The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Queen Margaret gained what she sought, mastery over the three Scandinavian kingdoms, and saw her son Erik, duke of Pomerania, crowned as ruler over this Nordic union in 1397. Even then, everyone wanted to fish in Baltic waters: the Teutonic Knights, not Queen Margaret, expelled the Vitalienbrüder from Gotland in 1394, although fifteen years later they sold the island to the Nordic queen and Erik. These were years when the Teutonic Knights were at a loose end: the ruler of the great Lithuanian duchy, extending all the way across Belarus and much of Ukraine, at last accepted Christianity in 1385, as part of a marriage treaty with his Polish neighbours, and the Knights found themselves with fewer excuses for the conquest of pagan territory in the east, though Orthodox Russia now came within their line of sight as a land of heretics. The Nazis made heroes of the medieval Teutonic Knights, but over the centuries the Vitalienbrüder have acquired a more romantic image; plenty of novels and films present one of their pirate leaders, Klaus Störtebeker, in a better light than he deserves. When conditions in the Baltic became too risky, they decamped to the East Frisian islands in the North Sea and carried on marauding there. Störtebeker was captured, and in about 1400 he and dozens of his companions underwent a grim execution at the hands of the resentful citizens of Hamburg. Even so, piracy remained a major worry in the North Sea, and the next generation of pirates were making a nuisance of themselves as far north as Bergen in 1440.7

  All this meant that the Hansa Diets did have matters of real political and military (or rather naval) importance to discuss.8 The Hansa Diet expected to make its decisions unanimously, but delegations would often insist that they had no authority to support a particular position; the Diet was not a parliament where common problems were aired, discussed and resolved, but a place where decisions (often those of Lübeck and its allies) were recorded and announced – that was how late medieval parliaments functioned. Cities might not bother to send delegates to the Hansetag, though not surprisingly the larger and more powerful ones were more careful to do so. Still, it must have seemed that this was Lübeck’s opportunity to show off its commanding position. The effectiveness of the Hansa lay in the expertise of the merchants who inhabited its cities rather than in its institutional structure, which remained fragile.

  II

  The different communities that made up the Hansa were bonded together by the presence of travelling merchants, some passing through briefly and others settling alongside their fellow Hansards. Hansards felt at home in the ports of a great swathe of northern Europe. In the early fifteenth century, two brothers, Hildebrand and Sivert von Veckinchusen, worked with family members and agents in London, Bruges, Danzig, Riga, Tallinn and Tartu (also known as Dorpat), as well as Cologne and distant Venice, sharing the same work ethic, business methods and cultural preferences. In 1921, a pile of over 500 letters between members of the family was found buried in a mass of peppercorns within a chest that is now in the State Archives of Estonia at Tallinn. In addition, their account books survive. No other Hanseatic family is as well documented. The Veckinchusens are of interest precisely because they were not always successful, and their careers show clearly the risks that needed to be taken if the trade routes were to be kept alive at a time when piracy remained a constant threat, when the Danes were still flexing their muscles in the Baltic, when English sailors were trying to carve out their own niche in the market, and when internal tensions within the Hansa towns threatened to upset the apple cart.9

  The Veckinchusen brothers originated in Tartu in what is now Estonia, although they eventually became citizens of Lübeck.10 They are known to have been based in Bruges in the 1380s. They therefore operated between the two most important trading centres of northern Europe, which were linked by the Hanseatic sea route through the Øresund.11 The Hansa community in Bruges operated rather differently from Novgorod, London and Bergen, where the German merchants possessed a reserved space and were closely concentrated together. As befitted a cosmopolitan centre that attracted businessmen from all over western Europe, notably Genoa and Florence, as well as from the Baltic, the Hansards were dispersed across the city, living in rented accommodation, though they did hire a meeting space in the convent of the Carmelite friars, whose church they attended. In 1478 the Hansards began building the handsome ‘House of the Easterlings’, or Oosterlingenhuis, that can still be seen (though much rebuilt) in the heart of the old trading area of Bruges. It possessed its own courtyard and stood on a plot of land that the city fathers had assigned to the Hansa several years earlier. Now they had a base for meetings, and some office space, situated close to the house of the great Florentine trading firm of the Portinari (patrons of Jan van Eyck), and to the Genoese consulate, a fine Gothic building that has been raised to new glories as the Belgian national fried-potato museum. Everyone wanted a base in Bruges, and around 1500 the English, the Scots, the Portuguese, the Castilians, the Biscayans, the Lucchesi, the Venetians, the Genoese, the Florentines and no doubt others as well also possessed business houses in the centre of the city.12 Many of these communities, including most of the Hansards, were to decamp to Antwerp only a few years later; Bruges became less attractive for business as the water channels leading to the open sea silted up and as international politics (the ascendancy of the Habsburgs) favoured the growth of the more accessible port of Antwerp.13

