Dan Snow's History Hit - What was the Hanseatic League?

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

The Hanseatic League was a medieval trading network that stretched across Northern Europe. Formed in Northern Germany in the 12th century, it was an economic powerhouse of the age. Over the next five centuries, it negotiated with kings, standardised regulations, created outposts across Europe, blockaded ports and even went to war to protect its trading interests.In this episode, Dan is joined by Dr Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Amsterdam, to discuss the League's unique structure, operations, and legacy. Together, they examine its innovative and flexible approach to trade, politics, and conflict management. Also, how the Hansa functioned without becoming a formal nation-state and its lasting imprint on European history and economics.To discover more about Justyna's work, please visit: https://premodernconflictmanagement.org/ or her personal page https://justynawubs-mrozewicz.blogspot.com/Produced by Dougal Patmore and James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.This was originally released as a subscriber-only episode in August 2025Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. If you explore the quayside in Kings Lynn in Norfolk, you will find many beautiful buildings. One of them I've always been particularly fond of. It's the Hanseatic Warehouse. It's a herringbone brick building. You can see the timber frames. It's right there on the key side of the Great Ouse River. And it's a reminder of a time when Kingslin was a great port before the river had silted up.

Ocean-going ships who come all the way in there and unload their cargo. And this building was one of many in Britain, a key outpost of a remarkable commercial organisation. The Hanseatic League, they had other sites in Britain. In fact, in London they had a whole area. It was called the Steel Yard, and it's, roughly speaking, underneath Cannon Street Station today. There was a walled community. They had their warehouse on the river. they had a chapel and counting houses, their little guild hall,

they'd wine cellars and kitchens and residential quarters. The jetties could be accessed directly by sea-going ships. And Kingslyn and London, other outposts in Britain, well, they were just a fraction of the similar sites right across northern Europe, stretching across the Baltic deep into what is now Belarusia or even Russia itself. If you squint a bit, they look a little bit like the beginnings of the colonies that place like Britain and Portugal and Holland were setting up in South and

Southeast Asia. But the Hanseatic League wasn't quite like that. It might sometimes feel like a foreign kingdom. It could enter into negotiations. It could even make war. But it wasn't a power. It wasn't something that would become a nation state like the French or the Dutch. It was something very different. It was an influential, but I find it quite a mysterious medieval trading network. It was a loose collection. of merchant elites in all these different places that work together to secure trading privileges, to maximize their commercial trading, their financial advantages, to reduce internal barriers to trade, to collaborate, and attempt to deal with foreign princes and kings.

In this episode, I'm going to try and get to grips of the Hanseatic League. I'm going to see how this informal network of merchants evolved and thrived and became something slightly more solid, slightly more formal, eventually though, declining but leaving a legacy in many European cities. And a legacy in organisations like Luftanzer, the German airline, its forebear in 1920 deliberately chose the name. Luftanzer, it was going to be a Hansa of the air, a nod to the transnational commercial nature of that organisation. It's founders calling it, I think, to deliberately distance themselves from the big hierarchical empire. that had just plunged the world into a terrible, terrible war, the First World War.

What exactly was the original Hansa? What was the Hanseatic League? And why does it matter today? Well, to find out, I'm talking to Dr. Justina, Wabs Morozovich. She's Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam, and she's going to help me get to grips with the Hansa. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

God saves the king. unity till there is first than black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the power. Justina, thank you very much coming on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. I guess, first of all, our leagues, is this a sort of type of political organization that was sort of normalish at the time, but that we've lost contact with, or was this innovative?

