The Origins of the Hanseatic League
The Hanseatic League did not spring into existence fully formed. It was the product of a long, slow process of cooperation among the merchants and cities of northern Europe, a process that took more than two centuries to complete. The roots of the League lay in the merchant guilds of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in the trading colonies of the late Saxon period, in the privileges granted by foreign rulers to German merchants, and in the urban revolution of the high Middle Ages.
This article traces the long genesis of the League, beginning with the earliest merchant guilds of the Rhineland and Westphalia, continuing through the urban revolution of the Wendish towns and the formation of the great Baltic cities, and ending with the first collective actions of the late thirteenth century. The picture is one of a confederation that was, in the first instance, a response to the practical needs of long-distance trade, and that gradually acquired the institutional form that would carry it through four centuries of commercial dominance.
The merchant guilds of the early Middle Ages
The earliest ancestors of the Hanseatic League were the merchant guilds — Kaufmannsgilden — of the Rhineland and Westphalia. These guilds were associations of merchants who travelled together, lived together in common hostels in foreign cities, and protected one another from the many dangers of medieval travel. The Romans had merchant guilds, and they survived the collapse of the Roman world in many places. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the merchant guilds of northern Germany acquired a new importance, as the long-distance trade of northern Europe revived after centuries of decline.
The most important of the early guilds was the guild of Cologne, which had obtained trading privileges in England as early as the reign of Ethelred II (978–1016). A charter attributed to Henry II, dated to the 1150s, confirmed the rights of the Cologne merchants to trade at the port of London and to be judged by their own law in disputes with the English. Similar guilds existed in Dortmund, Soest, and other Westphalian towns, and they established the pattern of the merchant guild that would later be followed by the Baltic cities. (The standard treatment is Dollinger, The German Hansa, 1970, pp. 19–48; for a more recent overview, see Hammel-Kiesow, Die Hanse, 4th ed., 2011, pp. 8–18.)
The merchant guilds of the Rhineland and Westphalia were, in the first instance, local associations. They protected their members, regulated trade, and maintained the hostels in which the merchants lived during their stays in foreign cities. They did not yet form a league, and they did not yet act collectively. But they established the habits of cooperation that would, in time, become the foundation of the Hanseatic League.
The urban revolution of the Wendish towns
The next major step in the origins of the League was the urban revolution of the Wendish towns in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Wendish region, the area along the southern coast of the Baltic that had been settled by Slavic peoples, was colonised by Germans in the course of the twelfth century, and the new German settlers brought with them the urban traditions of the Rhineland and Westphalia. Towns were founded, old Slavic settlements were rebuilt on the German model, and the region became a chain of cities that stretched from Lübeck in the west to Riga in the east.
The model for the new towns was Lübeck, founded in 1143 by Henry the Lion, refounded on a new site in 1159 by Flemish and Dutch settlers, and rebuilt according to 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, derived from the law of the Westphalian towns and the Saxon Sachsenspiegel, was adopted by the new towns of the region, and the common legal framework made cooperation between the towns almost automatic.
The Wendish towns were not, at first, members of a single league. Each was governed by its own council, and each pursued its own interests. But they shared a common legal tradition, a common merchant culture, and a common dependence on the trade of the Baltic. The merchants of one town had to deal with the merchants of the other towns, and the practical necessities of trade led, in time, to formal cooperation. The first such cooperation was the agreement of 1241 between Lübeck and Hamburg, in which the two cities agreed to protect their merchants on the roads and on the seas. This agreement is often cited as the founding moment of the League, though — as almost every historian of the period has pointed out — the better view is that it was the first step in a process that would take more than a century to complete.
The privileges of foreign rulers
The growth of the League was powerfully assisted by the privileges that foreign rulers granted to German merchants. The merchants of Cologne had obtained privileges in England as early as the reign of Ethelred II, and these privileges were confirmed and extended by Henry II in the 1150s. Similar privileges were obtained in Norway, where the merchants of the League were given the right to trade in the port of Bergen. The privileges in Flanders, granted by the counts of Flanders in the thirteenth century, gave the merchants of the League the right to trade in the great fairs of Bruges. The privileges in Novgorod, granted by the princes of Russia, gave the merchants of the League the right to trade in the great fur markets of the Russian north.
