In 1160 a group of German merchants set up at the Baltic a trade transit station in Visby, Gotland Island, to facilitate the ware transportation among coastal towns in the area.
By the end of the 11th century, merchants from this region were increasingly drawn to the coast of the North and Baltic Seas to meet the rising demands of urban populations that continued to grow until the end of the 13th century. They traded foods such as herring and grain, as well as commercial products such as wood, flax, tar or wax for salt, which was needed on the coast for preserving fish.
Merchants attempting to travel on sea or land regularly came under threat from robbers, pirates, feudal lords, and tribal monarchs. Local rulers across Northern Europe often were bent on confiscating goods or exacting tributes. Merchants who tried to travel alone were fair game.
In response, they began to organize convoys or troops—“Hanse” in Middle Low German—on trade routes across the region.
Starting in the late 11th century, a brisk east-west trade developed between the Russian city of Novgorod and Westphalia. This trade initially went through the key trading post of Schleswig, which also maintained trading ties with England.
The year of 1239 was the actual establishment of the Hanseatic League is usually now attributed to this date-the name being derived from the old German Hansa, a union or confederacy.
Northern German mastery of trade in the Baltic Sea was achieved with striking speed and completeness in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. After its capture by Henry III (the Lion) in 1158, Lübeck became the main base for Westphalian and Saxon merchants expanding northward and eastward.
Later in 1241, the first agreement was signed between Lübeck and Hamburg to facilitate foreign trade in the North Sea and the Baltic.
By the end of the 13th century, similar agreements had been reached with a large number of cities that had decided to join the trade Union. In 1370 the Hanseatic League numbered 77 cities, which forced the then King of Denmark, Valdemar IV, to grant them free navigation between the two seas and exemption from customs duties. This agreement led to the final formation of the Hanseatic League.
The League expanded between the 13th and 15th centuries and ultimately encompassed nearly 200 settlements across seven modern-day countries, ranging from Estonia in the north and east, to the Netherlands in the west, and Kraków, Poland, in the south.
At the end of the 15th century, new overseas trade routes began to develop with the discovery and colonization of America, which reduced the economic importance of the Baltic and North Sea. This decline was also caused by a number of factors including economic depression, increased power of non-Hanseatic merchants and the nobility which backed them, a depletion of various resources, the plague of the late 14th century CE, and climate change which shortened growing seasons.
The Thirty Years' War and the devastation it caused in the German countries was the final blow to degenerate the Hanseatic League, which in 1669 operated only in its metropolises (Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg). In 1669, the last Hanseatic Convention was held in Lu beck, at which attempts were still being made to reorganize the Hanseatic League on the basis of a city alliance. By the 17th century, the league had diminished in numbers and power to be almost inconsequential, and it was dissolved in the 19th century.
Hanseatic League
