The League That Was Never Founded

The concession

On 24 May 1370, in the Pomeranian port of Stralsund, the council of the realm of Denmark signed away a great deal. Four castles on the Scanian shore were handed over for fifteen years: Helsingborg, Malmö, Skanör and Falsterbo, which between them commanded the sound joining the Baltic to the North Sea, and the herring fairs on the beaches below. For those fifteen years the other party would take two-thirds of everything the Scania markets yielded, down to the dues on booths and wagons. And no new king of Denmark was to be received except with that party's counsel, and not before he had sealed its liberties with the great seal of the realm.

Kingdoms sign such things when they have lost a war. What is strange about this one is the counterparty.

There was no Hanseatic state to sign with. The association that took Denmark's terms had no charter and no constitution. It had no capital city; its assemblies met at Lübeck because Lübeck was convenient, and meetings held elsewhere were no less valid. It had no treasury, no permanent officials, no standing fleet, no head of state, and no legal personality, in the strict sense, there was nothing there to sue. It had no founding date either, because it was never founded. Historians who want one have to pick a moment and then defend the choice.

Even the name is a description of the difficulty. Hanse is an old Germanic word for a band of men travelling together; in Gothic it meant a war party. It came to mean the company of foreign merchants a town had to deal with, and then the fee a merchant paid to join that company. The thing was named after its members long before anyone thought of it as an institution.

So an association with none of the equipment of power took a treaty off a kingdom. This series is about how that happened. It took two centuries and three different kinds of organisation, and nobody planned any of it.

A town built twice

Everything starts with one town, and that town had to be built twice.

In 1143 Adolf II, count of Schauenburg and Holstein, planted a settlement on the spit between the Trave and the Wakenitz, a few miles up from the Baltic shore, and called it Lübeck. He was not the first to see the value of the place: a Slavic stronghold called Liubice had stood just downriver until raiders burned it out in 1138. The site was chosen for what lay on either side of it. Ahead was the Baltic and, beyond it, the wax, furs, timber and grain of the east. Behind was a short overland haul to the Elbe and, through the Elbe, everything sailing the North Sea; the alternative was the long voyage round the top of Denmark. Behind it too was Lüneburg, and Lüneburg had salt. Salt is what allowed a herring caught off Scania in September to be eaten in Cologne in March.

In 1157 the town burned down. In 1159 Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, rebuilt it and granted its inhabitants terms that made settling there worth the trouble: their own market, their own court, freedom from tolls across his lands. In 1226 the emperor Frederick II made Lübeck an imperial free city, with nobody between it and him.

What then travelled out of Lübeck was its constitution. A lord founding a town on the Baltic coast wanted merchants to come and live in it, and merchants wanted to know in advance what their rights would be. The cheapest way to tell them was to grant the new town the law of a place they already trusted. So Lübeck law — the town's whole municipal code, its council structure, its commercial and inheritance rules — was adopted wholesale by one new foundation after another. Hamburg took it in 1188, Rostock in 1218, Stralsund in 1234, Reval in 1248. Difficult cases in the daughter towns were referred back to Lübeck's own court for a ruling. About a hundred towns [E] eventually governed themselves this way, most of them around the Baltic rim.

This network grew by being copied, and what got copied was a legal template.

Merchants before towns

Before there were Hanseatic towns there were Hanseatic merchants, and they had already worked out how to operate abroad.

The place they worked it out was Gotland, an island sitting in the middle of the Baltic with the harbour town of Visby on its western shore. Almost anything sailing between the Russian rivers and the German coast passed within reach of it. By the middle of the twelfth century German merchants were wintering there alongside the Gotlanders, and the two groups were quarrelling badly enough to draw blood.

In 1161 Henry the Lion settled it. At Artlenburg on the Elbe he granted Gotlanders trading in his territories the same protection and freedom from tolls his own merchants enjoyed, in exchange for the same treatment for his men on Gotland. Each side obtained, in writing, the right to be treated as something better than a foreigner.

Being a foreigner meant something specific, and the whole institution is an answer to it. A merchant outside his own town had almost no standing. If his ship went aground, the cargo that washed up belonged to the lord of that shore. That was ordinary law, not piracy. If some countryman of his had defaulted on a debt in the town he was visiting, his own goods could be seized to settle it, because a foreign community was held collectively liable for its members. The practice had a name, reprisal, and it was perfectly legal; it also meant that a stranger's creditworthiness was everybody's business. Local courts could refuse to hear him. Local guilds could forbid him to sell to anyone but themselves, at their price, and forbid him to stay past a fixed number of weeks.

A privilege was a written exemption from precisely those hazards, granted by whoever had the power to grant it, and renewable, revocable and worth fighting over. It was the merchants' real asset. Ships and cargo could be replaced.