Was it highly unusual? So there were several leagues, city leagues, in the Middle Ages, but they were mostly for a certain purpose, for a certain time, and there was a foundational act. So in a sense, I think it's good to start by saying that the Hansa was not really a league. It was something totally different, and it was something confusing, both to contemporaries, and it is still to us now, both to scholars and I guess to your listeners as well. So there is this English term, the Hansiatic League, which is wildly known. But in a sense, I think we should call it the Hansa, the founder of market, that it was a different

type of beast. Nice. It's like the old quote about the Holy Roman Empire. It's now the Holy Roman nor an empire. So the Hanseatic leave was now the Hanseatic nor a league. It was Hanseatic, in the sense that it was a collectivity, but it was not a league. So in 1469, the English king Edward IV was also quite confused by it. And he tried to push the Hanset, the Hanseatic merchants who were there,

discussing their privileges and also their duties to define what they were. And they were quite good about interning it around by stating what they were not, so that they, in a sense, they were stating that there were not any type of corporate body, cooperation, and not a trading company. They were really kind of putting the emphasis of what they were not in order to avoid collective liability. So there was no common chess, so no common finances, you could say, there was no common representative, there was no oath which they swore to all of them, there was, as I mentioned, no foundational act. So it did not fit in the definitions of the Roman law at that time. So it was a nice way to kind of avoid collective liability and state that if merchants from one city committed an act which displeased the English king, then they were not all liable.

to it. Hence, it was not a league. Nice. A little bit amorphous, clever. It protects from litigation and, as you say, angry sovereign authorities. Tell me, what's the genesis? How and where does it emerge? Yes, so there are several theories in a sense in how you should see the emergence of the Hanses. So all the research underlined that it was connected to the city of Lubbeck, its foundation in the middle of the 12th century. But actually, the Hansa is not so much about merchants, being in a German city, but merchants going somewhere else. So in that sense, the fact that merchants from Cologne and also later Lubbock and other cities ventures to London in the 12th century and established a guild hall, established an organization

on the site, this is the beginning of the Hansa. So merchants from cities around the Baltic and also the North Sea Coast went to places like England, London, but also to Bruges, to Norway, to Russia, to Novgorod, but also to other places later to Italy, Portugal, Iceland and so on. So it was very much about this outward movement connected to trade. This is the beginning of the Hansa, merchants going abroad and getting organized gradually. So that's really interesting. So it's not driven by politics, strategy at home.

It's what happens when groups of merchants with similar cultural and religious and geographical connections find themselves together in London or Portugal and think, should we group together here and deal with these crazy Englishmen? It's sort of it's being formed almost on the periphery and then it's somehow exported back home. Indeed. So this is very much this back and forth interaction of interests, privileges, opportunities which arise. So the Hansen beans, in a sense a group of traders. There were several Hanses in the beginning in the 12th century. But this one grew very much because of merchants coming from various cities who came together. So it's a huge geographical area in the sense, if you see from the western part, what is now the Netherlands,

there were several cities in the Hansa, up to the eastern part of the Baltic. And then they found themselves in, for instance, what is now known as the steel yard in London. And they had to live together, trade together, and negotiate their rights with, for instance, the English king. And at a certain moment, so in the 12th and the 13th, especially in the 14th century, they established rules, regulations, but also this kind of collective name of the Hans, or the German Hans. They got privileges in various places like Norway or Flanders or London as merchants of the empire, merchants coming from the sea cities, underlining the fact that.

It was very much the maritime trade, but also eventually the term, the German Hansa. But whereby the German didn't mean the kind of Germaness, which we associate perhaps with the word now, but it was the German law, the German urban law, and the German language. So dialects which were being spoken and those cities, by those merchants. Okay, so if you're sitting in London, there's a group of Hansa merchants, they're speaking German, they have illegal and linguistic integrity and that you trade with them. But then how does that work back in Lübeck, in the cities, for example, on the Baltic coast of Germany? How are they being forced to collaborate by the actions of their commercial entities they're sending abroad?

There are guilds established of merchants going, for instance, to Bergen, to Norway or to Stockholm or indeed to Flanders. So it is a part of the organisation within the city, which has also a huge impact on the city government, richest merchants, the Hanseatic merchants, are very often mares or older men and have a huge influence on the politics and they want to have their interests represented within the city but also on a larger scale. So what you see from the middle of the 14th century is that representatives from these cities, for instance, Bogor masters, theirs or older men go to very often Lubbock or another large Hanseatic city and they meet up for the so-called Hanseatic diets. So these are week-long meetings

where they eat together, they discuss various issues of trade, but also politics, privileges, the law, but also social issues, internal conflicts. They spend time together. They get to know each other. They're family ties, which are very much apparent. And also internal alliances forged. So this is an internal institution, you could say, of the Hansa. those diets, the meetings. And then they also decide that they need to have a more firm organization of those settlements abroad. So this is very much an interaction between the two. The outside activities and the inside within the cities. These are the same people. So Justina, as someone who's not a medievalist, I'm bringing my terrible modern worldview.

