The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (38 page)

They had good reason at the time to write
that letter: they were trying to save all the Hansa towns, whichever ones happened to
have ships in harbour at the time, from being made to pay for the politics or the
misdeeds of a single member. Rostock and Hamburg wanted to be able to sail on even if
Lübeck or Bruges was deep in some dispute over tax or sailing rights; they were happy to
share privileges, but not responsibility. They relished the very obvious paradox: here
was a seemingly vague, amorphous sort of group, barely able to organize a meeting every
few years to make decisions, and yet able to make war efficiently on Flanders, France,
England, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Holland at various times, to raise the money for
ships like a nation, sign treaties at the end and even manage kings, imposing them and
deposing them.

It took effective control of trade over the Baltic and then
the North Sea, without even a sniff of legal right. In the law that was general in
Europe, but not so settled in the north, the sea belonged to nobody, and everybody had
the right to sail on it. Justinian’s version of the civil law of Rome lays down
that ‘The sea is for everyone’s use, but nobody’s property, just as
air is for common use but has no owner … but the jurisdiction is
Caesar’s.’ In other words, a proper power, a king or emperor, had the right
to police the sea and beat back thieves and pirates. The more pirates bothered shipping,
the stronger the idea of territorial waters grew, a right of self-protection on the
water.
²⁵
But nobody thought the Hansa was such a proper power, not even the
Hansa, and no such power had the right to decide who could sail where and why and when.
The Hansa made its own legal reality by wars and blockades and treaties, an alternative
law which made its merchant members perversely legalistic with other people; the
citizens of Bergen in 1560 were furious about the damage the Kontor was doing and asked
the king for help because the Hanseatics ‘always sent such learned men to any
negotiations that the people of Bergen could not defend themselves’.
²⁶

The Hansa was a new kind of body when it
emerged, but its name was familiar. In a fourth-century translation of the Bible in
Gothic,
hansa
was the word used for the gang who come to take Christ prisoner
in the garden at Gethsemane: a band of men, a club. This was not a promising start.
Charlemagne worried in the eighth century about the guilds called
hanse
because
they swore oaths of loyalty when they should have been loyal only to him; they were
rivals.
Hansa
became the word for a union of merchants, usually from one town,
sometimes from several; there was the Flemish Hanse of the Seventeen Towns and the
Danish Guild of St Canute, campaigning to get and hold on to privileges in foreign
ports. There were the fishermen who spread their risks by ‘sharing a herring ship
with someone else’.
²⁷
They were little arrangements,
minimal alliances until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Then came the Emperor Frederick II, the
wonder of the world, some said, and fiercely ambitious to rule Italy and keep down the
Pope. He called his birthplace Bethlehem and his followers called
him Messiah; the Pope called him Antichrist and felt obliged
to excommunicate him four times. Such a man could not be expected to attend to the
details of what was done in his name and, in the interests of his Italian campaigns, the
Emperor thought it wise to allow the feudal lords all the powers they needed to raise
all the money he needed for war. They each imposed different laws and different coins
and different weights and measures. This had consequences they never intended. You could
make a profit just by buying cloth by the ell in Lübeck and selling it in Riga, even if
you didn’t put up the price, because the Riga ell was shorter than the one in the
west. The tolls for passing up and down the Rhine became such a confusion that English
merchants called them ‘the German madness’.

The Emperor didn’t interfere with the
towns, but he didn’t help them or make alliances with them as the French kings
did; he was too distracted. The towns felt entitled to act independently, with just
enough co-operation to make sure they could act as they wanted. They already had their
associations from before Frederick was born. They were used to meeting each year from
the last weeks of August to the first weeks of October to buy herring at the beach fairs
in Scania, in southern Sweden: a free-for-all market which became in the thirteenth
century the start of new towns. The Gotland association of merchants who did business in
Sweden combined to sail in convoys for greater safety, to act together overseas, to bury
any merchant who died abroad. The association thrived without any undue interference, it
became the Hansa and the Hansa took over the Scania fairs. In 1189, it signed its first
treaty with a foreign prince: promising trade and profits, demanding privileges and
especially low taxes.