So they organised around it. The association of German merchants abroad had no capital and no shares; there was nothing in it to divide. What it had was a seal, a common chest, elected aldermen, and the collective ability to threaten a ruler with the withdrawal of every one of them at once. Its earliest surviving name is a mouthful out of a charter of 1252: universi mercatores Romani imperii Gotlandiam frequentantes, all the merchants of the Roman Empire frequenting Gotland. That is a description of who turned up. Nobody had yet needed a name for it.

The towns get planted

In the spring of 1200 a bishop named Albert sailed for the eastern Baltic with twenty-three ships and a body of armed crusaders. The next year he founded a town where a small river ran into the Daugava, a few miles up from the sea, and merchants from Gotland came with him. The town was Riga.

Riga was the first German town on the Livonian coast, and the pattern repeated along it for the next half century. A bishop or a military order or a territorial lord took a river mouth; a town was laid out beside it; settlers were recruited with a grant of rights; merchants arrived to use it. Elbing, Reval, Danzig, Königsberg. Reval took Lübeck's law in 1248.

This was colonisation. The towns were planted in countries whose inhabitants had not asked for them, by a movement that carried the sword at least as often as the ledger, and Riga's founder had raised a crusading order within a couple of years of laying out his streets.

What the foundings produced, commercially, was a coastline of matching parts. A merchant sailing from Lübeck to Riga arrived somewhere with a council he recognised, a court whose procedure he already knew, and a body of commercial law descended from the same source as his own. A grant obtained in one place could be understood and enforced in another. Nobody had to build the network. It fell out of the copying.

The chain stopped where the copying did. Novgorod, at the far end of the Russian trade and the richest destination on it, was nobody's foundation and took nobody's law; neither was London, or Bruges, or Bergen. Where the Germans could not plant a town of their own, they had to negotiate for a footing inside somebody else's.

Why the towns took over

If the merchants' association was working, why did the towns end up running it?

Partly because the merchants stopped travelling. In the twelfth century a merchant sailed with his goods, sold them himself, bought a return cargo and came home; an association of the men who did that together was the natural unit. By the fourteenth century he was more likely to stay in Lübeck and work through partners and correspondents resident in Bruges or Reval, settling by letter. The band of men travelling together, which had given the Hanse its name, had largely stopped travelling.

And partly because the thing that needed defending had changed hands. Privileges were granted to communities and renewed with communities, and a ruler renewing one wanted a counterparty with a seal, a treasury and a permanent address, someone who would still be there in ten years and could be held to the bargain. Town councils had all of that. Those councils were run by the same long-distance merchant families in any case, so the transfer cost nobody anything they minded losing.

The moment usually chosen to mark the change is 2 February 1356, when delegates from the towns met at Lübeck as a general assembly for the first time. What brought them together was a quarrel with Bruges, and what they did about it was to put the Bruges establishment under the authority of the towns rather than of the merchants trading there. Within a generation the other overseas establishments had gone the same way.

The tidy version, merchants' Hanse becoming towns' Hanse in 1356, is a periodisation. The date was chosen afterwards, by historians, to name a drift that took decades and that different regions completed at different times. Nothing was constituted in 1356. An assembly met, and assemblies went on meeting.

Meeting was as far as it went. These assemblies, the Hansetage or diets, kept no register of members and ran no admission procedure worth the name; modern counts of the towns involved range from about seventy to about a hundred and seventy [E], depending on how much participation you require before you count a town in. Attending was not compulsory. A town that disliked a decision could ignore it, and towns did.

Four houses abroad

Abroad, the merchants held four permanent establishments, and those were where the privileges were cashed. The Peterhof at Novgorod took Russian furs and wax. Bryggen at Bergen took Norwegian fish. The Steelyard in London took English wool and, later, English cloth. The fourth sat at Bruges, the clearing house of north-western Europe, where Baltic cargo met Flemish weaving and Italian credit. The word for such an establishment is kontor, a counting house, and it undersells them considerably.

A kontor was a small self-governing republic inside a foreign city. It elected its own aldermen, wrote its own statutes, ran its own court over its own members and disciplined them without reference to the host, kept a common chest, and controlled who was permitted to trade there at all. It also legislated on how its members lived. At Bergen they were forbidden to marry locally, which kept the capital in German hands and the community rotating.

The trade could be extraordinarily narrow. In the English customs accounts for 1303–11, stockfish, which is cod split and dried hard in the Arctic wind until it will keep for years, makes up about 82 per cent [M] of the recorded value of everything imported from Norway. Bergen's kontor was, commercially, one commodity with a town attached.

