Gone Medieval - Hanseatic League

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Growing from a few North German towns in the late 12th century, the Hanseatic League — a powerful network of merchant guilds and market towns — dominated trade across almost 200 settlements in seven modern-day countries. But how did it function and manage to become so successful over such a vast region?In this edition of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman finds out more about the Hanse from Dr. Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz.This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. From the 12th century onwards, a powerful network of merchants known as the Hansa or more commonly the Hanseatic League grew to dominate trade across the northern and Baltic seas. But who were they? How were they organized? And how could they be quite so successful across a region that stretched from London in the west to Novgorod in the east.

To answer some of these questions, I'm delighted to her with me today, Dr Justina Wobsmolziewicz, who is an Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam. Justina, thanks so much for joining me and welcome to the Gone Medieval Studio. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to discussing the Hansa. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. I mean, Hanseatic, like it's something that I, so growing up in Norway, I certainly had heard a lot about and going to places like Bergen,

but never really understood what it was all about. I wanted to ask you, first of all, I mean, how did you get interested in studying this particular topic? In the sense, there were two things. So first when I did my Scandinavian studies, quite a long while ago, I heard about this Hanseatic presence in Scandinavia, which had an enormous impact on the language. So up to 30% of Swedish, for instance,

consists of low German loanwords. German was the language of the Hansa. So it had an enormous impact on the society and on the language. It even changed the grammar. So that was something which captures my attention. I thought this must have been enormous importance, not only as a linguistic present, but also a historical present. And I delved more into the subject. And I came across both interesting literature and sources, which highlighted this unique character of the Hansa back then. For instance, in the end of the 15th century, the English described the Hansa as a crocodile in the water, so a potentially dangerous creature, sharp teeth, of which only the head and some parts were visible. And the head was one of the cities, Lubbeck,

which was described as the head of the Hansa for a long time. But actually, this creature consisted, you could say, of many heads and many parts which were both very medieval in the sense that they existed in Europe, like GILDS, but which in combination of its features made it a unique phenomenon in European history and a phenomenon which was present for at least 500 years, so since the end of the 12th century until the 17th century. So really, it was something that had a really huge impact. And also on England, I said we're going to get into that a little bit later on as well. But I think it's, to me, as having grown up in Scandinavia and moved to England,

You don't really hear so much about it. It seems like much more of a Scandinavian or that part of Northern Europe, around Germany, those areas. But actually, it did have a big impact on England as well, didn't it, and a big connection. Yes, indeed. Merchants from German cities, which later became Hanseatic cities, were present in London since the late 12th century. They established a settlement, which was called the Steel Yard, which was positioned to south of the Thames Street and quite some excavations done also in the area. But right now it's Kennan Street Station, so you can't. see much of it anymore, but it was a settlement of traders coming from various cities and living

together and enjoying privileges given to them by the English king and doing trade and being a kind of spider in the web of European economy, European trade, and really vital for England in providing grain from the Baltic, but also being a channel for English textiles, English wool and other products. So it really connected England to other parts of Europe. as well as it did Scandinavia. So if we were going to go really back to basics then, can you give us a sort of definition of exactly what the Hanseatic League really was? Well, actually, I'll start with a definition of it was not,

because this is the way Hansa described themselves. In 1469, for instance, in a rather famous speech to the English king who was exasperated and wanted to know, so what kind of opponent do I have here, who are you? They said, we're actually quite a special organization. So we are not a trading company. We are not a corporation. We are not a corporate body or even a corpus, a body, which was quite a medieval notion of describing an organization. We're quite different. We don't have common property. We don't have a treasury, no seal. We don't swear an oath to each other. There's no common

representative, no common leader, and no common ruler. Instead, they kind of position themselves as a confederation of mutual consent of something very vague. And it was vague on purpose, because it served the purpose to avoid a liability for each other's actions. So this was a very clever way of doing it, but it illustrates that contemporaries didn't know what the Hansa was, how to describe them, hansets themselves avoided describing them, and they often actually didn't use the term in their interactions between themselves. And it also makes difficult really for researchers nowadays to describe them. And I can imagine for someone who has not heard about the Hansa at all, also difficult to grasp. So what was it? But it's actually this very

essence of this undescribable crocodile, which makes it interesting. But of course, as researchers, we have to have a kind of working consensus of what it is, the subject that you are dealing with. The kind of working definition of the Hansa is that it was a network organization of merchants and cities, so 70 large cities in the German-speaking area where German law was governing the urban life and up to 130 smaller towns. So in an organization, which in its stream, you could say, counted up to 200 cities, functioned under various rulers and partly under various laws. It extended really over a large area, not only in Western Europe, but also up to the Baltic, for instance, Val and Tallinn, were also.