I'm totally acknowledging my context as a modern human being. I'm sort of struggling to understand, And given the discussions that we are having in the 21st century around the world, or rather, where power and sovereignty ought to lie, that transnational organisations, nativist groups who say, no, we should not be sharing our sovereignty with anyone, you know, it's infringing our rights of self-determination. Are any of these discussions sort of presaged in this period? I mean, why is a city in northern Germany, why are they prepared to send their representatives to Lubeck and have those people sort of, try and hammer out legal and commercial issues in this kind of transnational group. Are these other cities sort of fine with that? Do they know they're going to make money? Is there tension within that relationship? They do it because they see clear advantages of cooperating. So you see this kind of idea of a collectivity which surpasses the city,

which is the kind of physical entity that they all know and they can relate to. But they have the idea of something which is indeed. above it. There are no nations at the time. So it's trans-regional. There are all kinds of political boundaries that they're crossing while discussing those things. But they see the advantages for mobility of their merchants, of the sailors, of craftsmen who can go to another Hanseatic city and settle there with, for instance, easier access to membership rights. They discuss how information should flow. They give each other more access to information. They know that when they cooperate and indeed operate as a group of merchants and discussions with the English king,

they will get more advantages rights than other foreigners. They know that by coordinating laws, the rules and regulations of trade will be recognizable to each other and it will facilitate trade. They will know what to do when their counterfeit goods being circulated within their system. So there are a host of advantages, and one of them which I have been researching, in the past years is also conflict management. So they know indeed answering a question, there will be also internal conflict between merchants,

but also between cities, and you have to deal with them. They're part of life. So you have to have ways to sometimes prevent them, but also effectively address them. So for instance, in 1381, they had a rule that if two cities were in conflict with each other, then one or more cities in the vicinity was to send representative, and try to mediate the conflict.

They had several rules of what to do when individual merchants were in conflict with each other, for instance, about debt or inheritances or about goods which never reached another city, for instance, because of piracy or adverse weather. They created several scripts, you could say, how to address those situations and that made it possible to, I think,

imagine living in such a larger construct than just one city, they had a concept of an adapted concept of the common good. So before states and nations and what we know that also common wealth, there was the medieval concept of the common good, so something which was to be advantages for the inhabitants of one city. Hanserts adapted this concept to the common cities and to the common merchants. So seeing it as something that they were to defend, they were to give access to all kinds of benefits to each other. So you see there's very much creativity also on a conceptual level on how to operate it. So I think it's a very pragmatic, creative approach and an awareness of the surroundings which surpass the immediate physical world in which you live.

Listen to Dan Snow's history I'm learning all about the Hanseatic League more coming up is it quite flexible do you get towns and cities sort of crashing out if they profoundly disagree on the regulations around dried fish other examples of them just going right we're kind of out And given that there isn't a kind of straight-jacketed institutional framework,

it means that presumably they can stretch the elastic, they can sort of come and go. Indeed. It's very much a kind of flexible club membership without putting your name even in the club. So it's only in the 16th century that you have lists really of Hansiatic cities. Before you grew into the Hansa, as a city, by sending your merchants abroad. only the 15th centuries that started to be discussions who should actually count as a hansiatic city. There are several criteria which you could apply to the membership,

but it's all fluid. And indeed, it also means that if you're no longer interested in trading as a hansett, when the advantages disappear, that you kind of slowly make your exit and you just don't go to hansiatic diets. You don't send your merchants abroad. And effectively, you cease to be a hansiatic.

city. But very often it wasn't a kind of official resignation. It's indeed an amorphous network organization and you flow into it and you can flow out of it. There are very few examples of cities which really make a sense we get out of here or which are being kicked out of the organization. So again, Justine, I thank you so much. You've really helped me to understand this. And on the ground, talk to me about merchants, cargoes on the ground or rather on the water. when you were enjoying a period of being very much in the league, for example, let's just use that language, your merchants would arrive in a port, presumably, and there was less friction. There's less paperwork, there's immediate protections offered, for example, I suppose, of cargoes.

