The Golden Age of the Hanseatic League
The golden age of the Hanseatic League is usually dated from the Treaty of Stralsund in 1370 to the Burgundian wars of the 1460s and 1470s, a period of roughly a century in which the League’s power was at its height and its commercial dominance was almost unchallenged. The period was marked by the rise of the great merchant families, the expansion of the kontore, the regular meeting of the Hansetag, and the elaboration of the legal and commercial institutions that made the League’s success possible. It was also marked by a flourishing of art, architecture, and urban culture that left an indelible mark on the cities of the Baltic.
This article describes the golden age, beginning with the conditions that made it possible, continuing with the great merchants and the great cities, and ending with the first signs of the crisis that would eventually bring the golden age to an end.
The conditions of the golden age
The golden age of the League was the product of several conditions, some of them internal to the League, some of them external. The most important of the external conditions was the political fragmentation of northern Europe. The Holy Roman Empire, of which the major Hanseatic cities were a part, was a loose confederation of principalities, ecclesiastical states, and free cities, and the central authority of the emperor was weak. The kings of Denmark, Sweden, and Poland-Lithuania were consolidating their authority, but they were still vulnerable to the League’s embargoes and naval power. The result was a situation in which the cities could pursue their commercial interests with relatively little interference from the territorial states.
The second external condition was the demographic and economic recovery of Europe after the disasters of the fourteenth century. The Black Death, which had killed roughly a third of the population of Europe in the middle of the century, had been followed by a long period of recovery, and the recovery was particularly strong in the cities of the Baltic. The cities grew, the trade routes expanded, and the demand for the goods of the Baltic — grain, salt, herring, furs, timber — was high. The League’s merchants, with their established networks and their privileged position in the foreign kontore, were well placed to take advantage of the recovery.
The third external condition was the technological advance of the late Middle Ages. The cog, the great round ship of the Baltic, was developed in the course of the thirteenth century, and it transformed the carrying trade of the region. The cog was a sturdy, capacious vessel that could carry large cargoes across the open sea, and it was the backbone of the Hanseatic merchant fleet. The cog was supplemented, in the fifteenth century, by the hulk, an even larger vessel that could carry cargoes of up to 500 tons. The technological advance in shipping made the long-distance trade more efficient, and it allowed the League to extend its operations to new markets.
The great merchant families
The golden age was the age of the great merchant families, the patrician families that dominated the politics of the cities and the trade of the Baltic. In Lübeck the great families included the Berings, the Brömbsens, the Geverdes, the Klingbergs, the Lüneburgs, the Parchams, the Ritzerows, and the Warendorps. In Hamburg the great families included the Bergen, the Hummersbüttel, the Kirchhoff, the Looft, the Meierson, the Moller, the Sluter, and the Wetken. In Danzig the great families included the Ferbers, the Recks, the Ziegenhagen, and the Zielkes. In Riga the great families included the Bockelbergers, the Kerstens, the Mönnekes, the Osthues, the Proffe, the Ronnebergers, and the Staves.
A caveat: many of these family names appear in the historical record only for a generation or two — the Berings, for example, are prominent in the 14th century and largely disappear from the records by the 16th. The picture of a stable patrician class ruling the cities for centuries is partly an artefact of the surviving sources; the reality was more fluid. Recent prosopographical work (for example, the Lübeck Prosopographische Datenbank) has done much to clarify which families were actually continuous over time.
The great merchant families were, in the first instance, business families. They made their fortunes in the long-distance trade of the Baltic and the North Sea, and they used the profits to buy land, to build houses, to endow churches, and to support the arts. The great families were also political families: they dominated the councils of the cities, they served as delegates to the Hansetag, and they provided the merchants who staffed the kontore. The great families were also dynastic families: they married among themselves, kept careful records of their genealogies, and tried to keep their wealth within the family.
