THE HANSA
Systematic commerce in the north of Europe, broadly speaking, begins
with the traffic of the Hansa towns, whose rise may be traced to the
sudden development of civic life forced on Germany in the tenth century
by the emperor Henry I, as a means of withstanding the otherwise
irresistible raids of the Hungarians.[711] Once founded, such cities for
their own existence' sake gave freedom to all fugitive serfs who joined
them, defending such against former masters, and giving them the chance
of earning a living.[712] That is by common consent the outstanding
origin of German civic industry, and the original conditions were such
that the cities, once formed, were gradually forced[713] to special
self-reliance. _Faustrecht_, or private war, was universal, even under
emperors who suppressed feudal brigandage; and the cities had to fight
their own battle, like those of Italy, from the beginning. As compared
with the robber baronage and separate princes, they stood for
intelligence and co-operation, and supplied a basis for organisation
without which the long German chaos of the Middle Ages would have been
immeasurably worse. Taking their commercial cue from the cities of
Italy, they reached, as against feudal enemies, a measure of peaceful
union which the less differentiated Italian cities could not attain save
momentarily. The decisive conditions were that whereas in Italy the
enemies were manifold--sometimes feudal nobles, sometimes the Emperor,
sometimes the Pope--the German cities had substantially one objective,
the protection of trade from the robber-knights. Thus, as early as the
year 1284, seventy cities of South Germany formed the Rhenish League, on
which followed that of the Swabian towns. The league of the Hansa
cities, like the other early "Hansa of London," which united cities of
Flanders and France with mercantile London, was a growth on all fours
with these.[714] Starting, however, in maritime towns which grew to
commerce from beginnings in fishing, as the earlier Scandinavians had
grown to piracy, the northern League gave its main strength to trade by
sea.
Its special interest for us to-day lies in the fact that it was
ultra-racial, beginning in 1241 in a pact between the free cities of
Luebeck and Hamburg,[715] and finally including Wendish, German, Dutch,
French, and even Spanish cities, in fluctuating numbers. The motive to
union, as it had need be, was one of mercantile gain. Beginning,
apparently, by having each its separate authorised _hansa_ or
trading-group in foreign cities, the earlier trading-towns of the group,
perhaps from the measure of co-operation and fraternity thus forced on
them abroad,[716] saw their advantage in a special league for the common
good as a monopoly maintained against outsiders; and this being
extended, the whole League came to bear the generic name.
See Kohlrausch for the theory that contact in foreign cities is the
probable cause of the policy of union (_History of Germany_, Eng.
tr., p. 260; cp. Ashley, _Introd. to Economic History_, i, 104,
110). As to the origin of the word, see Stubbs, i, 447, _note_. The
_hans_ or _hansa_ first appears historically in England as a name
apparently identical with _gild_; and, starting with a _hansa_ or
hanse-house of their own, English cities in some cases are found
trading through subordinate _hansas_ in other cities, not only of
Normandy but of England itself. Thus arose the Flemish Hansa or
"Hansa of London," ignored in so many notices of the better-known
Hanseatic League. Early in the thirteenth century it included a
number of the towns of Flanders engaged in the English wool-trade;
and later it numbered at one time seventeen towns, including
Chalons, Rheims, St. Quentin, Cambray, and Amiens (Ashley, _Introd.
to Economic History_, i, 109; cp. Prof. Schanz, _Englische
Handelspolitik_, 1889, i, 6, citing Varenbergh, _Hist. des
relations diplomatiques entre le comte de Flandre et l'Angleterre
au moyen age_, Bruxelles, 1874, p. 146 _sq._). There is some
obscurity as to when the foreign Hansards were first permitted to
have warehouses and residences of their own in London. Cp.
Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, vol. i, Sec.
68; and Ashley, i, 105, following Schanz, who dates this privilege
in the reign of Henry III, though the merchants of Cologne (_id._
p. 110) had a _hansa_ or gildhall in London in the reign of Richard
I. Under whatever conditions, it is clear that London was one of
the first foreign cities in which the German Hansard traders came
in friendly contact.
