Like many innovative forms of business enterprise, this partnership proved extremely attractive. In 1241, Hamburg and Lübeck concluded a treaty granting each other’s merchants reciprocal privileges. Similar agreements were concluded with other coastal and inland towns, and Lübeckers easily convinced their fellow Germans to trade exclusively with them, thus extending the reach of the hanse—in effect a merchant guild—via a network that crossed Germany and, as merchants and settlers branched out, Prussia (northeast Poland), Lithuania, Livonia (roughly Latvia and Estonia), and Novgorod. Hanse merchants established kontors (trading centers) where they tended to congregate or be confined to special quarters depending on local circumstances. There were gated Hanse establishments in Novgorod (founded around 1200) and at the Steelyard in London (1281), but there were fewer restrictions at the kontors in Bruges (1252) and Bergen (1343). By the mid-1300s, the Hanse had evolved from “a community of German merchants” who traveled together both for safety and to increase their leverage in securing privileges in foreign lands to “an association of Hanseatic towns” in which the needs of individual traders were superseded by those of the city from which they came. The “Hanse of the Towns” originated in an assembly of merchants’ representatives held in 1356 to address agreements made by merchants in the kontor of Bruges with the count of Flanders and the king of England. Trading privileges had always been negotiated by merchants on the spot, but by 1374 representatives of the Hanse towns had established the principle that all decisions made by individual kontors were subject to approval by a general diet of the Hanseatic towns.
As in the Varangian period, there was a lively trade between the Baltic and the Black Seas, although as a consequence of the Mongols’ destruction of Kiev in 1240, the preferred route had shifted to the west and now went by way of the Oder or Vistula Rivers to Kraków and the Prut, a tributary of the Danube, or the Dniester. Farther west, the primary arteries of trade in Germany flowed north through Wendish territories to the Baltic: the Trave near Lübeck and Starigard, the Peene and Oder near Wolin and Szczecin, respectively, and the Vistula at Gdansk. Lübeck was the primary seat of trade to which other Hanse towns (about eighty-five in all) generally looked for guidance, and the Low German spoken by the majority of Lübeckers became the lingua franca of commerce in the Baltic. At the same time, the Hanse’s monopolistic power effectively barred competitors—Gotlanders, Wends, Prussians, Estonians, and Russians—from the most lucrative trades.
Among the Hanseatic merchants’ most determined competitors were the Danes, who were also trying to establish themselves in the eastern Baltic. Henry the Lion’s pressure on the Wends had driven many of them to piracy and their raids on the Danish coast as far north as Jutland compelled Denmark’s Valdemar I, “the Great,” into an alliance with Henry. In 1169, the Danes destroyed a Wendish fortress on the island of Rügen at the mouth of the Oder River and took advantage of Frederick Barbarossa’s preoccupation with Italy and crusading to extend their rule in the east. In the second half of the thirteenth century, Denmark relapsed into civil war and much of their trade fell into German hands. Yet the Danes had laid the foundation for a prosperous trade. Many towns had been established in Denmark, notably Copenhagen (København, or “merchants’ harbor”) on the Øresund near the rich herring fisheries off Skåne, then Danish territory in what is now southern Sweden. The productivity of these fishing grounds, which remained a primary engine of economic growth in the Baltic for centuries, can be glimpsed in the exuberant description of the thirteenth-century History of the Danes: “The east side of Zealand [Sjælland] is separated from Scania by a strait which annually brings a rich booty to the fishermen’s nets. The entire sea is generally so full of fish that often the vessels are stopped and can hardly be rowed clear through great exertion and the booty can no longer be caught by artificial means but can without difficulty be caught by hand.” Many of the merchants who purchased fish at Skåne were Germans bearing silver from the newly opened mines of the Harz Mountains, and salt—an essential commodity in the fish trade—from Lüneberg, south of Hamburg.
