The Latvian city of Riga is hosting the 41st International Hanseatic Day this week and this gives us reason to take a closer look at the Hanseatic League and to highlight some of the many Hanseatic towns, while focusing attention, as ever, on relevant resources in the UL. All the places featured in this blog post are also UNESCO World Heritage sites, so there is a neat link with last month’s blog post.
The Hanseatic League was a great economic power in medieval times, dominating maritime trade in northern Europe across 200 merchant towns and cities in seven countries. Lübeck in northern Germany was the administrative centre and generally played host to the Hansetag meetings, the main decision-making governing body. The first of these meetings was held in 1356, the last in 1669 by which time the League’s dominance had declined as the pattern of world trade had altered and economic power had shifted to the control of nation states.
To find out more about the past and present impact of the Hansa on Lübeck I would recommend A companion to medieval Lübeck edited by Carsten Jahnke and Hansestadt Lübeck: Ausflugsziele zwischen Lübeck und Travemünde (S570:01.c.7.56). Lübeck is also fittingly home to the European Hansemuseum.
This week’s events in Riga are taking place as part of a new Hansa organisation founded in 1980 and made up of 194 towns and cities across 16 countries. It was set up to foster and develop business links, tourism and cultural exchanges. To qualify for membership a place has to have either belonged to the medieval Hanseatic League or had active trading exchanges with it. Boston, King’s Lynn and Hull are current English members.
If the author is to be believed the first history of the Hanseatic League was written in 1889 by Helen Zimmern, a friend and translator of Nietzsche: The Hansa Towns (available online). More than 100 years later, research interest in all aspects of the Hanseatic League is high, reflected in two recent books available online:
- A companion to the Hanseatic League edited by Donald J. Harreld
- The Hanse in medieval and early modern Europe edited by Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz and Stuart Jenks
A succinct summary is also provided in chapter 3 of The Baltic: A History by Michael North. Further evidence of academic interest is a conference on Hanseatic history due to take place next month in Novgorod, which in the Middle Ages was the eastern most trading post of the Hanseatic League, important for its furs, wax and honey. Novgorod was one of four overseas offices (or kontors), the other three being Bruges, London (German merchants traded at the Steelyard, a site now covered by Cannon St station – see England and the German Hanse, 1157–1611: a study of their trade and commercial diplomacy by T. H. Lloyd for more information) and Bergen in Norway, centred around Bryggen, the harbour district with its characteristic wooden houses. This was the largest of the four offices with more than a thousand traders at its peak, exchanging dried cod for grain and other commodities. Bryggen i Bergen by Marco Trebbi (S592.b.99.16) is a brief illustrated history with text translated into English. Like Lübeck, Bryggen is also home to a Hanseatic museum.
Also in Scandinavia, the Swedish city of Visby on the island of Gotland, was an important centre of the Hanseatic league. This can be explored further in the pages of Visby förr i tiden: en kulturhistorisk sammanställning i ord och bild by Waldemar Falck (S401:7.b.9.1180).
The Hanseatic places added most recently to the UNESCO World Heritage list include Wismar and Stralsund to the east of Lübeck, jointly added in 2002. They also share the distinction of being on the European Route of Brick Gothic along with Rostock and Greifswald. These four places, together with Lübeck, are the subject of Gebrannte Grösse: Wege zur Backsteingotik, a set of five slim volumes (2003.8.5543-5547).
The legacy of the Hanseatic League remains strong, particularly in Germany where some cities are officially named Hansestadt, this also being shown by the letter H at the beginning of car number plates (eg HH for Hamburg, HB for Bremen). Bremen was a key centre for the building of cogs, the ships used for maritime transport, and its importance to Hanseatic history was marked in 2004 when its 15th century city hall and the nearby statue of Roland (also 15th century) were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list. You can find out more about Bremen’s role in the brief history Bremen: the story of the free Hanseatic city by Carol Claxton (2016.11.1030)
Katharine Dicks
Languages across Borders 