also Hanseatic cities. And it was an organization which was also rooted in various areas through the settlements which they established. So the London Steel Yard was one of them, one of the most important ones. There was three other large settlements in Bergen and Norway and Novgorod in Russia and also in Bruges, in Belmont countries. And there was also a host of other smaller settlements scattered across Europe, some more permanent, some functioning only for a couple of months per year. So a very extensive and large system. The Hansa was an organization which was mostly about protecting trading rights, privileges, but it was also about taking it easier for merchants and their families and sailors to move through Europe, either for shorter

periods of time or settle in another city. And it was unique European phenomena. I think that's a really good explanation, even though it's clear why it's so complex. I mean, I did wonder, do we know much about how it originated in the first place. How did it come about? Is that something that we know much about? The Hansa started as an organisation of traders and it grew in the course of the 14th century into an organisation of both traders and cities. So in the 12th century, time when urbanisation really also took off in Europe and trade expanded where population numbers also started to grow. There were groups of merchants who ventured to new markets and settled for periods of time and who needed protection.

So both physical protection, that's why they moved together. They were often called Hansa, so a term which was not unique only for the Hansa later, but this was a group of merchants as a term. So we see such presence in England of merchants coming from what later were to become Hanseatic cities to Flanders, as well in the early 13th century, to Russia in the 12th century. Northland, but also Scandinavia, so Visby, Gotland was also a pivotal place where they appear. So we see an increased mobility and economic activity going on in Europe, and these traders really jumped into it.

There's increased production of various goods and exchanges. And in the course of the 13th century, traders coming from what was to become the Hanseatic area decided to use a kind of common umbrella term. It was, on the one hand, the German Hanser, which was, used, which we see appears in privileges by the English king and also in Flanders, and also traders of the Roman Empire. So also quite broad and vague terms, but what is important is that these were collective terms. So these were not privileges giving to merchants from one town or city, but from various cities, that they really decided to not only move physically together,

to search protection physically together, but also function under collective privileges. That this is one of the most important aspects, which was of value for the traders. And from then on, they became also a political power. So kings and rulers, bishops negotiated with them because it was obviously beneficial both to merchants and the cities from which they came and to rulers to make sure that the exchange was smooth and growing and beneficial for all parties. I mean, it sounds quite remarkable. And it sounds like a really quite sophisticated and clever way of being able to work across such large areas, because we're talking a really huge area here and so many different countries and interacting with all those different kingdoms. Is that part of the success, do you think?

Is it the fact that it wasn't really so well defined? Is that why it was able to thrive so much, do you think? Yes, definitely. So the fact that they did not operate under one ruler who would offer them protection, but that they had to organise it themselves. So we had city councils, cooperating, representatives of city councils meeting regularly at Hanseatic diets, as they were called, organizing those settlements abroad, establishing rule together, setting up a whole system of communication, pragmatic literacy, which had to straddle geographical distances, political boundaries, boundaries between legal systems, and at the same time making use of things like, indeed, the language that I mentioned, they all literally spoke more or less the same,

language that facilitates contact and trade. So I think taking both differences and difficulties of functioning in medieval Europe at the time into account and the same time making use of commonalities, of connections of the fact that they moved around established networks, family networks and business networks was a vital element of success. And the same perhaps also partly in comparison to Italian trade, which was also flourishing the time and especially in the later Middle Ages, which is quite characteristic of the Hansa is that it was not so much elite driven. So, of course, there were also rich merchants, but the large bulk of the trade was done by a middle strata of merchants. So you didn't have to be extremely rich in order to

start business. You started together with someone else or conducted trade on his behalf. Businesses were quite small. So there was quite a lot of flexibility and possibility growth there. And there was also a loss of attention for education, the pragmatic literacy. So you had to be able to read letters, write letters, to have some account books in order to conduct trade on distances. So it's a kind of very hands-on organisation in that sense. A hundred years ago, one of history's greatest discoveries ever was made in the Valley of the Kings. The tomb of Tutankhamun was found, intact with thousands of treasures. And this month on the ancients from history hit, We're exploring how a discovery transformed a boy king from minor Egyptian monarch.

Tutankarman really worked to restore Egypt. But he only had 10 years. If he'd had 30 years on it, 40 years on the floor, it would have been, I think, very, very different. And he might have become a great further. Into immortalised ancient ruler. It certainly created something with what I call Tutmania, all these things that are indications of the fascination with ancient Egypt.

