The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Within twenty years another prince of Novgorod, Konstantin, granted the Germans the right to operate from their own courtyard, dedicated to St Peter – the Peterhof. Actually they had already set themselves up there, and had built a stone church. The use of stone was a necessary luxury, since the merchants stored their wealth here. Then they would go back to Visby at the end of each winter, carrying the chest containing the funds of the community until their return in the summer. Between the winter, when trade in ermine and other Arctic goods was brisk, and the summer, which was a good time to collect wax or buy the luxury goods arriving circuitously from the Black Sea and beyond, German merchants would be absent from Novgorod. Attempts were also made to build ties to other Russian cities, but they were never as successful as the links to Novgorod, which had the advantage of lying not too far inland. Once again, the sea is only part of a bigger story, since Cologne absorbed many of these Russian goods before they were sold on to Flemish and English businessmen.35 There was enormous demand throughout Europe for high-quality Russian wax, most of which evaporated into the atmosphere when it was used in church ceremonies; and the range of furs that could be obtained from Russia and Finland was unmatched: not just plenty of cheap rabbit and squirrel furs, but pine marten, fox, and at the top of the scale white ermine (de rigueur at princely courts).

  IV

  Benefiting from their links to German cities as far away as Cologne, the early Hansa merchants could raise the capital they needed for ambitious ventures into Russia, carefully managed through legally binding contracts. This gave them an advantage over traditional Scandinavian traders, who operated with less sophisticated methods. The purchase of shares in ships rather than ownership of an entire ship meant that one could spread the risks associated with sea voyages across a number of investments. Contact with Russia provided essential priming for the rise of the German Hansa; but the Baltic and the North Sea became increasingly important to the Hanseatic traders, as England and Norway became the focus of their longer-distance sailings, while within the Baltic rye, herrings and other basic foodstuffs became ever more important as the German cities grew, and as their persistent demand for food outstripped local resources. These towns had been founded as centres of trade and industry, but their very success turned them into major consumers of agricultural goods. This was greatly to the advantage of those who produced such food, above all the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, who was also master of extensive estates where subject Prussians and Estonians laboured on behalf of the Christian conquerors in slave-like conditions. Trade in grain, principally rye, became the lifeline of cities as far afield as Flanders and Holland, and this dependence would only increase over the centuries, long after the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order had become a distant memory in Prussia and beyond.36

  The ships that the Hansa merchants used were, in the early days, mainly cogs, with their shallow draught but generous cargo capacity; they had developed in the North Sea and the Baltic over several centuries. A late fourteenth-century example was found in the mud of the River Weser in 1962 and has been carefully restored for the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven. Her timbers can be securely dated from their tree rings to 1378. She was twenty-four metres long, three times her maximum breadth, and her capacity was somewhere in the region of 100 tons. She originally possessed a square sail and a rudder at mid-stern. But she never went to sea, to judge from the fact that not much was found on board apart from the tools of a shipwright, so it is likely she was dragged underwater during a tidal surge. Her construction was slightly odd (carvel planking around the keel, with planks laid flush, rather than the clinker planking one generally expects in northern Europe); but this was a fairly old-fashioned type of ship by 1380: the Hansa fraternity were making increasing use of larger vessels, mounted with ‘castles’ at each end, the ‘hulks’ that appear on many a medieval town seal from this part of the world.37 All this has set off technical arguments about when a cog is really a cog, though quirks of construction are only to be expected; the term kogge was a generic description, and these ships were not produced on an assembly line, unlike the big Venetian galleys of this period. They were no more uniform than modern city trams, but were perfectly recognizable as the same object; and what mattered was their seaworthiness first and their capacity second.38

  Typical or not, the Bremen cog represents the humble realities of Hansa seafaring; silk and spices certainly reached the ports of northern Germany, whether they had been carried all the way from the Mediterranean down elongated sea routes favoured by the Venetian, Catalan and Florentine galleys of the late Middle Ages, or humped overland from the warehouse of the Germans (Fondaco dei Tedeschi) in Venice, past Bolzano and over the Alpine passes until they reached the rich cities of southern Germany – Nuremberg, Augsburg, Regensburg – and then embarked on further travels to reach Lübeck and its neighbours. A modern visitor to Lübeck who did not visit the famous marzipan emporium of the Niederegger family, founded in 1806, would be missing a great treat; but before Niederegger the city attracted ginger, sugar and cloves as well as almonds, and – most probably during the golden age of the Hansa – the north Germans discovered how they could manufacture sweetmeats and spicy sausages from the exotic trade goods that reached their cities. Fine Wurst is a Hanseatic legacy.