These privileges were not the gift of benevolent rulers. They were the product of hard bargaining, in which the German merchants offered the foreign rulers access to the goods of the Baltic in exchange for the right to trade in their territories. The privileges were valuable to the rulers, because the German merchants were the principal channel through which the goods of the Baltic reached the markets of the West, and they were valuable to the merchants, because the privileges gave them a competitive advantage over other foreign traders.
The privileges were, however, fragile. They could be revoked by a hostile ruler, and they could be undermined by the local merchants of the host country. The German merchants had to defend their privileges constantly, and the defence of the privileges was one of the principal reasons for the formation of the League. A privilege granted to one town could be defended by all the towns acting together, and the local rulers were less likely to revoke a privilege if they knew that all the towns of the League would respond.
The first collective actions
The first major collective action of the League was the embargo on Flanders in 1280–81, in which the Wendish towns closed their markets to the merchants of Flanders in retaliation for a series of attacks on Hanseatic merchants. The embargo was effective, and the count of Flanders was forced to renew the privileges of the Hanseatic merchants. The success of the embargo taught the cities the value of coordinated pressure, and similar embargoes followed in the next decades.
The embargo of 1280 was followed by the embargo of Magdeburg in 1284, in which the Wendish towns closed their markets to the merchants of the archbishopric of Magdeburg, then a commercial rival. The archbishop was forced to make concessions, and the success of the embargo further strengthened the position of the League.
The first major war of the League was the war against the pirates of the Baltic in 1284–85, in which the cities of the Wendish district organised a fleet to suppress the pirates who had been 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 war demonstrated that the cities could organise military action on a large scale, and it marked the beginning of the League’s military power.
The Hansetag and the institutional form
The first recorded meeting of representatives from many cities took place in 1304, in connection with the dispute over the privileges of the Steelyard in London. The meeting was not yet a regular Hansetag, but it established the practice of convening meetings of city representatives to discuss matters of common interest. The first regular Hansetag was held in 1356, in Lübeck, and it established the form of the Hansetag that would continue for the rest of the League’s history.
The Hansetag was not, in the first instance, a permanent institution. It was a gathering of city delegates, convened at irregular intervals to discuss matters of common interest. The delegates were bound by the instructions of their home cities, and the decisions of the Hansetag were binding on all member cities only insofar as the cities were willing to enforce them. The Hansetag could pass resolutions, levy collective embargoes, declare war, and sign treaties, but it had no power to compel obedience.
The Hansetag worked because the cities usually agreed. They agreed on the broad outlines of policy, even if they disagreed on the details. They agreed on the need to defend the privileges of the kontore, the need to protect the trade routes, the need to maintain the merchant law, and the need to act collectively against pirates and other threats. When the cities did disagree, as they often did over the distribution of costs and benefits, the Hansetag could become deadlocked, and the League’s policy could drift.
The character of the early League
The League of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was, in many ways, a different kind of organisation from the League of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was looser, more informal, and more dependent on the willingness of the cities to cooperate. It had no permanent institutions, no permanent staff, and no permanent headquarters. It was, in the strict sense, a confederation of sovereign cities, and it acted only when the cities agreed.
The early League was also smaller, more cohesive, and more homogeneous than the League of the later Middle Ages. The member cities were, in the main, the Wendish towns of the southern Baltic, the Westphalian towns of the Rhine, and a few other cities that had been admitted because of their importance in the trade. The cities shared a common legal tradition, a common merchant culture, and a common religion. The later conflicts between the cities, especially the conflicts between the Wendish towns and the Westphalian towns, were less acute in the early period, and the League could usually agree on a common policy.
The early League was, in short, a confederation held together by a common interest in trade, a common legal tradition, and a common merchant culture. It was not a state, and it never became a state. It was a coalition of cities, each of which retained its own sovereignty, and it acted only when the cities agreed. But it was, in its time, one of the most effective international organisations in Europe, and its success in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries laid the foundation for the great commercial empire of the fifteenth century.
A useful German-language treatment of the period is the relevant chapter in Rolf Hammel-Kiesow, Die Hanse (4th ed., 2011), and the discussion in Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa (Stanford, 1970), pp. 56–80. For the historiographical debate on whether the League was a state or a confederation, see the references at the politics pillar page.