The Growth of the Hanseatic League
The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were the period in which the Hanseatic League grew from a loose coalition of Wendish towns into a confederation of more than a hundred cities that dominated the trade of northern Europe. The growth was not the result of a single act of foundation or a single plan of expansion. It was the product of many small steps, each of which built on the precedents of earlier steps, and each of which was the response to a particular need or opportunity.
This article traces the growth of the League from the late twelfth century to the early fifteenth century, beginning with the urban revolution of the Wendish towns and the formation of the great Baltic cities, continuing with the establishment of the kontore and the great wars of the fourteenth century, and ending with the consolidation of the League’s power in the late fourteenth century.
The urban revolution of the Baltic
The first step in the growth of the League was the urban revolution of the Baltic, the great movement of town founding and town rebuilding that transformed the southern Baltic coast in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The model for the new towns was Lübeck, which had been founded in 1143 by Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, and refounded on a new site in 1159 by Flemish and Dutch settlers who brought with them the urban traditions of the Low Countries.
Lübeck’s success was immediate, and within a generation the city was the most populous and prosperous in northern Germany. Its town law was adopted by the new towns of the region: Wismar (1229), Rostock (1218), Stralsund (1234), Greifswald (1250), Danzig (1263), Elbing (1237), Königsberg (1255), and many others. The result was a chain of cities, all built on the same plan, that stretched from Lübeck to Riga.
The cities of the Baltic were, in the first instance, regional centres. Each had its own hinterland, its own markets, and its own merchants. But they were also connected by the trade of the Baltic, and the merchants of one city had to deal with the merchants of the other cities. The common legal tradition made cooperation almost automatic.
A useful note on the chronology: the dates of foundation given in the standard literature (and reproduced in the table on the cities pillar page) refer to the year the city received its charter, not to the year the first settlement was laid out. Wismar, for example, is dated 1229 because of Wizlaw’s charter, but the site had been settled earlier.
The expansion to the West and the East
The growth of the League was not confined to the Baltic. In the West, the cities of the Rhineland and Westphalia — Cologne, Dortmund, Soest, Münster, Osnabrück, and many others — were already members of the League by the late thirteenth century, and they brought with them the privileges they had obtained in England, Flanders, and France. The expansion to the West gave the League access to the markets of the Atlantic seaboard, and it made the League a player in the politics of the Holy Roman Empire.
In the East, the cities of Livonia, Estonia, and Finland — Riga, Tallinn (Reval), Dorpat (Tartu), and others — were founded or rebuilt in the course of the thirteenth century, and they were admitted to the League in the early fourteenth century. The expansion to the East gave the League access to the markets of Russia, and it made the League a player in the politics of the Baltic.
The expansion of the League was not, of course, without conflict. The cities of the Baltic competed with one another for the trade of the East, and the cities of the West competed with the cities of the East for the trade of the West. The Hansetag, the League’s central institution, had to mediate these conflicts, and the mediation was not always successful. But the League’s ability to act collectively, even in the face of these conflicts, was one of the marks of its success.
The kontore and the foreign trade
The growth of the League was accompanied by the establishment of the kontore, the foreign trading offices that were the League’s most distinctive institutions. The earliest of the kontore was the kontor of the Steelyard in London, which had existed in some form since the tenth century and which was granted extensive privileges by Henry II in the 1150s. The kontor of Bruges was established in the 1250s, the kontor of Bergen in Norway in the 1360s, and the kontor of Novgorod in the 1270s (formalised by the Treaty of Novgorod in 1270 and reinforced in subsequent treaties).
The kontore were more than commercial offices. They housed hundreds of merchants at a time, kept their own warehouses, regulated the conduct of trade, and arbitrated disputes among their own members. The kontor in Novgorod was particularly notable for the privileges it had wrested from the Russian authorities, including the right to hold divine services in the Church of Saint Peter, the right to bear arms within the city, and the right to be judged by Hanseatic law in disputes with the local population.
The great wars of the fourteenth century
The growth of the League was marked by a series of great wars, each of which extended the League’s power and confirmed its privileges. The first of these was the war of 1284–85 against the pirates of the Baltic, in which the cities of the Wendish district organised a fleet to suppress the pirates preying on Hanseatic shipping. The fleet was successful, and the pirate nests on the island of Rügen and along the Pomeranian coast were destroyed.
The second was the war of 1367–70 against the king of Denmark, known as the first war of the cities. The League’s fleet sailed into the Sound, blockaded Copenhagen, and forced King Valdemar IV to sign the Treaty of Stralsund in 1370, which guaranteed Hanseatic privileges in Scandinavia for the next two centuries. The Treaty of Stralsund was, by any measure, the high point of Hanseatic power.
The third was the war of the 1390s against the Victual Brothers, a band of pirate mercenaries who had seized the island of Gotland and used it as a base to prey on Hanseatic shipping. The League blockaded Gotland, starved the pirates out, and recovered the island in 1398. The war demonstrated the League’s ability to project military power over long distances, and it confirmed the League’s control of the Baltic.
The consolidation of the League
The late fourteenth century was a period of consolidation for the League. The Hansetag met more frequently, the kontore expanded their operations, and the great merchant families of the Wendish towns extended their business across the continent. The League’s commercial dominance was, by 1400, almost unchallenged, and the League’s political influence was, in the first decades of the fifteenth century, at its peak.
The consolidation of the League was not, however, complete. The cities had different interests, and the Hansetag had to mediate the conflicts that arose among them. 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 League’s Hansetag spent a great deal of time resolving disputes among its own members, and the disputes were a constant source of weakness.
The standard treatment of this period is in the relevant chapter of Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa (Stanford, 1970), pp. 80–116. For a more recent treatment focused specifically on the growth of the kontore, see the relevant chapters of Stuart Jenks’s work on the Hanseatic kontore.