It just greases the cogs of this trade, does it? It does, and it's a huge network of families and friends. So part of the system was also that you spent quite a bit of time abroad in one of those outposts to learn the trade as a young merchant being sent by family members, but also as a craftsman. You could be sent to an uncle. When you were a lubaker, you could send me to an uncle to Reval Talin to learn tricks of the trade there. There were marriage alliances also being forged, also during those hansiatic diets. So you knew people around.

So that was also really part of this system. It was also a social network in that sense. And what always amazes me is when they read the primary sources is how huge this mobility was, not only of the merchants themselves and sailors and craftsmen, but also their family members, the wives, the children, youngsters traveling. There was a lot of traffic on the North Sea and the Baltic and also on the rivers. And the fact that you knew people around, that you knew how the legal system worked, that you understood the language, those dialects of the German, it really facilitated.

mobility and that you also very often knew the layout of the cities even so the law made it quite clear that there should be a marketplace for instance on a town hall so you also had a kind of imaginary an idea of how the city should look like where you should go which elements to find which made this well quite often a scary medieval world much more familiar to those people who moved about. As the Hansa evolves, and you mentioned, for example, getting in a bit of a scrap with Edward III, do they embrace the tools, the language of a sovereign power? Do they develop a military force? They fight people. Do they enter hardcore negotiations with the English crown as sort of equals? They do. They very much do. So, for instance, they start wars with a Danish king.

So on the whole, you could say that they prefer negotiation, diplomacy, because it's cheaper. These are merchants at all. But if needed, they don't shy away from violence, from capturing ships, from blocking ports, from real outright warfare. So they do it several times and as a collectivity. And you see here also part of the organization, some of those cities are active in sending ships and people from the cities. and others contribute through taxes, through money. So there's a whole system of internal negotiations also, how many ships should be sent.

So they're very well versed in all the strategies and tactics of conflict, both on a large scale like wars, but also in terms of legal systems and so on, what to employ in order to have an advantage. And I guess this is one of the reasons why this organization was so long-lived. it's almost 500 years at a time where lots of changes happened in urban Europe. So I think this is quite a remarkable feat for cities, which were under various rulers and undergoing all kinds of changes, crises, including the Black Day.

We've seen other types of policies that forms a political organisation that perhaps war and crisis can concentrate power into individual hands. It can metastasize or evolve into sort of monarchy. Or do you get individuals that emerge that become the sort of talismanic warlike leaders? Or is it always a more consensual, a more discursive, sort of oligarchic system? It's quite a flesh organization. So there is some hierarchy in terms of cities. And in that sense, also some hierarchy in terms of people, individuals who are leading those cities.

But they don't really seek a kind of permanent leadership, even looking. is not really an official head of the Hansi. They see it also as a bit of a burden, actually, a responsibility. So they try to divide those tasks. And it's only in the middle of the 16th century that the Hanseatic cities decide that they need a kind of official who will represent them as a whole in discussions, for instance, with the English king or the Polish king. So there's a high English Zuderman, who is a syndic. And he gets quite a lot of tasks. a long list, but he's not really a very willing representative. He's complaining a lot that it's too much work. It's actually keeping him from his business. He's also a merchant.

He would prefer it to see it as a kind of part-time job. So most of those mares, burgomasters, older men and so on, they represent the cities and negotiations and the handsetic diets, but they're also merchants. And you really get the impression that they like this kind of multi-task life that they have, that do not want to focus on one, for instance, a political career. So it's the mix of those two. And this creates a situation that you don't really see such individuals who are pushing just for political power. It's more about economics. It's more about trade, about social and capital that they're building. So it's an interesting way of, yeah, a more holistic approach to political life, I guess.