Although Hanse traders never dominated Denmark the way they did Norway, where the Bergen kontor was established in 1343, many German merchants settled in Denmark. Rising tensions led to war between the Hanse of the Towns and Denmark in the 1360s. The Treaty of Stralsund (1370) confirmed Hanse control of Skåne, restored their trading privileges in Denmark, lowered customs dues, and gained the Hanse towns a voice in the election of the Danish king. This was the high point of Hanse political power in the Baltic. Twenty years later, the crowns of Denmark and Norway were brought together in a personal union under Margaret of Denmark, who envisioned a confederation of the three Scandinavian kingdoms with Denmark supreme. To that end she supported a revolt against the king of Sweden, whose father was the duke of Mecklenburg. In retaliation, the duke’s subjects, including citizens of the Hanse towns of Wismar and Rostock, waged a pirate war against Margaret and her allies. These pirates were known as Vitalienbrüder, or “victual brothers”—victual referring to the fact that they were self-sufficient in food, brothers attesting to their essentially egalitarian organization. (This and similar names were also used for outlaw gangs on land.) That they lived beyond the law and knew it is obvious from their motto, “God’s friends and the foe of all the world,” a sentiment reminiscent of Cicero’s condemnation of piracy. The Vitalienbrüder were active across the Baltic; an estimated fifteen hundred pirates were reported along the Livonian coast in 1392, and two years later as many as three hundred ships were at large in and around the Danish archipelago. When the pirate wars ended in 1395, the Vitalienbrüder retained a base on the island of Gotland from which they continued to plunder merchant shipping and hired themselves out to princes from Calais to Finland and Russia. Their reign of terror lasted until 1401, when the Teutonic Knights of Prussia rounded up and executed hundreds of them and occupied Visby.
Four years earlier, Margaret’s nephew, Eric of Norway, had been acknowledged as king of Denmark and Sweden. The Kalmar Union over which he ruled was a federation of three countries with a common king but it especially helped establish Danish merchants in the Baltic on a par with those of the Hanse. The weakening of the union at midcentury reflected both the growing sense of national identity within the three kingdoms and the diminished threat posed by German traders. The political power of the Hanse was likewise undermined by the rise of nation-states elsewhere in Europe, while Dutch competitors threatened their commercial supremacy. The Danes preferred dealing with the Dutch because they posed no threat of cultural dominance like that exercised by the Germans. Moreover, because they sailed between the Baltic and North Seas, they diminished the importance of the Hanse’s Lübeck-Hamburg axis. The Dutch also became a source of revenue for the Danish kingdom when in 1429 the crown began forcing ships to pay tolls before transiting the Øresund.
For all the commercial, cultural, and political power Lübeck and Hamburg wielded, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries the most important port in northern Europe was Bruges, the center of administrative and political power in the county of Flanders and home to a great number of foreign communities. Bruges owed its identity as a port to a storm in 1134 that scoured the Zwin River and opened the city to the North Sea, about fifteen kilometers away. This allowed shippers to offload in the center of town, where there were markets, a weigh house, and a fixed crane for shifting goods. Yet dredging equipment of the time was inadequate to maintain the channel in the heavily silted river, and eventually none but the smallest vessels could reach the city, and downstream ports opened at Damme and Sluys.
Part of Bruges’s appeal lay in its accessibility to merchants from southern Europe, the Baltic, and the British Isles, but it was also at the center of a vibrant industrial economy in its own right. In the twelfth century, Flanders, Hainault, and Brabant produced the best luxury textiles in northern Europe, which is what attracted Genoese and Venetian merchants to sail there directly. In addition, Bruges manufac
tured armor, illuminated manuscripts, and, later, printed books. Thanks to its commercial networks, by the fourteenth century almost any product available in Europe could be found in Bruges. A list of unknown authorship enumerates the scores of products imported directly from more than thirty places in northern and southern Europe, North Africa, the Levant, Asia Minor, and the Black Sea. These include foodstuffs like herring, grain, cheese, bacon, honey, wine, spices, dates, almonds, and sugar; textiles such as wool, cotton, and silk; animal by-products from furs, skins, and leather to tallow, grease, and beeswax; metals and minerals both precious and base (copper, iron, tin, lead, pewter, coal, and alum); and hunting birds. Bruges remained the center of northern Europe’s international commerce until the end of the fifteenth century when ships outgrew the shallow waters of the Zwin altogether and the focus of trade shifted due east to the Scheldt River port of Antwerp.
