The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (39 page)

Something did hold the Hansa together,
though, and it was common purpose: the need to act like a modern cartel, impossible for
one seaside town, possible for an association of towns. The first rule was to make sure
of making money, which was not a simple matter. The Hansa ports dealt mostly in bulk
goods: grain from the east, herring
from the
Baltic and cod from the Norwegian coast; timber from the north as well as pitch and tar
from burning it, and cloth from Flanders and from England. The profit margin on these
things was low, so the only way to make money was to control the trade, to have a
monopoly at sea: to fight for privileges in every port and then control the sea lanes
between them.
³⁴

Language mattered very much; all the Hansa
towns, from the Low Countries to Russia, understood the same Low German. Taste also
travelled with the Hanseatic ships: the same clothes and crockery, the houses built of
brick and stone with their step gable roofs and their granaries in the loft and their
salt stores, just like any Saxon farm. The towns all have narrow alleyways that run from
the harbour to the central market square, the churches are all built as meeting halls.
It is as though Hansa households carried their hometowns with them, a shared defence
against the foreignness of where they were: like the English drinking gin in the
Himalaya. They all had stoneware for cups and plates, which carefully imitated fine
glasses and platters, and tile-stoves that heated their houses and were dressed with
painted and moulded tiles; in later years, a Hansa stove was almost holy, stuck all over
with portraits of the heroes of the Reformation.
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There was also the insistence that
a merchant who travelled was as good as any fixed and static noble any day: the Hansa
creed. Rostock town council put doubtful coats of arms on their signet rings to prove
the point, and so did Rostock merchants based in Malmö in Sweden (which never was a
Hanseatic town and belonged to the Hansa’s Danish enemies); and so the habit went
about the Baltic.
³⁶

Then there was violence, which may have been
the strongest link of all: the immediate, instant response to any threat or rival, the
powerful solidarity of the fight. Nations and courts can appeal to history and
high-flown ideas of continuity and purpose, but two hundred Hanseatic towns had two
hundred histories, often of fighting each other. Their mindset was traders defending the
moment they make the trade, like soldiers in mid-battle dealing with each shot, each
move, without needing a strategy for the whole war. They did not have to think about
what seems ruinously obvious, the differences and even contradictions between the
interests of the towns. If
they ever did, if
they thought like a single entity, they might all have to take the blame.

In the 1440s, the Bergen Hanseatics were
angry with the king’s representative, Olaf Nielsson; they accused him of
supporting the English, trying to separate the German craftsmen in Bergen from the
Kontor and encouraging pirates to steal their ships. Nielsson was deposed and sent
packing but he traded his castle to the king for the chance to return for another six
years in Bergen. On his way back in 1445 he happened to capture three Hanseatic ships,
and he gave permission for English ships to sail north of Bergen to buy stockfish,
something the Hansa had long ago agreed not to do. Lübeck was appalled. It sent out an
old Bergen hand to remind the merchants of their privileges, but by the time of the
meeting the men had already heard about the loss of three ships and they could guess
what Nielsson’s return might mean. They scrambled out of the meeting and down to
the quays and they wrecked the ship which brought Nielsson back. The king’s man
did not stay around to see what the merchants meant to do next; he went across the water
to the Munkliev monastery, with his followers and with the Bishop of Bergen, and he
waited.

The merchants went up against the monastery
as though it were an enemy town. They killed the bishop among many others, and after one
night they found Olaf Nielsson hidden in the bell tower. He was allowed a few hours to
confess and repent all his sins, and then they killed him, too. The Hansa men had to
make their excuses later to the Norwegian authorities, which they did with a
fifteen-point complaint about the dead man, his various sins including the illegal
capture of the castle he had just given to the king and a suggestion that they had been
encouraged to attack so they were not the only ones to blame. It was a classic defence:
it wasn’t just us, he deserved it, things aren’t as bad as they look. The
Hansa, like a modern corporation, didn’t know about personal responsibility. But
the Norwegian king was busily struggling for the Swedish crown and he wanted no trouble
with them; his people had to be fed, the seas had to stay open, he didn’t want
pirates. For the life of Olaf Nielsson, the Bishop of Bergen and all the other men who
were in the way, the
Kontor agreed to pay a
penalty: a small fine. You can’t hang a confederation, after all.
³⁷

Their violence began to seem old-fashioned
after a while, but not because their rivals were peace-loving and considerate. Their
rivals simply had other ways of waging trade wars by making them into hot wars, nation
to nation, which national interests and alliances might bring to an end; their rivals
fitted the new system of states.

In 1484 the Amsterdam town council
complained to the Bergen Kontor about German trouble-making, and demanded that the
violence stop. ‘All good merchants should support each other,’ Amsterdam
wrote, ‘and never hinder each other; they should not scare each other or resort to
violence.’
³⁸
That had never occurred to the
Hansa men, who constantly tried to get rival merchants thrown out of ports or
disadvantaged when they weren’t organizing blockades or pirate raids or incidents
in which inconvenient people ended up dead or disappeared. They knew their power
depended on other people’s needs, Norway’s lack of grain for a start, and
they had no intention of sharing their power by letting others satisfy the needy.

In Amsterdam they now faced a major trading
power, soon to be the greatest of them all, which seemed to see business quite
differently from the simple force on which the Hansa relied. The Dutch talked about
credit, which the Hansa resisted, and kept sophisticated double-entry books, which the
Hansa adopted late; they could make trade abstract. The Hansa was going out of style
before it went out of business.