A reciprocal and normal egoism furthered as well as thwarted the Hansard
enterprise. Trade in the feudal period being a ground of privilege like
any other, the monopolied merchants of every city strove to force
foreign traders to deal with them only. On the other hand, the English
nobility sought to deal rather with the foreigner directly than with the
English middlemen; and thus in each feudal country, but notably in
England,[717] the interest of the landed class tended to throw foreign
trade substantially in foreign hands, which did their best to hold it.
In the reigns of the Edwards privileges of free trade with natives were
gradually conferred on the foreign traders[718] in the interests of the
landed class--the only "general consumers" who could then make their
claims felt--in despite of the angry resistance of the native merchant
class. For the rest, in a period when some maritime English cities, like
those of France and Germany, could still carry on private wars with each
other as well as with foreign cities,[719] a trader of one English town
was in any other English town on all fours with a foreigner.[720] When,
therefore, the foreigners combined, their advantage over the native
trade was twofold.
Naturally the cities least liable to regal interference carried on a
cosmopolitan co-operation to the best advantage. The Hansa of London,
being made up of Flemish and French cities, was hampered by the divided
allegiance of its members and by their national jealousies;[721] while
the German cities, sharing in the free German scramble under a nominal
emperor much occupied in Italy, could combine with ease. Cologne, having
early Hansa rights in London, sought to exclude the other cities, but
had to yield and join their union;[722] and the Hansa of London dwindled
and broke up before their competition. As the number of leagued cities
increased, it might be thought, something in the nature of an ideal of
free trade must have partly arisen, for the number of "privileged"
towns was thus apparently greater than that of the outside towns traded
with. To the last, however, the faith seems to have been that without
monopoly the league must perish; and in the closing Protestant period
the command of the Baltic, as against the Dutch and the Scandinavians,
was desperately and vainly battled for. But just as the cities could not
escape the play of the other political forces of the time, and were
severally clutched by this or that potentate, or biassed to their own
stock, so they could not hinder that the principle of self-seeking on
which they founded should divide themselves. As soon as the Dutch
affiliated cities saw their opening for trade in the Baltic on their own
account, they broke away.
While the league lasted, it was as remarkable a polity as any in
history. With its four great foreign factories of Bruges, London,
Bergen, and Novgorod, and its many minor stations, all conducted by
celibate servitors living together like so many bodies of friars;[723]
with its four great circles of affiliated towns, and its triennial and
other congresses, the most cosmopolitan of European parliaments; with
its military and naval system, by which, turning its trading into
fighting fleets, it made war on Scandinavian kings and put down piracy
on every hand--it was in its self-seeking and often brutal way one of
the popular civilising influences of northern Europe for some two
hundred and fifty years; and the very forces of separate national
commerce, which finally undermined it, were set up or stimulated by its
own example. With less rapacity, indeed, it might have conciliated
populations that it alienated. A lack of any higher ideals than those of
zealous commerce marks its entire career; it is associated with no such
growth of learning and the fine arts as took place in commercial
Holland; and its members seem to have been among the most unrefined of
the northern city populations.[724] But it made for progress on the
ordinary levels. In a world wholly bent on privilege in all directions,
it at least tempered its own spirit of monopoly in some measure by its
principle of inclusion; and it passed away as a great power before it
could dream of renewing the ideal of monopoly in the more sinister form
of Oriental empire taken up by the Dutch. And, while its historians have
not been careful to make a comparative study of the internal civic life
which flourished under the commercial union, it does not at all appear
that the divisions of classes were more steep, or the lot of the lower
worse, than in any northern European State of the period.
