The Hanseatic League?

Question

does anyone know any
positive affects the league had on expanding Europes trading?

Answer 1

Historians generally trace the origins of the League to the foundation of the Northern German town of Lübeck, established in 1158/1159 after the capture of the area from the Count of Schauenburg and Holstein by Henry the Lion, the Duke of Saxony.

Exploratory trading adventures, raids and piracy had occurred earlier throughout the Baltic (see Vikings) — the sailors of Gotland sailed up rivers as far away as Novgorod, for example — but the scale of international economy in the Baltic area remained insignificant before the growth of the Hanseatic League.

German cities achieved domination of trade in the Baltic with striking speed over the next century, and Lübeck became a central node in all the sea-borne trade that linked the areas around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The 15th century saw the climax of Lübeck's hegemony. (Visby, one of the midwives of the Hanseatic league in 1358, declined to become a member. Visby dominated trade in the Baltic before the Hanseatic league, and with its monopolistic ideology, suppressed the Gotlandic free-trade competition.)

Lübeck became a base for northern German merchants from Saxony and Westphalia to spread east and north. Well before the term Hanse appeared in a document (1267), merchants in a given city began to form guilds or Hansa with the intention of trading with towns overseas, especially in the less-developed eastern Baltic area, a source of timber, wax, amber, resins, furs, even rye and wheat brought down on barges from the hinterland to port markets.

Visby functioned as the leading centre in the Baltic before the Hansa. For a hundred years the Germans sailed under the Gotlandic flag to Novgorod. Sailing east, Visby merchants established a branch at Novgorod. To begin with the Germans used the Gotlandic Gutagard. With the influx of too many merchants the Gotlanders arranged their own trading stations for the German Petershof further up from the river — see a translation of the grant[1] of privileges to merchants in 1229. They helped establish key Hansa towns on and near the east Baltic coast: Danzig (Gdańsk), Elbing (Elblag), Thorn (Toruń), Reval (Tallinn), Riga and Dorpat (Tartu), all founded (like others on the Baltic coast) under Lübeck law, which provided that they had to appeal in all legal matters to Lübeck's city council. Before the foundation of the Hanseatic league in 1358 the word Hanse did not occur in the Baltic. The Gotlanders used the word varjag.

Hansa societies worked to acquire special trade privileges for their members. For example, the merchants of the Cologne (Köln) Hansa contrived to convince Henry II of England to grant them (in 1157) special trading privileges and market rights which freed them from all London tolls and allowed them to trade at fairs throughout England. The "Queen of the Hansa", Lübeck, where traders trans-shipped goods between the North Sea and the Baltic, gained the Imperial privilege of becoming an Imperial city in 1227, the only such city east of the River Elbe.

Lübeck, which had access to the Baltic and North Sea fishing grounds, formed an alliance in 1241 with Hamburg, another trading city, which controlled access to salt-trade routes from Lüneburg. The allied cities gained control over most of the salt-fish trade, especially the Scania Market; and Cologne joined them in the Diet of 1260. In 1266 Henry III of England granted the Lübeck and Hamburg Hansa a charter for operations in England, and the Cologne Hansa joined them in 1282 to form the most powerful Hanseatic colony in London. Much of the drive for this co-operation came from the fragmented nature of existing territorial government, which failed to provide security for trade. Over the next 50 years the Hansa itself emerged with formal agreements for confederation and co-operation covering the west and east trade routes. The chief city and linchpin remained Lübeck; with the first general Diet of the Hansa held there in 1356, the Hanseatic League acquired an official structure and could date its official founding.

Lübeck's location on the Baltic provided access for trade with Scandinavia and Russia, putting it in direct competition with the Scandinavians who had previously controlled most of the Baltic trade routes. A treaty with the Visby Hansa put an end to competition: through this treaty the Lübeck merchants also gained access to the inland Russian port of Novgorod, where they built a trading post or Kontor. Other such alliances formed throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The League never became a closely-managed formal organisation. Assemblies of the Hanseatic Towns met irregularly in Lübeck for Hansetag, from 1356 onwards, but many towns chose not to send representatives and decisions did not bind individual cities. Over time, the network of alliances grew to include a flexible roster of 70 to 170 cities [2].