The modern trade-off between politics and
money had begun.

Town leagues replaced the more personal,
almost family associations of merchants because the town was the one political power to
which they might have to answer; so it was logical that the Hansa be organized town by
town, with a man’s standing defined by the town he came from. Town was family now.
There were eventually some two hundred towns involved around the Baltic and the North
Sea. Beside the member towns, who expected to be heard from time to
time on matters of policy, there were other ports like Lynn
in England whose livelihood was tied to the Hansa, and some like Boston in Lincolnshire
that were downright dependent. And then there were the Kontors, Hansa towns inside other
towns, often walled away. The Bergen Kontor put up a wall after a violent row with the
town, but it lasted only three years in the 1520s before the town insisted it come
down.
²⁸
The Peterhof at Novgorod was something between a fort and a tenement
with its own locked and private church for storing valuables, and the Steelyard in
London was a walled enclosure that could be closed down. In Bruges, the Hansa had no
walls, just a tendency to cluster around the Bourse. Its meeting place was the refectory
of the Carmelite monastery and eventually it built a guildhouse of solid brick and
painted beams, but hardly had a chance to use it before the harbour at Bruges silted
over and it quit the town.
²⁹

The Hansa acknowledged no centre, although
in practice it was often Lübeck that called meetings of its council, the Hansetag. The
council did not meet every year, which was one more problem when the group wanted to
take action. The one clear interest you’d think the whole Hansa shared was open
seas, and as little trouble as possible from pirates. It did not work that way.

In the 1380s the Danes were at war with the
German Duke of Mecklenburg, who was busily trying to use pirates to beat up his Danish
enemies; but these pirates, the
Vitalienbrüder
, were not so easy to control.
Rostock and Wismar were on the duke’s land, and for once they felt obliged to do
their duty by their overlord and shelter the pirates who were making the Baltic almost
impassable. They went on protecting them when the campaign went far beyond Denmark and
the pirates raided even Bergen, where the Hansa merchants were unimpressed by their
offer to leave the Kontor alone and pillage just the rest of the town. Feeling some kind
of local loyalty, they took up arms to defend the town and saw the Kontor plundered in
revenge.
³⁰

Rostock and Wismar were unrepentant about
sheltering the enemies of their allies in Bergen. They declined to hand back the goods
the pirates had stolen and taken to their harbours. The disturbances went on long enough
to force up the price of herring by ten times in
Cologne, by three times in the lands of the Teutonic
Knights, but even the knights were not inclined to save the Danes trouble by suppressing
the pirates because they were busy with their own territorial ambitions. Punishing the
rogue towns would have to wait perhaps years for a council meeting where there might or
might not be a majority to vote for sanctions.
³¹

The pirates left Rostock to become a
freebooting scourge. They occupied the islands of Bornholm and Gotland for bases, and
took any vessels that passed, killing the crews or throwing them overboard to die; their
motto, logical enough, was ‘God’s friends and the foe of all the
world’. They had every reason to avoid capture ruthlessly; the merchants of
Stralsund took one pirate crew and stuffed them into barrels on the deck, heads sticking
through holes cut at one end, packed like herring, and shipped them back to the gallows.
They were also cunning. Around Stockholm one winter the commander Master Hugo realized
his ships were at the mercy of the enemy Danes. He cut trees, made a wooden wall around
the ships and poured water over the wall; it soon froze. Just outside the wall, he cut
the ice to make a moat for his ice fortress, and in the night the cold and a scatter of
light snow hid what he had done. The Danes attacked, they did not notice the thin ice on
the moat, men and machines tumbled down into the frigid waters. The pirates could wait
in their stockade for warmer weather so they could sail on.

Like the Hansa itself, the
Vitalienbrüder
were single-minded; their name for themselves was
Likendeelers
meaning the ones who divide the loot equally, and loot was
what mattered. Even when the first excuse for their campaign was gone, and Rostock and
Wismar were on better terms with the Danes, they sailed on; according to the chronicler
Detmar of Lübeck they hit at Russia, they spoiled the Hansa’s trade, and they
sailed on to the Caspian, to the Holy Land, to the world. That says something about
Lübeck’s hopes for controlling them.