The legend of the Hansa is much more golden
than the reality. It was taken once to be a time of German hegemony on the seas, a
matter of national pride, but the Hansa had nothing to do with nations, least of all
Germany: its flexibility, its success, depended on not being national, and often on
staying far away from the Emperor who was the one central power in what now is Germany
or else opposing him. It was taken as some kind of model for the European Union, even
though it lacked any centre, any commissioners in Brussels, any common law and common
regulations, any attempt to have one point of
view on the world and where to fight it. It was too loose to
be a model for a nation or a true federation.

What makes the Hansa seem modern is
something quite different. It is the abstract idea of trade, business, money, as a
profession and a force without roots in the world or responsibilities, ready to go
anywhere in pursuit of profit and deals. Nothing mitigates. Nothing softens. Nothing
forces or even allows compromise. Those ships in the Øresund were chasing profit by
rigging a market, they were trying to enforce a legal arrangement that Norway did not
want, and they expected to kill people on the way: to starve them, women, children and
men.

Money rules.

She was shouting, and Katelijne Vedelaer had
every reason to shout. There were three men and one woman who grabbed her and took her
by force out of the quiet of her community, over the water and out of the town of
Bruges. They were not just kidnapping her. They were telling her she had no right to
choose her own life among the holy women, that she had to be married and she had to
marry Lievin van Aerlebecke and she had to share all she had with him instead of the
community of her friends.
¹

She shouted to prove she wanted her life
back. She wasn’t running off with a lover, she was being snatched for her
property, taken off for the rape that would force her to marry. She made such a racket
that the town aldermen were alerted, but they could do nothing; the holy women, the
‘beguines’, were under the special protection of the Count of Flanders.
Aldermen went to the count’s bailiff and it was the bailiff who sent out the
sheriff with a band of law officers. They knew which way to ride because van Aerlebecke
came from Harelbecke in the flatlands to the south of Bruges, but they lost so much time
on the Harelbecke road that the posse caught up with the kidnappers a full half-day
later, twenty-five miles away, in the town of Roeselaere.
²

The man van Aerlebecke, his brother and his
servant were all arrested, along with Lizebette van Dudzele, who rode with them: all
respectable persons, even grand. Their families had position in the town, guaranteed the
money lent to churches, supervised the tanners and shearers in the cloth business, went
abroad to serve as jury in
cases which
involved citizens of Bruges. They still considered rape and kidnap as a tactic. The
Church was preaching marriage between those who freely consented, even loved each other,
and the law in Flanders agreed, but money was money and property was property and a
woman like Katelijne was forced to keep shouting.

Back in Bruges, she was handed over to the
official who took care of abducted women; he also kept watch when there was a duel being
fought, for which he got a fat half-pound candle for Candelmas and a feast four times a
year. The bailiff himself came to take Katelijne back to the beguines. Her kidnappers
were brought to trial, and van Aerlebecke was given the harshest sentence possible: one
hundred years and a day of banishment, and the promise that he would have his head cut
off if he ever came back to Bruges. The accomplices were all banned for six years each,
the men to be hanged if they came back early, the woman to be buried alive; they had to
pay sizeable fines, fifty pounds a head.

The women in the beguinage were not quite
sure the matter was settled, even so. They asked for an official record of the verdict,
carrying the seals of the bailiff, the mayor and the two citizens who wrote the report;
they wanted it quite clear that Katelijne did not want to leave them, that she had no
part in her own kidnapping. That record survives in a private collection, which is how
we know what happened.

The beguines had every reason to be careful.
They had chosen a religious life, but outside the rules of convents and religious
orders: they made a woman’s world. They did not marry, although some had been
married and were widows, and they made their own living, often by manual labour: working
fields or making cloth, which is why every beguinage had to be built by a body of
running water to wash the wool. Their independence worked, and that disrupted other
people’s plans to use them to make alliances by marriage, to get land or
money.

The beguines were known for teaching girls
manners, but also Latin, French and theology in a time when Philippe de Navarre,
soldier, diplomat, lawman and a monster of official standing, could say flatly that
‘a woman must not be taught letters or writing, unless she
is to be a nun; for many evils come from women writing and
reading … you don’t give venom to a snake who has quite enough
already.’
³
Sometimes they even preached, which was not proper: grudgingly
Henry of Ghent conceded a woman could teach, but privately and in silence, and she could
teach only women ‘both because their address might incite the men to lust (as they
say) and also would be shameful and dishonourable to the men’.
⁴
Worse, they
talked about God as though they loved Him, body and soul, with all the madness and
passion of love, and as though they could go to Him directly, without church or priest
in the way; this was such an alarming heresy that Marguerite Porete died for it in 1310.
And, to make matters even worse, they used everyday language and not Latin; everybody
knew what they were saying.

The beguines flourished all across the lands
of Northern Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In Strasbourg, for
example, one woman in ten was a beguine. In Cologne, there were a hundred beguine
houses. In the Northern countries as a whole, perhaps three women in every hundred were
beguines. The poet and mystic Hadewijch of Brabant, who most likely fell out with her
fellow beguines and then went wandering, mentions beguines in Flanders, Brabant, Paris,
Zeeland, Holland, Frisia, England and ‘beyond the Rhine’, the territories of
the edge of the world.
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