  The fortunes of the Hansa were not, however, built out of marzipan and gingerbread. Fish, grain and salt, apparently humble animal, vegetable and mineral staples, were not quite such modest sources of profit as might be supposed when they were traded in the astonishing quantities handled by the German Hansa. Herrings had a special place in the diet of European Christians, as far away as Catalonia: when Lent arrived, they provided the perfect substitute for forbidden meat, all the more because methods of preserving them became more sophisticated. The difficulty with herring is that it is a very oily fish, and oily fish rot much faster than those with a very low fat content, notably cod. For this reason it was possible to produce wind-dried cod, which remained edible for a good many years (after soaking), whereas herring had to be salted and pickled as quickly as possible after it was caught.39 Tradition records that a Dutch sailor, Willem Beukelszoon from Zeeland, transformed the future of the herring fisheries in the fourteenth century, when he devised a method of pickling partly eviscerated herrings and placing them between layers of salt in great barrels, which had to be done immediately after they were brought on deck (the secret was to leave the liver and pancreas in place, which improved the flavour, while removing the rest of the guts). This seems already to have been standard Hanseatic practice, and it was adopted in Flanders only around 1390, when fighting in the North Sea interrupted the flow of herrings to Flanders.40 Pioneer or plagiarist, Beukelszoon has been rated as the 157th most important Dutchman in history, not surprisingly in a nation that loves its Nieuwe Haring so much, but also in tribute to the fortune that the Dutch made out of exporting this humble fish in later centuries.

  Nothing, though, compared to the quantities of herring to be found in the Baltic when the fish spawned off the coast of Skania, now the southernmost province of Sweden but during the Middle Ages generally under Danish rule. It was said that you could wade into the sea and scoop them out of the water with your hands; rather than sea, there was a mass of wriggling fish: ‘the entire sea is so full of fish that often the vessels are stopped and can hardly be rowed clear through great exertion’, to cite an early medieval Danish writer.41 All this gave great impetus to the fair held on the shores of Skania, which dealt in many goods, but was most famous for its herring market; temporary shacks were set up as housing for the thousands of people who came to the fairs, also providing factory space for the labour force that cured, dried and, in a myriad of other ways, treated the fish. The fairs became an ever more attractive centre of trade as demand for these fish expanded and as the reputation of Skania as the unsurpassed centre of this business became known: visitors arrived from northern France, England and even Iceland.42

  In the course of
the fifteenth century, the herrings began to gather further north, for an unexplained reason (maybe connected with climatic conditions), and the glory days of the Skania fairs came to an end. But at its peak it was not unusual for 250 ships all loaded with herring to come into port at Lübeck alone, as happened in 1368. Annual totals just for Lübeck may have reached 70,000 barrels.43 Yet none of this could have happened without the availability of salt to preserve the silver harvest of herrings – indeed, some Dutch observers went further, and less poetically called it a ‘gold mine’. Here lay Lübeck’s great advantage. Not far away, near Lüneburg Heath, lay very extensive supplies, consisting of strong brine that was boiled down to produce salt; this was not the cheapest process, and when in the early fifteenth century rivals in western France began to flood the market with their own cheaper salt (sometimes half the price, even after long-distance transport), Lüneburg fell into decline, and Hansa merchants proved happy to range much further afield, all the way to the Bay of Bourgneuf or even Iberia.44

  This Hanseatic world, at once contentious and co-operative, thus extended its sights far beyond the Baltic and the North Sea. It has been seen that the search for cheap salt took German ships all the way to western France. There they might encounter ships from another land that were learning their way around the Atlantic: the Portuguese, whose own base in Flanders lay at Middelburg, close to the modern Belgian–Dutch frontier. But by the fifteenth century the Hansards were travelling even further, reaching Portugal itself, which they recognized as another source of salt (including the flat lands around Lisbon); and they also recognized that Portugal was short of grain, which they could easily supply from the rich reserves of the Baltic. They brought all sorts of other foods to Portugal, including beer and beetroots, and even salted fish, which was something the Portuguese could supply to themselves in vast quantities. After the Portuguese captured the Moroccan port of Ceuta in 1415, in the campaign where Prince Henry the Navigator won his spurs, German ships began to bring grain as far south as Ceuta itself, which was desperate for supplies as it was cut off from the rich grain fields that still lay under Muslim rule. Nor was this a casual relationship: Hansards interested in Portugal included prominent burghers of Danzig experienced in trade with Scotland, England, Flanders and France.45 As Portugal emerged as a significant maritime power in the fifteenth century, its Hanseatic connections gave it access to a much larger world than the waters off Iberia.

  23

  Stockfish and Spices

  The calamity of the Black Death struck first the Mediterranean and then northern Europe from 1347 to about 1351, followed by further periodic visitations of bubonic and pneumonic plague. The heavy toll on human life – as much as half the population in some areas – reduced pressure on supplies of the most basic foodstuffs, notably grain, but had distorting effects on the production and distribution of food. Land went out of cultivation as villages lost their manpower and became unviable; migration to the towns, where artisans were in short supply, shifted the balance between urban and rural population, so that it was no longer broadly true that up to 95 per cent of the population of western and northern Europe lived and worked in the countryside; and even those peasants who remained in the countryside often managed to cast off what remained of the shackles of serfdom. This was the beginning of a great economic transformation, but the reconfiguration of the economy depended on the easy movement of large quantities of food. Here, transport by sea was of crucial importance, since it rendered possible the movement of really substantial quantities of grain, dried fish, dairy goods, wine, beer and other necessities or desirables, and the ability of the Hansa merchants to exploit these opportunities meant that the years around 1400, often characterized as a period of deep post-plague recession, were for them, as for merchants in many other parts of the Atlantic and Mediterranean, a time when it was possible to reap handsome profits and to answer back to rulers who up to now had seen them as rather troublesome creatures, valuable only as suppliers of prestige items, and greedy and unreliable.