  Until then, the concentration of merchants of different backgrounds provided Bruges with its raison d’être. Bruges was a very large city by medieval standards, with up to 36,000 inhabitants on the eve of the Black Death; but it was not the prime target of all those traders who came there, even though the arrival of large amounts of Baltic rye and herring did help to keep the citizens well fed. In the fifteenth century, one of the main functions of the merchant communities in Bruges was quite simply to settle bills. The city became the major financial centre in northern Europe, which meant that even as its port silted up and fewer goods passed through the city, there was still plenty of work for those well practised in the art of accounting. The Veckinchusens were primarily dealers in commodities, but currency exchange and the provision of letters of credit was a source of profit for them and their peers, even though the Hansards left the creation of international banks mainly to the Italians – the Medici had an important branch in Bruges.14 Generally, the Hansards showed a suspicion of reliance on credit that meant their financial methods never reached the sophistication of those achieved by the Florentines and Genoese. Even so, late medieval Bruges was to the economy of large swathes of Europe what modern London has become within the global economy.15

  From the Hansa perspective this had both advantages and disadvantages. The usual pile of grievances – confiscations of goods, quarrels over tax exemptions, the rights of the resident community, interference by the counts of Flanders and their mighty successors the Valois dukes of Burgundy – soured relations between the Hansa and Bruges, and during the late fourteenth century the Hanseatic merchants were thinking seriously about moving their business away from Bruges, northwards towards Dordrecht. In the 1380s the Hansards lost not just property but lives in Bruges, during a period of revolutionary disorder that ended with the assumption of power by Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy. Yet Philip was not willing to meet their demands for compensation, so in 1388 the Hansards did decamp to Dordrecht. This was not the back of beyond: in 1390 Hildebrand Veckinchusen was there, sending Flemish cloth and a fair amount of wine all the way to Tallinn. After a couple more years, relations with Bruges had been restored, and Hildebrand had become an Alderman of the Hansa community there; he had earned enough trust to be appointed an inspector of weights and measures, a task that was performed jointly with local officials.16 For, in reality, the Hansards and the citizens of Bruges were happiest working closely together.

  The Veckinchusens were not wedded to Bruges. Indeed, when Hildebrand found a bride, she was a young woman from a prosperous Riga family.17 Going to Riga for his wedding, which had been arranged by one of his brothers, gave him the chance to experie
nce the route to Novgorod, where the Hansa Kontor, or ‘Counter’, continued to flourish, and where he brought for sale thirteen bolts of cloth of Ypres, in other words a sizeable quantity of some of the best woollen cloth Flanders looms were then producing; each bolt would have been twenty-four yards long and one yard wide (approximately 22 by 0.9 metres). These he sold for 6,500 furs, which gives some idea not just of the high value of Flemish cloth but of the easy availability of squirrel, rabbit and finer skins in fifteenth-century Russia. On another occasion his brother Sivert forwarded 15,000 furs from Estonia to Bruges, where Hildeband had re-established himself – by 1402 he was renting a building in the city that included storage space as well as an apartment for his wife and his seven children.18 In good years, the Veckinchusens could hope for profits in the range of 15–20 per cent.19 Meanwhile his brother Sivert, now living in Lübeck, warned him that he was taking too many financial risks – ‘I’ve warned you again and again that your stakes are too high’ – which led him to send his wife and children to live in Lübeck; but he was convinced he could make money by staying put in Bruges.20 This obstinacy in his business dealings was to cost him dear over the next few years.

