Hanseatic League

A commercial empire with no ruler, no capital, no army of its own and no founding document, which dominated northern European trade for three centuries. The Hansa began as associations of German merchants abroad protecting each other, and grew into a league of towns - perhaps two hundred at its widest, with Lubeck at the centre - stretching from Novgorod to London. Its business was bulk goods rather than luxuries: grain, timber, tar, wax, furs, salt and above all fish, with Baltic herring preserved in salt from Luneburg feeding Catholic Europe through its fast days. Members ran fortified trading posts abroad, the kontors, of which the Steelyard in London and the Peterhof in Novgorod were the largest, and their privileges there were extracted from local rulers by threatening to take the trade elsewhere. When negotiation failed the league imposed blockades, and it fought and defeated the king of Denmark in the 1360s, dictating a peace that gave it a veto over the Danish succession - an outcome no other merchant body has ever achieved. Its assembly met irregularly and its decisions bound only those who chose to obey. Decline came from the rise of territorial states that could not be played off, Dutch competition, and the shift of trade to the Atlantic. The last assembly met in 1669. Lubeck, Hamburg and Bremen still carry Hanseatic in their official names. Hanseatic warehouse districts are World Heritage sites. The league operated from the twelfth century to the seventeenth. Lubeck was its principal city and the usual meeting place of its assembly. Its cog, a single-masted cargo ship, was the standard Baltic vessel. Middle Low German was its working language and left loanwords across Scandinavia.

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