A Companion to the Hanseatic League

285 Pages·2015·2.087 MB·English

by  Donald J. Harreld

A Companion to the Hanseatic League
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Brill’s Companions
to European History
VOLUME 8
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bceh
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A Companion to the
Hanseatic League
Edited by
Donald J. Harreld
LEIDEN | BOSTON
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Cover illustration: Town seal of Lübeck, 1280, as depicted in Ernst Wallis’ Illustrerad verldshistoria,
(Stockholm 1882, p. 333). http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stadssigill_foer_staden_Luebeck.png
(accessed 4 September 2014)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A companion to the Hanseatic League / edited by Donald J. Harreld.
  pages cm. — (Brill’s companions to European history, ISSN 2212-7410; volume 8)
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-28288-9 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-28476-0 (e-book) 1. Hanseatic
League—History. 2. Hansa towns—History. 3. Europe, Northern—Social conditions. 4. Europe, Northern—
Economic conditions. 5. Europe, Northern—Commerce—History. I. Harreld, Donald J.
 DD801.H22C66 2015
 382.0943—dc23
2014044089
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering
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information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 2212-7410
isbn 978-90-04-28288-9 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-28476-0 (e-book)
Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff and Hotei Publishing.
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This book is printed on acid-free paper.
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Contents
List of Maps and Figures  vi
List of Contributors  vii
Introduction  1
Donald J. Harreld
Part 1
General Hanse History
1 The Early Hansas  15
Rolf Hammel-Kiesow
2 The ‘Golden Age’ of the Hanseatic League  64
Jürgen Sarnowsky
3 The Hanseatic League in the Early Modern Period  101
Michael North
Part 2
Themes in Hanse History
4 Kontors and Outposts  127
Mike Burkhardt
5 Social Networks  162
Ulf Christian Ewert and Stephan Selzer
6 The Baltic Trade  194
Carsten Jahnke
Bibliography  241
Index  274
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List of Maps and Figures
map caption
0.1 The Baltic region  11
0.2 The North Sea region  12
figure caption
5.1 Network of Guardians in Early Fifteenth Century Lübeck  173
5.2 Structure and Stabilization of Commercial Networks  183
5.3 The Family Network of Hildebrand Veckinchusen  184
5.4 Game Theoretical Analysis of Hanseatic Reciprocal Trade  188
6.1 Export of Amber to the West  209
6.2 Proceeds of the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order in the sale of
amber  211
6.3 Floated wood on the Vistula River  225
6.4 Production and Export of Slovakian Copper  230
6.5 Swedish copper-export  231
table caption
3.1 Danzig Sea Commerce 1460–1583 (Number of ships that called at
or departed from Danzig)  102
6.1 The import of Scanian herring in the harbor of Lübeck in
Rostocker Barrel  214
6.2 Import of wax in English harbors between 1303 and 1311  219
6.3 Ash transported on the Vistula River  226
6.4 Tar and pitch transported on the Vistula River  227
6.5 Copper trade in the Baltic, noted in the Custom Lists  227
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List of Contributors
Mike Burkhardt
is the author of Der Bergenhandel im Spätmittelalter: Handel, Kaufleute,
Netzwerke (Colonge, 2009).
Ulf Christian Erwert
has taught medieval and economic history at Chemnitz University of
Technology, Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg, Free University of
Berlin and the universities of Munich, Regensburg, Halle and Münster. He
is the author of numerous articles on the Hanse, the Portuguese overseas
expansion, the political economy of pre-modern princely courts and early
modern living standards.
Rolf Hammel-Kiesow
is the associate director of the Archives of Lübeck and an honorary professor
at the University of Kiel. He is the author of many works on the history of the
Hanse. Since 1994 he has been a member of the Executive Board, and since
2010, the Chairman of the Hansischer Geschichtsverein.
Donald J. Harreld
is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Brigham Young University. He is
the author of High Germans in the Low Countries: German Merchants and
Commerce in Golden Age Antwerp (Leiden, 2004).
Carsten Jahnke
is Associate Professor for Medieval History at the SAXO-Institute, University
Copenhagen. He is the author of many works on the history of the Hanse and
the history of the Baltic area.
Michael North
is Professor and Chair of Modern History at the University of Greifswald,
Honorary Doctor of the University of Tartu and Director of the International
Graduate Program “Baltic Borderlands”. His recent books include The
Expansion of Europe, 1250–1500 (Manchester 2012) and The Baltic: a History
(Cambridge, Mass. 2015).
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viii list of contributors
Jürgen Sarnowsky
is Professor of Medieval History at Universitaet Hamburg. He is a board
member for the Hansischer Geschichtsverein, and is the author of numerous
articles on Hanse history and more general medieval history topics.
Stephan Selzer
is professor of medieval history at Helmut-Schmidt-Universität / Universität
der Bundeswehr in Hamburg. Selzer is the author of many publications
on social and economic history including Die mittelalterliche Hanse,
(Darmstadt 2010).