  Despite his warnings to his brother, Sivert also faced an uncertain future. His reputation in the city stood high, for he was invited to join the Society of the Circle, an influential club to which only members of the merchant elite were admitted. However, Lübeck was facing the same sort of political strife that was creating turmoil in Bruges, Barcelona, Florence and many other European cities in the years either side of 1400.21 Lübeck’s butchers, for instance, had already led two revolts, the ‘Bone-Cutter Rebellions’, in the 1380s, neither of which was successful. Much depended on the solidarity of the rebels, and in 1408 a New Council, on which the city’s guilds were heavily represented, challenged the authority of the existing city council, which was seen as a high-spending and closed elite that spoke more for the Society of the Circle than for the city, and had failed to respond to the economic changes of the late fourteenth century. The increasing prosperity of the urban middle class in the decades after the Black Death, when reduced pressure of population gave access to better food and a higher standard of living, needed to be reflected in the government of the cities. The New Council attempted to keep its membership broad, so Sivert Veckinchusen, whose natural sympathies lay more with the old order, found himself elected to it; but he then followed many of the members of the Old Council into exile in Cologne. The Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund of Luxembourg, had the unenviable task of sorting out who should govern the Imperial Free City of Lübeck, which was a matter of great importance to the rest of the Hansa, in view of its role as honorary head of the league. Sigismund ignored principles and was inclined to favour whichever side in Lübeck could offer him more money; when the New Council failed to satisfy his insatiable demands (24,000 florins), he sided with the Old Council, although its members had the sense to include some of their rivals in a government of reconciliation that came into being over the next few years; this helped restore much-needed stability to Lübeck.22

  Meanwhile, Sivert turned his attention to landward connections between Germany and Italy, setting up a venedyesche selskop, or ‘Venice Company’, in Cologne that supplied the Italians with furs, cloth and rosaries made from Baltic amber (a monopoly of the Teutonic Knights). His brother Hildebrand joined the company; for a time everything looked very promising, but then things began to go awry: they were cheated of money that was owed to the firm, as well as making unwise choices about what to bring to Lübeck and the north (both by sea and overland), and what to send down to Venice, where they proved to have misjudged the appetite for furs and amber. Sivert had to report to his brother that the family should really have stayed with what it knew best, the sea trade from Bruges to the eastern Baltic; ‘I wish I had never become involved in Venice,’ Sivert complained.23 But even the Baltic trade of the Veckinchusens fared less well than expected: woollen cloth despatched to Livonia was found to be riddled with moth-holes; and rice carried from Bruges to Danzig became waterlogged. For whatever reason, market conditions were poor in the years around 1418, whether in Danzig, Novgorod or the inner German cities, so the Veckinchusens were not the only ones to suffer; it seems the markets were saturated with goods, and that the whole decade from 1408 to 1418 saw poor profits.24 In 1420 Hildebrand heard that the salt normally collected in the Bay of Bourgneuf was not available, so he thought he could restore his fortunes by snapping up the salt supplies of Livonia and sending them westwards towards Lübeck; but poor information about where in Livonia he should buy the salt and the simple fact that other merchants had the same idea meant that the attempt to corner the market failed.25

  Hildebrand returned to Bruges and tried to keep himself afloat with Italian loans, but he could not repay them, and fled to Antwerp in the vain hope of escaping his creditors. Lured back to Bruges by promises that his friends would help him sort out his affairs, he was thrown into the debtors’ prison, where he lingered in misery for three or four years, during which even Sivert was unwilling to offer any help; meanwhile Sivert was doing rather well, and was elected to the Lübeck Society of the Circle, the club of the wealthy and powerful that had honoured his brother some years earlier.26 Conditions in the prison were not too bad, if means could be found to pay for food and the rent of a private room; but by the time he was released, in 1426, Hildebrand was evidently a broken man. One of his old partners wrote in pity: ‘God have mercy on you, that it has happened to you this way.’27 He set out for Lübeck but he died within a couple of years, worn out by his trials.28 His ambitions had never been matched by his success.

