier area 7 (Huang & Steinführer 2020, 13 n.19; Huang & Meiners 2019) and area 6 (Simson 1907) | unverified. No diet total appears on this page without its rule. Exactly one appears in the body; all three are in the note below |
| Imperial summonses for a Hanseatic diet in 1684 and again in 1687, to raise Turkish aid | [CR] | reorganisation_claude_a §7.5, from Grassmann | unverified; single run, from a named reference work |
| Derived on the page: the first imperial summons falls fifteen years after the last diet (1684 − 1669), and the second three years after the first (1687 − 1684) | [D] | Arithmetic on the 1684/1687 row above and the 1669 line of the chronology row | derived here; both subtractions are shown in this row |
| The Bergen kontor passes to Norwegian citizens in 1754; the Steelyard title, held by three towns, sold in 1853 | [M] | reorganisation_claude_a §§3.4 and 7.5 (Grassmann; Lloyd agrees on 1853) | unverified; the runs agree on both years. Dates only. Both endings are told in full in the part on the four houses abroad, and neither is re-narrated here |
| Flagged rows | |||
| “July 1669” as the date of the last diet, not printed | — | reorganisation_claude_a §7.4; reorganisation_comparison | A named correction. Grassmann's Hanselexikon and the German Wikipedia article both give July 1669. The archival dating of the recess is 29 May, 11 June, with post-negotiations on 13 June, and the recess's own summoning clause says the diet was called for about the middle of May. July is a propagated error, and it is recorded here because a reader who checks the obvious sources will find it |
| Diet totals, all three, each with its rule | [M] | Huang & Steinführer 2020, 13 n.19; Huang & Meiners 2019; Simson 1907 | Not interchangeable. Huang and Steinführer count 36 general diets between 1550 and 1669, on the rule that at least four towns from at least two regional thirds or quarters had to be represented. Huang and Meiners count 172 between 1358 and 1669, on a broader systematically compiled inventory of urban decision-making. Simson counted 40 between 1535 and 1621, on his own definition of a general diet reconstructed from dispersed manuscripts. The three totals count different objects and none converts into another; a bare number is barred anywhere on this page |
| The 1418 count against the 1418 list: 34 against 32 | [CR]; the gap [D] | reorganisation_claude_a §7.3, quoting Hähnlein on HR VI p. 548 | The source flags its own discrepancy. Hähnlein states thirty-four towns and prints a list of thirty-two, and says so. The figure carries both numbers on the row label, draws the thirty-two the list names, and leaves the gap open. Nothing on this page resolves it |
| Left out on purpose: Cologne's syndic arriving during the thirteenth session on 8 June; the recess's page count and the protocol's; any Antwerp disposal date | — | reorganisation_pro_dossier area 7; reorganisation_claude_a §7.4; reorganisation_comparison §“Divergences” | Checked and dropped. The late arrival is attested and adds a number the argument does not need. The disproportion between the sealed recess and the session protocol is stated on the page in words and carries no page counts. Two Antwerp disposal dates circulate, neither could be stood up by any run, and no date for it appears here |
Verification status, once, for the whole page. The reorganisation dossiers behind this part are unverified as a body. The five files in the series' verification directory cover the economic figures only, and this part uses none of them. The 1669 material is the strongest in the corpus: all three research runs reached Huang & Steinführer's 2020 study of the last diet independently, by different routes, and agree on the place, the dates, the nineteen sessions and the attendance distinction. That is called strong here, and this is what being strong amounts to. Nothing on this page has been through an independent verification pass of its own.
The six, the eight and the nine. Six towns sent their own delegates; two more sent proxies to Lübeck men and were certainly represented; the ninth, Hildesheim, is disputed on evidence, because Michael Schütz argues from Hildesheim's own files that the formal power was never issued, while Braunschweig voted in its name after prior consultation. The three counts answer three different questions and none of them is wrong. Nothing on this page adjudicates between them, and the figure exists so that the reader can apply each rule to the same set of marks.