The four were not built to a pattern, and the untidiest of them was the most important. At Bruges the merchants had no compound at all for most of the period; they lodged with Flemish hosts and worked through Flemish brokers, scattered across a city that had no intention of penning them up, and acquired a house of their own only in the fifteenth century. Whatever held the Hanse together at Bruges, it was not architecture.

None of it rested on ownership. Buildings could be leased and ships could be replaced. What could not be replaced was the grant of rights the host ruler had made, and a grant can be withdrawn. That cut both ways. If the merchants walked out, the host city lost the traffic, and everyone involved knew it.

Three instruments, and one year of numbers

With no army and no permanent revenue, the towns had three instruments. Two worked by exclusion; the third by taxing the members themselves, and only when they had agreed to fight.

The first was the boycott. Move the merchants out of a city and the city loses the trade. The assemblies did this to Bruges in 1358, taking the trade to Dordrecht, and again in 1388, and both times Flanders negotiated. Whether either actually cost Bruges much is a live question: leakage was considerable, and merchants from member towns were accused of trading through the ban.

The second instrument faced inward, and it bit harder. A member town that broke ranks could be verhanst, cut out of the common privileges, so that its merchants were foreigners again everywhere and no Hanseatic town would deal with them. A town living on long-distance trade could not absorb that for long. Braunschweig was expelled in 1375, after a rising in the town killed members of its council, and spent years getting back in.

The third was money, and it was temporary on purpose. When a war had to be paid for, the assembly voted a Pfundzoll, a pound toll: a small percentage on the declared value of members' cargo, collected at the port of departure, receipted so that nobody paid it twice at the far end, and reconciled between the towns afterwards. It was voted one war at a time; there was no standing treasury for it to feed.

All three came together once. On 19 November 1367 delegates met at Cologne, declared that because of the injuries the king of Denmark had done the common German merchant the towns would be his enemies and would help one another faithfully, and assigned every member a quota of ships and men. Towns from Holland and the Zuiderzee joined. The fleets sailed, Copenhagen was taken, and on 24 May 1370 the Danish council signed at Stralsund: the four castles, two-thirds of the Scania revenues for fifteen years, and the clause about who could be king.

That war's pound toll is also the reason we can see anything at all, and what it shows shapes everything you read after this. The Lübeck toll year running from 18 March 1368 to 10 March 1369 recorded about 546,000 marks lübisch [M] of taxable cargo through the port, marks lübisch being Lübeck's money of account, a bookkeeping unit in which no coin was then struck. The largest single slice, about 188,000 marks [M], was traffic to and from London and Hamburg. The same books counted roughly 1,800 ship arrivals and departures [M] across the year.

One year. The clerks were counting because there was a fleet to pay for, and when the war ended the counting stopped. That is the shape of the record the Hansa left about itself: a handful of brilliantly detailed years across four centuries, most of them produced by an emergency. The long continuous series were kept by other people, English customs officers and Danish toll collectors at the Sound, who had reasons of their own to count. Peace leaves no ledger.

How to read the numbers here

Which is why every number in this series carries a label.

There are four. [CR] means somebody recorded the figure at the time, in a ledger or a charter or a customs return. [M] means a modern historian counted or aggregated it out of such records. [E] means it is a reconstruction that needed assumptions about capacity, or unit conversions, or the years nobody wrote down. [D] means it was worked out here, on the page, from the rows above it.

The charts keep the same discipline. A solid mark is something recorded. A hatched or open mark is somebody's assumption, and where that somebody is us, the assumption is drawn on the chart instead of buried inside it. Where scholars disagree, both readings are drawn and both are named, because quietly picking one is the most efficient way to make a soft number look hard.

Figures that could not be stood up get said so, or left out. Every page carries an appendix listing each number on it, where it came from, and whether it survived checking; more than one well-travelled Hanseatic statistic has failed that check and been dropped.

The labels are there because the record is thin enough that a smooth line across it is nearly always a decision somebody made, and you ought to be able to see whose before you decide whether to believe it.

What comes next

From Stralsund the story runs downhill in interesting ways. Ivan III shut the Peterhof at Novgorod in 1494. The Bruges establishment faded as Bruges did, and the money moved to Antwerp. The English crown revoked the Steelyard's privileges in the middle of the sixteenth century, and the effect on Hanse trade through London was immediate and measurable. Meanwhile the Baltic economy went on growing, in Prussian grain and in Dutch hulls, increasingly along routes that no longer called at Lübeck. Assemblies were still being summoned into the seventeenth century, and fewer and fewer towns bothered to come. The last one met in 1669.

That spine is what this series follows. Where the record is genuinely contested, single questions get pieces of their own; the first of those, on whether the League declined at all, is already up.

Three centuries after Stralsund, the association that had claimed a say in who would be king of Denmark could not get its own members into a room.