Is there ever a point when the Hansa could have evolved into a more imperial or that nation-state structure and competed with the rise of, in the early modern England, Netherlands, Portugal, Prussia, eventually Sweden? Or is it just, it was just never that beast? So in the second half of the 16th century, you really see those attempts of reorganisation. So was the official that I mentioned, but also writing down rules more firmly, writing a list of members. So then they actually do try to. to become a league. They realize that the world is changing, so states are becoming much more powerful. Kings are more powerful. There's more of a distance between the city governments and

kings, so they try to do it. But it's in a sense, perhaps too late for it. Cities lose quite a bit of autonomy, so it's not really the timing to pursue such an adventure anymore. And we see also The change with trading routes, the Atlantic route is opening up. So there's a lot of shifts going on. The Baltic is much more of an area where the Dutch gain supremacy. So in a sense, it's not their path. But I think what is really fascinating about the Hansa is that it shows a different route, which did work for a long time.

It's not statehood or a nationhood, but a kind of collective living acting for hundreds of years. where political boundaries are less important than the networks, the economic and the social and political networks that are being forged bottom up. That's what I find so challenging and exciting and interesting about the Hansa, because this is a time when the rest of Europe, nation states are evolving, the fiscal military state, governments that can borrow money, build armies, build ships, fight an enemy, a culture of identity as building, regional peoples are becoming French or becoming English or Scottish or even British. And the Hansa feels like it was just always on a very different

trajectory to that. It is. And perhaps if states didn't evolve the way they did, but cities stayed within their power and autonomy, then perhaps the whole of Europe would eventually be a Europe of cities, which in the sense it is becoming in some aspects. Again, you see quite a lot of initiatives of cooperation between the cities, but there was not really the idea of that they were to govern Europe as a really one political bloc. It's a different philosophy and it's a different trajectory and exciting one. And in a sense, it shows us it's not a given, this nationhood or statehood is one of the ideas we can have as people as inhabitants of Europe or other parts of the world of cooperation and solving problems addressing conflicts.

So it's not only within such top-down, rigid structures with indeed powerful men on top, but really also bottom-up smaller communities which see the value of cooperation and are perhaps realistic about the risks of cooperation and competition. Was the hands a quite a radical alternative model, which did not survive the hard state power of the 17th century and that that period, but could have its time again. It's a completely different way of doing, of reimagining our political communities. It could be seen this way. So in a sense, the Hansus never totally ceased to exist. So in the 17th century, indeed, we have the last Hanseatic diet, which is seen as the end of the Hansa, but several of the cities

continued to cooperate and continued to have this identity of cities which don't exist just within their own minds. And since in 1980s, you see this cooperation gaining traction again. So it's more on a cultural, partly also economic level that they're doing it. You have meetings of people, both officials, but also just inhabitants of those cities coming together for festivals and exchanging ideas, business ideas, and culture. So it still exists in a sense. The Hans never ceased to it. And perhaps it's a good reminder for us that there are all kinds of possibilities. When mayors of big cities announce sort of bilateral links between Berlin and London or New York, is that the ghost of the hands, though? Is that smaller communities trying to

break out from beneath the sort of armored shield of the nation state to try and sort of forge commonality? You could see it, I guess, this way, but it's very often indeed bilateral. And if you make one step further, for instance, in issues like climate change or sometimes political alliances. There are more cities who decide to join in and we see this emerging on such topics. Then it is the ghost or the inspiration perhaps of the Hansa and some of those cities indeed, which are in the northern Europe, very much evoke this image. It's a positive image of cooperation of what is possible. And as you talk about legacy, the ghost is still there. Of course, the architectural landmarks people will be very familiar with traveling across that

area, Bremen, Lubbeck, Hamburg. But also, Lufthansa. So the name survives. Indeed, indeed. So you see it also in names of schools, for instance, here in Netherlands, and all kinds of products. So it evokes something which is surdy, reliable, which has historical roots, and which travels further than just one locality. So there's loads of positive connotations. Obviously, the Hansa was not only about positive aspects. There was, as we mentioned, war, and there were obviously also elites which governs the cities. But overall, I think it is one of those fascinating and quite positive examples of historical social interaction to which we kind of willingly look back to and get inspired by. Justina, I will put your website in the notes of this episode so people can check that out and check out more of your work. Thanks so much. Thanks for coming on. Thanks very much for listening, everyone.

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