Hanseatic and Flemish mariners were well placed to dominate the trade of England, which produced few exports apart from wool, tin, coal, and lead, and which relied on continental sources for iron, salt, naval stores, and wine. The Anglo-Norman aristocracy had turned their backs on the sea to concentrate on consolidating political power in England, but a more intractable problem was the legacy of cross-Channel dynastic politics, under which English kings ruled substantial French territories. When Henry II ascended the English throne in 1154, he brought with him the French counties of Anjou and Maine (his birthplace), and the duchies of Aquitaine and Gascony. At the nadir of their fortunes the French kings had only limited access to the English Channel, but between 1203 and 1259 they retook Rouen and Normandy, as well as La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay; built a port at Aigues-Mortes on the Mediterranean; and compelled England’s Henry III to renounce his claims to all his continental holdings save Aquitaine. With its rich vineyards around Bordeaux and the Gironde estuary, this was an especially lush prize and such a mainstay of England’s overseas trade that the tun—a barrel with a capacity of 252 gallons (1,270 bottles) of wine—became the standard by which a ship’s capacity was determined. (Though the unit of measure has changed, ships’ sizes are still given in terms of their tonnage.) This had both commercial and military applications, and in the early 1200s ships with a capacity of eighty tuns were considered suitable for naval operations and had to be registered with the crown.
This made sense in the context of medieval naval warfare because fleet encounters were rare in northern European waters and there was a far greater need for ordinary merchant ships to serve as auxiliaries and transports, notably in the English campaigns against the Welsh and Scots, as well as during the Hundred Years’ War with France (1337–1453). Influenced by the Angevin experience in the War of the Sicilian Vespers, the French had taken a theoretically more aggressive approach to naval warfare. In 1293, Philip IV employed Genoese advisors for the construction of the Clos des Galées at Rouen, the first such arsenal in northern Europe, and Philip hired Genoese squadrons and their crews to supplement and even lead his forces against the English. The French were not always willing followers, notably at the battle of Sluys in 1340, where they lost 200 of 230 ships and seventeen thousand men, partly because French commanders ignored their Genoese advisors. But naval engagements were rare—there were only four in the Hundred Years’ War—and even when losses were considerable they were decisive only to the extent that they hindered or facilitated the transportation of men and matériel.
Edward I’s immediate response to the establishment of the Clos des Galées was to order twenty-six English towns to contribute twenty galleys to the defense of the realm; but impressed ships made up the bulk of the English fleet, with the balance comprised of vessels contributed by the Cinque Ports and foreign hires. Established sometime between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Cinque Ports—Hastings, New Romney, Hythe, Dover, and Sandwich—originally regulated the annual herring fair at Yarmouth, but their strategic location by the Dover Strait made them the ports to which the crown turned to defend the shipping lanes to the continent. The exercise of royal prerogative should not be mistaken for royal authority. The crown depended heavily on the expertise of the Cinque Ports shipowners, but the royal charters that stipulated how many ships they were required to loan the king gave the Cinque Ports extraordinary privileges, including the right of wreck and freedom from taxes, which they routinely abused.b For much of the medieval period English merchant shippers were a law unto themselves. When Edward I sailed to Sluys in 1297, more than 165 men died in a riot between crews from the Cinque Ports and their rival, Yarmouth. Eight years later, the king commissioned a Cinque Ports ship called Le Snak to patrol the English Channel against pirates, only to have Le Snak’s crew steal £300 from ships belonging to London merchants. By the same token, the crown was frequently in arrears for crews’ wages and offered shipowners nothing for the use of their vessels until parliamentary pressure in 1380 required payment of a modest sum for wear and tear on ships’ gear.