But I think it did indeed inspire people to become archaeologists. Join me Tristan Hughes every Thursday on The Ancients from History Hit as we delve into the life and legacy of Tutankarpe wherever you get to your podcasts. To move on a little bit to your current research that you're working on now, because you've got a research project at the moment which looks at conflict management and specifically within this sort of context. And listening to that introduction, I can see now, I think, why that would be relevant. But why is it important or useful to look at that within the Hansa and the Hanseatic League? Perhaps one thing to point out first, it was not a Hanseatic League. So this is a term which has appeared in English a long time ago, a translation of an older term, the German one. But a league presupposes an organisation which is more consolidated than the Hansa was.

So the Hansa was not a league. It was also not a guild in that sense, so it's not a fossilised organisation of cities. or of merchants. But this difficulty of description makes it that researchers have focused a lot of the structure of the Hans. Whereas in our project, we have indeed moved more towards what the Hansa did for its members. So the function of it. And one of the important functions, which was indeed necessary, was dealing with conflicts which were inherent both to being abroad contact with rulers, but also obviously internal conflicts which would arise both between cities and in those settlements of basically foreigners living together suddenly for a couple of years,

let's say Bergen, are fascinating in that sense that they reveal dynamics, interactions between in a kind of much more faceted way. They shed much more light on the interaction. Because when something goes wrong, that's when you're right. I have to either send a letter about it to your city council or there's a court case going on. So we have those sources as historians. And the council in Hanseatic cities kept records very meticulously. So this is a really fascinating source to study. And what struck me when I was going through a source in various archives was that the Hansa was not only about conflict resolution,

about refinding a solution, but also about, and here comes again, this pragmatic aspect, realizing that some conflicts were unsolvable. So you had to find a modus vivendi together. And also that conflict prevention was a very important. important aspect of the interaction. So there's sophisticated way of incorporating conflict into light. So not treating it as something that occurs and has to be resolved and removed as quickly as possible. No, conflict is the part of life in Hanseatic cities and for Hanseatic

merchants. So they develop practical ways of dealing with it. For instance, if two cities were at odds with each other, that there was a spelled out rule that the representatives of a third one were to try to mediate. In many of the sources, it was underlined that if merchants were in conflict with each other, they were to first try mediation or arbitration, so smaller scale only then moved to a court, which is obviously more costly to do, but sometimes also necessary. And developed also a really pragmatic system of using each other's courts. They were not seen as foreign courts. So, for instance, if you were a merchant from Hamburg and you ended up having a find in Lubbock, you could count on it that you would be treated in Lubbock fairly and more

less as if you were a citizen of Lubbock, because there was the underlying idea of reciprocity. If you were treated fairly in Lubbock, then Lubbockers would hopefully encounter the same kind of treatment when they came to Hamburg, indeed. I like the idea of that. I can see how that really facilitates movement, because if you want to encourage people to trade widely and to travel and to move, you've got to give them some sort of certainty, haven't you, and about how they can live their lives and operate in trade. So, I mean, that sounds very clever. Do you see geographical differences in that? Did that way of operating function across the entire area? Or were the regional differences between, say, London and

Novgorod? Or was it actually quite successful across the whole area? It was quite successful across the rural area and that was connected to the fact that they met regularly. Representatives of cities and of those settlements abroad like London for a couple of days, a couple of weeks, and talked about all kinds of matters negotiated, but also streamlined, for instance, their policy when it came to privileges, decided on rules connected to the shipment of goods, all kinds of matters that came up. So we have those really wonderful sources, which are descriptions, reports of meetings, and there are much less dry than reports nowadays. So hear about fights and people standing up and leaving the room because they're annoyed and negotiations being conducted in taverns to keep things going

and then they are coming back in. So this happened at this level, but also the Hansa was divided into three and later four regional parts. So there were also regional meetings of this kind going on. And for some of them, for instance, for Prussia, which is my area of research currently in the project, there are also these kinds of very vivid reports of meetings and gatherings. So there was enough platform for coordination. And I think this was vital for the longevity of the Hans, otherwise the organization wouldn't be able to function for such a long time. Obviously, in the late 15th and 16th century, when states really started to consolidate the power of princes and rulers and kings became greater than the Hans got into trouble. And they indeed