  It comes as no surprise, then, that within a few years of the Black Death the Hansa merchants began to organize themselves much more tightly, holding regular Diets, or Hansetage (which were also an opportunity for Lübeck and some other leading cities to throw their weight around). This has generally been interpreted as a shift from the ‘Hansa of the Merchants’ to the ‘Hansa of the Towns’, even the creation of what one might call a ‘Hanseatic League’, which (in this view) would be one of a great many city-leagues that were emerging in the fragmented territories of the German Empire at this time, of which the most famous, because it still exists, is the league of cities and peasant communities in southern Germany that we know as Switzerland. Still, these leagues had no pretensions to what might be called statehood, not that the concept of statehood would have meant much to the Hansa merchants. Moreover, the Hansa was different from other leagues since it included a large number of places that lay outside the Holy Roman Empire, such as Riga and Tallinn.1 The first Diet was held at Lübeck in 1356, following pirate attacks, unsatisfied demands for indemnity, and the breakdown of relations with the counts of Flanders and with the city of Bruges; solidarity between cities was the best way to force the Flemings to restore the rights of the Hansards.2 As will be seen, the relationship between the Hansa and Bruges was always a delicate one, because each side needed the other, while complaints about the abuse of existing rights abounded, and the Hansards again and again threatened to move their business to one of Bruges’s lesser rivals. Issues of this order bound the Hansa cities together, and by 1480 seventy-two Diets had been held. It is no surprise that fifty-four of these gathered in Lübeck; and, apart from a single meeting in Cologne, they were always held in towns next to or quite near the sea, such as Bremen.3

  This development did not mean that the Hansa had become a state-like body; it remained a loose super-league, bringing together groups of allied cities from regions as diverse as the Rhineland, where Cologne dominated, the southern or ‘Wendish’ Baltic, which was Lübeck’s informal imperium, and the newer cities of the eastern Baltic, of which Riga was the most important. Minutes of the Diets were kept; but there was no administrative superstructure, and there were no formal treaties that members signed to gain entry to the Hansa. Maybe, indeed, this was one of its sources of strength. On the other hand, the lack of a constitution allowed the citizens of Lübeck to turn their de facto leadership of the Hansa to their advantage, and, despite grumbles from Danzig and Cologne, the special status of Lübeck was never really in doubt; its size, wealth and location gave it formidable advantages. Including every city that at some stage was regarded as a Hansa town, the total comes to about 200, too many to fit into the assembly hall provided by the good burghers of Lübeck; most members were far too small to exercise any political influence, and what they sought was tax advantages and trading opportunities. This was particularly true of the horde of inland towns, such as Hamelin of Pied Piper fame, or Berlin, not as yet a place of great significance. The sections consisting of Baltic members were much smaller in number, but their importance was out of all proportion to their slight numbers, given the presence of Lübeck, Danzig, Riga and Visby.4 In addition, the member cities lay under very different political regimes. Further east, the Teutonic Knights exercised overlordship, and the host of inland cities that occasionally sent representatives to the Hansa Diet were by and large subject to a local duke or count, which was not a great problem around 1400, when princely power in Germany was very weak, but did become more problematic once the princes began to claw back their power in the middle of the fifteenth century, sometimes forbidding towns from sending representatives to the Hansa Diet.5

  After 1356 the Hansa showed much more muscle, resisting not just the Danes but predatory pirates known as the Vitalienbrüder, who made a nuisance of themselves at the end of the fourteenth century; they probably earned their strange name, the ‘Victual Brothers’, from their role as privateers who kept Stockholm supplied with
food during a Danish siege in 1392. This siege was a dramatic moment in a war of succession that would, by the start of the fifteenth century, see a personal union of the three Scandinavian kingdoms; but the war spilled over into the Baltic, since the major actors included the duke of Mecklenburg as well as an exceptionally capable and determined royal consort, Queen Margaret of Denmark; one of the issues in the Swedish succession was the fear that the arrival of a north German duke as king would extend still further the powerful German influence in the country, which was already strongly expressed through the sizeable German community living in the boom city of Stockholm. Queen Margaret was, however, canny enough to realize that she should cultivate the Hanseatic cities, which were reluctant to be drawn directly into a conflict that was likely to redraw the political map of northern Europe. She had already extended Danish authority over southern Sweden (Skania), the area that had been ruled from Denmark for most of the past centuries.6 Once the siege of Stockholm was over, the Vitalienbrüder held on to their ships and preyed on Hanseatic and other vessels in the Baltic. The herring fisheries fell under threat, and for a few years supplies to the rest of the world faltered. Queen Margaret even appealed to King Richard II of England for naval aid, to help clear the Baltic and reopen the supply lanes. This appeal failed, and if anything the result was to stimulate the search for good-quality herring in the North Sea – admittedly, the quality was never quite as good as that in the Baltic, but thanks to the methods attributed to Beukelszoon the fish could be competently preserved.