Privateering and Letters of Marque
The English did not establish a naval base and shipyard until 1420 at Southampton. But this was a tentative effort and soon abandoned. Rather than attempt to develop a formal naval establishment, Henry VI began issuing letters of marque to captains of armed merchant ships. Technically, a shipowner who had been robbed on the high seas by the subject of another ruler could seek compensation by taking his case to court in the country of his robber. If this was not possible, or the verdict’s partiality was suspect, the victim could appeal to his own sovereign for a letter of marque entitling him to seize property from the compatriots of the original robber, up to the value of what he had lost, although such niceties were readily ignored. Yet privateering, as sailing with letters of marque came to be known, was not simply a peacetime system of alternative justice; kings and princes also used privateers to augment their fleets in time of war. To fund his campaigns against the Angevins, Roger of Lauria issued letters of marque for a 20 percent cut of the prizes taken, and in 1292 revenue from raiding accounted for half his fleet’s budget. An English letter of marque issued in 1400 spells out what the bearer could and could not do—or at least to whom he could and could not do it:
Commission to William Prince, master of a barge called le Cristofre of Arundell, to take mariners for the same, to go to sea on the king’s service; provided that neither he nor any liege of the king in his company on the barge take any ships, barges, or other vessels, merchandise, goods or chattels of any of the realms of France, Spain, Portugal or other parts except only of the realm of Scotland.
In other words, William Prince was an agent of the crown with the authority to seize Scottish vessels and their cargoes, but not those of any other country. Whether Prince respected the limits suggested by the king is unknown, but many commissioned privateers exceeded their writ and plundered allies and even their fellow countrymen. This lack of discipline was a major flaw in the privateering system. Another was that even if commissioned privateers were scrupulous about targeting only specified enemies, they were under no obligation to serve the king. So although letters of marque did disrupt enemy trade and provided some income to merchants whose opportunities for normal trade were limited by hostilities, as naval auxiliaries privateers were of negligible strategic benefit to the crown.
The Ship
Ordinary merchants were willing to seek such commissions in part because medieval sea trade was a rough-and-tumble business to begin with, and partly because their ships required little or no modification to ready them for more belligerent pursuits. Even as ship design, rigging, and construction techniques evolved, the distinction between warships and merchantmen remained slight. Outwardly, the most pronounced transformation in ship design was in the north, where the sleek lines characteristic of the Viking-influenced double-ended ships gave way to the cog, a relatively squat, boxlike vessel of heavy shell-first construction reinforced by frames and transverse crossbeams that protruded from either side of the hull. Cogs were characterized by a relatively flat
bottom with high sides and straight rather than curved stem-and sternposts. The sternpost probably assumed this form first in order to accommodate the centerline rudder, which dates to about 1200 in Europe. Despite its long pedigree in China, and tenth-century allusions to them in the Indian Ocean, the centerline rudder developed independently in northern Europe, where it was mounted with a hinged “pintle-and-gudgeon” system rather than lashings.c
Cogs were powered by a single square sail on a mast stepped amidships and many were fitted with elevated castles fore and aft, and a topcastle fitted to the mast. The stern-and forecastles were initially independent structures mounted on deck but eventually became fully integrated into the hull. As the name suggests, castles offered protection against attack and an advantage in height when attacking, and they were not limited to cogs. A survey of sealings depicting ships from 1150 to 1300 shows that nearly half carried a castle of one sort or another, and the unfinished Bremen cog of 1380, which was excavated in the Weser River in the 1960s, had a complete sterncastle and the structural members for a forecastle. In addition to providing cover in combat, the sterncastle offered shelter for the helmsman, who manned the tiller on the main deck, and the one on the Bremen cog enclosed a windlass and capstan for weighing anchor, stepping the mast, loading heavy cargo, and trimming the sail.d
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 47