tried to reform themselves more into the direction of the League. But it was not very successful. cities became less important, less prominent in the political system. So in the 17th century, the Hansa seemingly dissolved, but in a sense, the spirit of it continued to exist in the major cities in Lubek, Hamburg and Bremen. They kept calling themselves, hence yet, cities, and they still do, actually. Yeah, so they're sort of living on that heritage, I suppose, in a way. So you've been telling me about some of these records that we've got, some of these sources that you've been using. But actually, when we were planning this episode, you told me about another, a collaboration, of letters that have come to light that actually give it really extraordinary insight

into the lives of some of the people involved here. Tell us about that collection of letters. Yeah, this is a book, a source edition which has just come out with Breepold. And it's, on the one hand, Merchant's Letters from 1533 and also all kinds of other documentation, which really show how London and Antwerp and the Hansa were connected in this period. These are 35 letters. The majority of them are actually English letters, so not Hanseatic merchants. But merchants were stayed in Antwerp and wrote to their wives and bosses and family members. There are also several duct letters and a Hanseatic one as well.

But the interesting thing is those letters never made it from Antwerp to London, where they were supposed to go, but they were captured by privateers in a war in which the Hansa was involved. So the letters entered up in Lubbac. and also in the archive of Lubbock. And they were left unopened for more than 400 years. And this is a very rare find. These letters combine both business and private matters. And unopened letters, most of them have not survived.

So this is pure serendipity and chance and so on. So my co-editor found those letters. Actually, already 1990s, a long time ago, but left it as a side project because it's an intricate matter. So it took the corona pandemic for him. go back to this collection, then you realized that they needed also some help, also with the Dutch part and some other aspects. So we both decided it was a nice Corona project. So these letters really show how merchants, and now I'm not talking only about Hanseatic merchants,

which all together lived their lives and sent greetings to family members joked around and used code for their messages. It has been thought for a long time that it was only the elites who use code and cipher and so on. And here we have examples of English merchants writing in code to their wives, so really also expecting their wives to be able to decipher the message. There are marital jokes going on in that. So really lovely, vivid sources. And it is an example of, I think, indeed, this interconnectedness.

So the Hansa comes in through a side door here, but it brings us really important sources to also the history of London in the early 16th century. that must have felt quite special to really be the first people since the 1500s to actually read these words. Did you feel like you were sort of getting close to them? Very much. So you see, for instance, a young Hanseatic trader going to London to the steel yards and you see what he had in his trunk. And these were clothes and books and cookies. Oh, cookies. So a kind of image of a student going for an internship to London. It makes history very, very vivid, very personal. And at the same time also in a very natural way connected to the politics going on at that time.

And you mentioned also women, so there's some writing to their wives. Are some of the letters from women as well in that collection? Indeed, there are two letters from Dutch women, actually writing to their husband who migrated, one to a husband who was in London, who migrated there probably, and another one to a son. These are among the oldest letters written in Dutch by women from the low countries, and probably at least one of them is written in her own hands. At least this is the way she states it written in haste by me, so it's quite safe to assume. So it's probably the oldest written by an ordinary woman from the low countries. And it's lovely to see how bossy she is to her husband. And it's very clear that she's managing

business at home. Fantastic. Absolutely. Absolutely love that. I like that connection between the individual human lives and the bigger picture. So I absolutely love these letters. And people can actually find them, can't they? Because this whole book that you've edited, that's available online, free and open access. How can people find this or find out more about this topic more generally? Yeah, the book is called, So message in a bottle, merchant's letters, merchant's marks, and conflict management in 1533, 34, a source edition.

So it's about 100 pages of sources and 100 pages of our introduction because we were so enthusiastic about the sources. And it's available on the website of the publisher, Blaypals. Fascinating. and it's really nice to be able to look through and read those actual words that people use. So you're part of this whole, I'm not going to call it a league anymore. Now I've learned my lesson. Just to sort of wind up, I'm going to ask just one very wide question.

What do you think is the most sort of significant impact or legacy that the answer had on our history? I think it shows us how connected the medieval world was, how natural it was to travel to find creative way to cooperate, to exist in various conditions. And this is something that is still present with us today. I think the message is not to be afraid of all kinds of organizational creativity. Excellent. I like that. That's a good outcome. A good legacy to leave behind, I think. Justina, thank you so much for joining me today and explaining and sharing all your knowledge with us. That's been absolutely brilliant. So thank you.

Thank you so much for having me. And thank you all for listening. This has been an episode of Gondon. medieval from history hit. If you enjoy listening to our podcast, please do leave us a review because it really helps other people find us. And you can also subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just look in the episode notes for how to do that. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman.

My co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Saturday with another episode and I will be back again next Tuesday. Thank you all so much for listening.