  Hildebrand was let down by his family, and family solidarity was the key to the success of these Hanseatic trading families. There is no reason to suppose the Veckinchusens’ rise and fall was unusual; trade was about risks, and in an age of piracy and naval wars the chances of always making a profit were slim. The places that attracted the strongest interest of the Veckinchusen clan were cities on or close to the sea, with the exception of the Hanseatic outlier Cologne and their mistaken ventures overland through the south German cities to Venice. This suggests that the routes across the sea carried the lifeblood of the Hansa, and that the many towns of northern Germany which became members were mainly interested in the goods that traversed the Baltic and the North Sea. When the Kaiser’s historians laid all the emphasis on the Hansa fleets and ignored the inland towns, they were not completely distorting the character and history of the German Hansa.

  III

  The cod fisheries of northern Norway, and the opportunities for catching the same fish out in the open Atlantic off Iceland or even Greenland, brought prosperity to the Hansa and to the Norwegian rulers. There were several types of dried and salted cod, but the development of wind-drying in little harbours along the coast of Norway, where Atlantic winds turned the supple flesh of these large fish into leathery triangular slabs, created an article of trade that lasted for years without rotting, and that satisfied the increased demand for high protein foodstuffs that the smaller post-Black Death population found itself able to afford. Norway also became a good source of dairy goods, for grain production was poor, while mountain pastures were abundant, and dairy products were exchanged for imported rye and wheat. As diet improved, so did the revenues of the Hansa merchants and the king of Norway. The German merchants had long identified Bergen as the obvious centre in which to concentrate much of their North Sea business. It was the seat of a royal palace, and not much could be achieved without the king’s protection. The town had emerged by the twelfth century – tradition recorded its foundation by King Olaf the Tranquil in 1070, but evidence from excavations shows that the wooden structures that lined the shore began to be constructed around 1120, though again and again (even in very modern times) fire has laid waste this cluster of buildings, the Bryggen, or ‘wharves’, that became the home to the Hansa merchants in the city. Yet the prosperity of Bergen was not created by the
German merchants; they chose this site as their base because it was already a flourishing centre of exchange for furs, fish, seal products, and all the other products of the forests, fjords and open sea further to the north; it was already the harbour to which ships moving back and forth to Iceland would come, a ‘natural gateway’ and ‘nodal point of trans-shipment’, to cite a Norwegian historian of the city’s origins.29

  Unexpected evidence for the vitality of Bergen as a centre of Norwegian, rather than just German, trade has been revealed following the discovery of many dozens of strips of wood dating from the fourteenth century and inscribed, surprisingly, with runes, which runologists had thought long extinct by this time. Some were just tags, not so very different from modern luggage labels, and in two cases the tags state that they were attached to bales of yarn. One inscription even appears on a walrus skull, pithily stating ‘John owns’; even if the skull was just a curiosity, this can be taken as evidence that a couple of tusks, which would have had real value, had arrived from the Far North, most likely from Greenland. There are also carefully checked receipts marked (in runes) uihi, which is thought to be a corruption of the Latin vidi, ‘I have seen’, the origin of the modern sign ✔. And there are a few longer letters, in one of which Þorer Fair despondently writes from southern Norway to his partner, Havgrim: ‘things are bad with me, partner. I did not get the beer, nor the fish.’ He is worried that a certain Þorstein Lang, presumably his backer, will hear about his failure; he seems to be suffering from the cold – ‘send me some gloves!’ he adds. But the Bergen runes also contain short love letters: ‘the belt from Fana makes you still prettier’. A few fragments of Latin poems also survive, written in runic script. All this suggests that the art of writing was not confined to a small network of merchants; plenty of people read and wrote runes, taking advantage of the ease with which the mainly straight strokes could be carved into slivers of wood. The vitality of the Norwegian community in Bergen should not be underestimated, even if we know much more about the Germans in their Kontor, and even if the Germans were becoming more and more dominant in the Bergen economy.30