The league succeeded in establishing additional Kontors in Bruges (in present-day Belgium), Bergen (Norway), Copenhagen (Denmark) and London (England). These trading posts became significant enclaves. The London Kontor, established in 1320, stood west of London Bridge near Upper Thames Street. (Cannon Street station occupies the site now.) It grew significantly over time into a walled community with its own warehouses, weighhouse, church, offices and houses, reflecting the importance and scale of the activity carried on. The first reference to it as the Steelyard (der Stahlhof) occurs in 1422. In addition to the major Kontors, individual ports had a representative merchant and warehouse. In England this happened in Boston, Bristol, Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn, which features the sole remaining Hanseatic warehouse in England), Hull, Ipswich, Norwich, Yarmouth and York.

The League primarily traded timber, furs, resin (or tar), flax, honey, wheat and rye from the east to Belgium and England with cloth (and, increasingly, manufactured goods) going in the other direction. Metal ore (principally copper and iron) and herring came southwards from Sweden.


Town Hall of Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia).German colonists under strict Hansa supervision built numerous Hansa cities in the Baltic: towns like Reval (Tallinn), Riga, and Dorpat (Tartu), some of which still retain many Hansa buildings and bear the style of their Hanseatic days. Livonia (presently Estonia and Latvia) had its own Hanseatic parliament (diet), and all of its major towns became members of the Hanseatic League. The dominant language of trade was Middle Low German or Nederdiets, a language with significant impact for countries involved in the trade, particularly the larger Scandinavian languages.
Danzig (Gdańsk), along with other important Hansa cities including Thorn (Toruń) and Elbing (Elbląg) was incorporated into Poland at the Second Treaty of Toruń in 1466. Cracow, then the capital of Poland, was also a Hansa city. The lack of customs borders on Vistula river after 1466 helped to gradually increase Polish grain export, transported to the sea port down Vistula, from 10,000 t per year in late 15th century to over 200,000 t in 17th century[3]. The Hansa dominated maritime grain trade made Poland one of the main areas of its activity helping Danzig to become Hansa's largest city due to its control of the Poland grain export.


The old and rich port city of Danzig (Gdańsk). View of the Krantor (crane gate)
Hanseatic museum in Bergen (Norway)The League had a fluid structure, but its members shared some traits. First, most of the Hanseatic League (or Hansa) cities either started as independent cities or gained independence through the collective bargaining power of the League. Such independence remained, however, limited; it meant that the Hansa cities in Germany owed allegiance directly to the Emperor of the day, without any intermediate tie to the local nobility. Another similarity involved the cities' strategic locations along trade routes. In fact, at the height of its power in the late 1300s, the merchants of the Hanseatic League succeeded in using their economic clout (and sometimes their military might - trade routes needed protecting, and the League's ships sailed well-armed) to influence Imperial policy.

The League also wielded power abroad: between 1368 and 1370, Hansa ships fought against the Danes, and forced King Valdemar IV of Denmark to grant the League 15 percent of the profits from Danish trade (Treaty of Stralsund, 1370) and an effective trade monopoly in Scandinavia. The Hansa also waged a vigorous campaign against pirates. Between 1392 and 1440 maritime trade of the League faced danger from raids of the Victual Brothers and their descendants, a mighty brotherhood of privateers hired in 1392 by Albrecht of Mecklenburg against the Danish queen Margaret I. In the Dutch-Hanseatic War (1438 — 1441) the merchants of Amsterdam sought and eventually won free access to the Baltic and broke the Hansa monopoly. As an essential part of protecting their investment in trade and ships, the League trained pilots and erected lighthouses.

Exclusive trade routes often came at a high price. Most foreign cities confined the Hansa traders to certain trading areas and to their own trading posts. They could seldom, if ever, interact with the local inhabitants, except in the matter of actual negotiation. Moreover, many people, merchant and noble alike, envied the power of the League. For example, in London the local merchants exerted continuing pressure for the revocation of the privileges of the Hanseatic League. The refusal of the League to offer reciprocal arrangements to their English counterparts exacerbated this tension. King Edward IV of England reconfirmed the league's privileges in 1474 despite this hostility — in part at least thanks to the significant financial contribution the League made to the Yorkist side during The Wars of the Roses. A century later, in 1597, Queen Elizabeth I expelled the League from London and the Steelyard closed in 1598. The very existence of the League and its privileges and monopolies created economic and social tensions that often crept over into rivalry between League members.

However the league increased the amount of trade and the area of direct traded goods.It enabled economies to expand and strengthen by providing goods and demanding goods that they would otherwise not had acess too.

Answer 2

~I do, I do (screamed, with arms raised and waving frantically)