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Introduction
Donald J. Harreld
In Spring, 1870, the city of Stralsund celebrated the 500-year anniversary of the
“Peace” that bears its name that ended the war between the Hanseatic League
and the Kingdom of Denmark. The Peace of Stralsund is generally considered
to mark the zenith of Hanse commercial power.1 One result of this celebra-
tion was the founding of the Hansische Geschichtsverein, organized to pro-
mote Hanse history and to connect Hanseatic studies to the broader German
historiography.2 Thanks in part to the publication agenda of the Hansische
Geschichtsverein, Hanse studies have flourished since the association’s orga-
nization. The Hansische Geschichtsblätter, the Hanserecesse, the Pfingstblätter,
to name only a few of the series published by the association have provided
generations of scholars an outlet for serious scholarship on the Hanse.
The earliest scholars involved in the Hansische Geschichtsverein were, not
surprisingly, local historians and archivists located in the principal hanseatic
towns of northern Germany. In the early years, most of the works published
in the Hansische Geschichtsblätter slanted heavily toward political and diplo-
matic history topics and were fitted into the emerging nationalist histories of
a newly formed Germany. Of course his trend in historical scholarship was not
unique to German history. Late nineteenth-century national histories included
measurable doses of political propaganda in even the best cases.
By the early twentieth century, however, Hanse history had come into its
own, and the focus of Hanse studies began to include social and economic
history topics much more than they had in the preceding decades. One only
need to review the list of the luminaries working in the field of Hanse history
since the first part of the twentieth century to quickly realize that Hanse his-
tory had moved from the realm of political history and antiquarian studies to a
field intensely interested in economic and social issues. Indeed, for a half cen-
tury, the widely read work by Ernst Daenell set the bar in Hanse scholarship.3
Daenell’s massive two-volume work depicted the Hanse as a type of commer-
cial republic founded on economic power. But more than that, his work was
1  Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1970), 71.
2  Wilhelm Mantels, “Der Hansische Geschichtsverein,” Hanische Geschichtsblätter 1 (1871): 3.
3  Ernst Daenell, Die Blütezeit der deutschen Hanse von der zweiten Hälfte des 14. Bis zum letzten
Viertel des 15. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Reimer, 1905/1906).
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2 Harreld
meticulously detailed to the point of serving as a reference manual for later
scholars.
Several contemporaries, Rudolf Häpke, Fritz Rörig, and Walther Vogel,
among others, formed what might be considered the next generation of Hanse
historians. Rudolf Häpke’s most well know contributions to Hanse history
focused on the league’s presence in the Low Countries, and particularly in
Bruges, which was the topic of his dissertation.4 Fritz Rörig, an expert on the
history of Lübeck and the Hanse more broadly,5 was particularly interested in
the Hanse towns. His best know work in English, The Medieval Town, is a trans-
lation of the book Die Europaïsche Stadt im Mittelalter.6 In it, Rörig examines
the reasons for he saw as the decline of the Hanse towns’ due to Dutch and
English competition. While Rörig was most interested in the Hanse towns, his
sometime collaborator, Walther Vogel focused on Hanse ships and shipping.
Vogel’s work, Geschichte de deutschen Seeschiffahrt, continued to be influential
for researchers for decades after its publication.7
Following the Second World War, political overtones infused Hanse scholar-
ship particularly as Marxist scholars attempted to fit Hanse history into their
theoretical framework,8 but scholars’ understanding of the character of the
Hanse began to undergo significant change in other ways as well. One of the
best-known attempts at writing a general history of the Hanse in the decade or
so following the war was Karl Pagel’s Die Hanse, which perpetuated the notion
that the Hanse acted as a homogenous body and a powerful arm of the Holy
Roman Empire.9 Pagel had missed the mark according to many of the scholars
of the time, including Ahasver von Brandt who set out to refute Pagel’s charac-
terization of the Hanse cities as a medieval power bloc.10 It was, in effect, von
Brandt who soon set a new tone for Hanse scholarship with his characteriza-
4  Rudolf Häpke, Brügges, Entwicklung zum mittelalterlichen Weltmarkt (Berlin: Curtius,
1908). See also, Rudolf Häpke, ed., Niederländische Akten und Urkunden zur Geschichte der
Hanse und zur deutschen Seegeschichte (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1913).
5  See for example, Fritz Rörig, Der Markt von Lübeck: Topographisch-statistische
Untersuchengen zur deutschen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Leipzig: Quelle &
Meyer, 1922).
6  Fritz Rörig, Die Europaïsche Stadt im Mittelalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht,
1955).
7  Walther Vogel, Geschichte der deutschen Seeschiffahrt (Berlin: Reimer, 1915).
8  Andreas Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective: the East German approach
(London: Taurus, 1986), 97.
9  Karl Pagel, Die Hanse (Brunswick: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1952).
10  Ahasver von Brandt, Die Hanse und die nordischen Mächte im Mittelalter (Opladen:
Westdeutscher Verlag, 1962).
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