The cities in their prime
The cities of the League flourished in the golden age. Lübeck, the capital of the League, was at its peak in the fifteenth century, with a population of perhaps 22,000–25,000 and a wealth that was the envy of northern Europe. The city’s merchants dominated the trade of the Baltic, and the city’s council was the principal political authority in the region. Hamburg, to the west, was growing rapidly, and its merchants were extending their trade to the North Sea and the Atlantic. Danzig, on the Vistula, was the great port of the Polish grain trade, and its wealth was legendary. Riga, on the Dvina, was the gateway to the Russian trade, and its merchants were among the richest in the League.
The cities of the golden age were also centres of art and learning. The brick Gothic style reached its highest development in the churches and town halls of the period: the Marienkirche in Lübeck (1277–1351), the Nikolaikirche in Stralsund (1278–1340s), the Marienkirche in Gdańsk (1343–1502), the Rathaus in Lübeck (13th-c. core, with later additions), the Rathaus in Stralsund (1310s), and the Petrikirche in Riga (early 13th c., with much later additions) are among the masterpieces of the style. The painters, sculptors, and craftsmen of the cities produced works of art that were famous throughout Europe.
The standard treatment of Hanseatic art and architecture is the catalogue Backsteingotik (Lübeck, 2000) and the older survey by Willibald Leo von Lütgendorff, Die Bau- und Kunstdenkmäler von Lübeck, 3 vols.
The kontore in their prime
The kontore were at the height of their power and prestige in the golden age. The Steelyard in London was, in the early fifteenth century, the largest and most important foreign trading post in England, and its merchants controlled a substantial part of the English wool and cloth trade. The kontor of Bruges was the great emporium of the North, where the merchants of the Baltic met the cloth weavers of Flanders and the moneylenders of Italy. The kontor of Bergen in Norway controlled the export of stockfish, the staple food of much of northern Europe in Lent. The kontor of Novgorod in Russia was the easternmost outpost of Latin Christendom, and its merchants had privileges that were the envy of other foreigners.
The kontore were governed by councils elected by the merchants of the participating cities, and the councils had extensive powers. They regulated the conduct of trade, they arbitrated disputes among the merchants, they maintained the warehouses and the hostels, and they represented the merchants in dealings with the host country.
The Hansetag at its most influential
The Hansetag was at its most influential in the golden age. It met more frequently, passed more decisions, and its decisions were more often obeyed. The Hansetag’s authority was supported by the League’s ability to enforce its decisions through embargoes and, in the last resort, through war. The Hansetag’s decisions were also supported by the wide distribution of the costs and benefits of the League’s policies, which made the smaller cities willing to go along with the decisions of the larger ones.
The Hansetag’s authority was not, however, unlimited. The cities still retained their sovereignty, and they could still defy the Hansetag. The smaller cities, in particular, often felt that the larger cities were running the League for their own benefit, and the resulting tensions periodically produced open rebellion. The Hansetag’s ability to enforce its decisions was also limited by the practical difficulties of enforcement: a city that defied a Hansetag decision might be expelled, but expulsion was not always a sufficient deterrent.
The crisis of the golden age
The golden age came to an end in the late fifteenth century, and the end was marked by a series of crises that gradually eroded the foundations of the League’s power. The most visible was the Burgundian wars of the 1460s and 1470s, in which the League’s fleet suffered its first major naval defeat at the Battle of Reimerswaal in 1473. The Peace of Cadzand in 1477 was a recognition that the League’s commercial position was no longer unchallenged.
The other crises of the late fifteenth century were more subtle but no less significant. The voyages of discovery shifted the centre of European commerce from the Baltic to the Atlantic. The rise of the territorial states eroded the League’s privileged position. The Reformation divided the League’s member cities along confessional lines. The wars of religion devastated the cities of northern Germany. By the time the Thirty Years War ended in 1648, the League was a shadow of its former self.
The crisis of the golden age is treated at greater length in the article on the late period and the article on the decline.