Hansa towns often did go each a different
way. Bremen was more different than most. It was the 1440s and the Dutch were beating
their way into the Baltic, which had been a Hanseatic sea for a century or more; war
happened, inevitably. France and Scotland were
busily attacking English ships because the Hundred Years War
had not yet finished, and Scots pirates sometimes took ships from Flanders. The seas
were constantly unsafe. The citizens of Bremen had lost ships to the Dutch, and lost
other ships on Hanseatic missions against the Dutch, and nobody was willing to pay them
the compensation they were sure was due; so they decided on their own radical solution
to the problem of piracy.

They became a pirate port.

They brought Grote Gherd, ‘Big
Jerry’, from Wismar, and captains from nearby Hamburg and Lübeck itself, and they
offered a deal: sail from Bremen and you got to keep two-thirds of all the goods you
captured, and half the ransoms of anybody who had not been pitched overboard. Do well at
this, follow the quite detailed rules and regulations for what could be stolen and from
whom, and orderly, successful pirates could be citizens of Bremen for life.

Bremen now declared war on Flanders and
Flanders declared war on Bremen and the pirates sailed out. They struck off the south
English coast at Portland Bill, in the shelter of the Firth of Forth in Scotland as well
as around the mouths of the Elbe and Weser rivers near their home port. Big Jerry ran up
the flags of Hamburg, another Hanseatic town, to fool his prey, and worked the Øresund
to such good effect that he took thirteen ships from Flanders in a single expedition.
All this was extremely political in an incoherent sort of way: a Hansa town was often
stealing from Hanseatic merchants in the interests of beating back the Hansa’s
rivals. Hanseatic towns had difficulty getting their property back from Bremen, but when
Big Jerry’s associates stole goods bound for Edinburgh, the Scots negotiated a
deal: if there was proof of where the goods were headed, the pirates would hand them
back. It was worth making deals to make friends; as long as the Baltic was sealed shut,
Bremen had hopes of selling its own grain to Scotland.
³²

Now, piracy was crime, but it was also war
being waged by towns that had no clear way to declare war. It was a practical business
that sometimes seems almost respectable. In the National Museum at Gdansk there is the
most glorious triptych painted by Hans Memling in Bruges in the 1460s, commissioned by a
Medici agent who meant
to ship it to
Florence. It shows the Day of Judgement, Christ sitting on a rainbow waiting for the
righteous, who are being helped by angels through a great marble gate, and on the other
side the wicked endlessly falling into scarlet fire. In the centre, St Michael weighs
man against man against woman in delicate scales. The picture was packed up with all
kinds of spices and furs, and sent off from Bruges, but it never got beyond Dunkirk; the
ship was taken by a Gdansk pirate, Paul Bencke. His ship sailed back through the North
Sea and the Baltic and he presented the painting to the Basilica in Gdansk. It was
pirate stuff and Medici agents threatened legal action to get it back, but the church
still felt able to accept it. It would have seemed absurd to refuse such a Godly, lovely
thing.
³³

The wonder is that the Hansa survived its
ruinous divisions, that the merchants thought it so priceless that they paid a price to
be in it.

Law divided it, for a start. Although Lübeck
law was applied in some forty-three Hansa towns, the law of Frankfurt ruled in
forty-nine, and there were outrider towns that took their law from Bremen or Hamburg.
Until quite late, the Hansa had laws of its own only on issues like keeping a big crew
under control, not shipping out during winter and not buying or selling goods that had
been stolen or shipwrecked. Everything else was local. For anyone used to a state with a
single source of authority, king, Parliament or constitution, it looks a quite
impossible alliance, and it did sometimes come unglued: the Dutch Hanseatics
wouldn’t go to war with their neighbours in Holland and Zeeland, the Prussian
towns wanted to sell grain directly to the English without giving Lübeck a profit and
when the Hansa blockaded the English out of Bruges the Hanseatic merchants of Cologne
were perfectly happy to do business with the English at Antwerp. Even the epic Hanseatic
war against Denmark involved fewer than a dozen Hanseatic towns.