A network, not a state
The Hanseatic League, or Hanse, was a loose association of merchants and towns in northern Europe that flourished from the later Middle Ages. It was not a country, and it had no army or permanent government in the modern sense. It was a network of towns, mostly along the Baltic and North Sea coasts and on navigable rivers inland, whose merchants cooperated to protect their trade and secure privileges abroad. The word Hanse is generally understood to refer to a group or association of merchants.
Membership shifted over time, and sources disagree about how many towns can be counted as members, since some were full participants and others were only loosely connected. Regional meetings of delegates, usually called diets, are recorded from the fourteenth century, and 1356 is often given as an early date for a general assembly at Lübeck, although the structure remained flexible.
Lübeck and the Baltic
Lübeck, on the Baltic coast of northern Germany, is traditionally regarded as the leading city of the Hanse. It was refounded in the middle of the twelfth century and became a gateway between the North Sea and Baltic trade. Goods moved between the two seas partly by land across the neck of Jutland and partly by the Stecknitz route linking Lübeck to the Elbe and Hamburg. This route was an advantage in an age when the passage through the Danish straits was slow and sometimes expensive.
Other important ports included Hamburg and Bremen to the west, Rostock, Wismar, Stralsund and Danzig along the southern Baltic, and further east, Riga and Reval, now Tallinn. Each town had its own council, merchants and customs, but they shared an interest in orderly trade and in dealing collectively with kings and princes. The broader picture of Hanseatic Baltic trade is told in the history of the Baltic itself; this article concentrates on the ports.
What was traded
The Hanseatic towns specialised in bulk goods of everyday importance. From the Baltic and eastern Europe came grain, timber, tar, pitch, wax, furs, flax and amber. From the west came cloth, especially from Flanders and England, along with wine and manufactured goods. Salt from Lüneburg, carried to Lübeck, was important for preserving fish. Herring caught off southern Sweden and later in the North Sea was salted and exported, and the North Sea herring trade was one of the commodities that kept merchants busy.
Dried cod, known as stockfish, came from northern Norway through Bergen, where Hanseatic merchants bought it and sent it south. In exchange they supplied grain and other goods that northern Norway could not produce for itself.
Ships and harbours
The characteristic merchant vessel of the Hanseatic world was the cog, a single-masted, broad, high-sided ship with a flat bottom and a square sail. It could carry far more cargo than earlier northern craft and could be crewed by relatively few men. A cog wreck found in the River Weser at Bremen in 1962 is one of the best surviving examples and is dated to the early fourteenth century. Later vessels such as the hulk and the larger carracks gradually replaced the cog in some roles.
Harbours were often modest in engineering terms. Many Hanseatic ports lay on rivers or estuaries, with wooden quays, cranes worked by treadwheel, and warehouses close to the waterfront. The crane at Lübeck and similar structures in other towns are examples of the sort of lifting machinery used. Harbour regulation mattered: a port needed pilots, buoys and beacons, and merchants demanded protection from piracy and from the seizure of goods.
Kontors and overseas bases
Beyond the home towns, the Hanse maintained four principal trading posts, called kontors, in foreign cities. These were in London, Bruges, Bergen and Novgorod. Each had its own rules and its own character.
In London, the Steelyard was a walled compound on the Thames where German merchants lived and traded under privileges granted by English kings. At Bergen, merchants occupied a row of timber warehouses and houses along the waterfront known as Bryggen, which is now a recognised historic district. The Hanseatic presence in Bergen was strong, and it was organised with strict rules for the German merchants who stayed there. In Novgorod, the Peterhof was the trading base for the fur and wax trade with Russia. Bruges, with its connection to the sea and its position as a market for Flemish cloth, served as a western centre for the league until its harbour silted up and trade moved towards Antwerp.
These bases show that Hanseatic power came from legal privilege and organisation rather than from naval force, though towns sometimes did go to war, as in the conflicts with Denmark in the fourteenth century.
Decline
The Hanse weakened gradually between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rising territorial states took control of trade within their borders, and Dutch and English merchants challenged the Hanseatic position in the Baltic and North Sea. The shift of trade towards the Atlantic, and the growth of the great companies that sailed on oceanic routes, reduced the importance of the northern network. The idea of maritime trading companies as organised, chartered bodies had in some ways grown out of earlier merchant associations such as the Hanse, though the later companies had state backing on a different scale.
The last general diet is usually dated to 1669. A few cities, notably Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen, retained the Hanseatic name and some of their independence for centuries, and the tradition is still visible in the names and civic identity of those cities today.