The "downfall" of such a polity, then, is conceptual only. All the
realities of life evolved by the league were passed on to its
constituent elements throughout northern Europe; and there survived from
it what the separate States had not yet been able to offer--the
adumbration, however dim, of a union reaching beyond the bounds of
nationality and the jealousies of race. In an age of private war,
without transcending the normal ethic, it practically limited private
war as regarded its German members; and while joining battle at need
with half-barbarian northern kings, or grudging foreigners, it of
necessity made peace its ideal. Its dissolution, therefore, marked at
once the advance of national organisation up to its level, and the
persistence of the more primitive over the more rational instincts of
coalition.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 711: Menzel, _Geschichte der Deutschen_, bk. ix, cap. 147;
Kohlrausch, _History of Germany_, Eng. tr., pp. 157, 162, 257; Dunham,
_History of the Germanic Empire_, 1835, i, 108; Sharon Turner, _History
of Europe during the Middle Ages_, 2nd ed. i, 13. The main authority is
the old annalist Wittikind.]
[Footnote 712: Heeren, _Essai sur l'influence des Croisades_, 1808, pp.
269-72; Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, bk. iii, ch. 3.]
[Footnote 713: As to the process of evolution, see a good summary in
Robertson's _View of the Progress of Society in Europe_ (prefixed to his
_Charles V_), Note xvii to Sect. I.]
[Footnote 714: The Spanish _Hermandad_ was originally an organisation of
cities set up in similar fashion. E. Armstrong, _Introduction_ to Major
Martin Hume's _Spain_, 1898, p. 12.]
[Footnote 715: Luebeck was founded in 1140 by a count of Holstein, and
won its freedom in the common medieval fashion by purchase. Hamburg
bought its freedom of its bishop in 1225. Hallam, _Middle Ages_, 11th
ed. iii, 324. Many Dutch, supposed to have been driven from their own
land by an inundation, settled on the Baltic coast between Bremen and
Dantzic in the twelfth century. Heeren, _Essai sur les Croisades_, 1808,
pp. 266-69, citing Leibnitz and Hoche. Cp. G.H. Schmidt, _Zur
Agrargeschichte Luebecks_, 1887, p. 30 _sq._]
[Footnote 716: "The league ... would scarcely have held long together or
displayed any real federal unity but for the pressure of external
dangers" (Art. "Hanseatic League" in _Ency. Brit._, 10th ed. xi, 450).]
[Footnote 717: Cp. Ashley, as cited, i, 104-112; Schanz, as cited, i,
331.]
[Footnote 718: Cp. W. von Ochenkowski, _Englands wirtschaftliche
Entwickelung im Ausgange des Mittelalters_, 1879. pp. 177-82, 221-31.
Cp. the author's _Trade and Tariffs_, pt. ii, ch. ii, Sec. 1.]
[Footnote 719: Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 335. On private war in
general see Robertson's _View_, note 21 to Sec. i.]
[Footnote 720: Ashley, i, 108, 109.]
[Footnote 721: Whereas in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
England and Flanders had freely exchanged trading privileges, in the
fifteenth century they begin to withdraw them, treating each other as
trading rivals (Schanz, i, 7, 8).]
[Footnote 722: Ashley, i, 110.]
[Footnote 723: This principle may have been copied from the practice of
the Lombard _Umiliati_. The common account of that order is that when in
1014 the Emperor banished a number of Lombards, chiefly Milanese, into
Germany, they formed themselves into a religious society, called "The
Humbled," and in that corporate capacity devoted themselves to various
trades, in particular to wool-working. Returning to Milan in 1019, they
developed their organisation there. Down to 1140 all the members were
laymen; but thereafter priests were placed in control. For long the
organisation was in high repute both for commercial skill and for
culture. Ultimately, like all other corporate orders, they grew corrupt;
and in 1571 they were suppressed by Pius V. (Pignotti, _Hist. of
Tuscany_, Eng. trans. 1823, pp. 266-67, _note_, following Tiraboschi.)]
[Footnote 724: In such accounts as M'Culloch's (_Treatises and Essays_)
and those of the German patriotic historians the Hansa is seen in a
rather delusive abstract. The useful monograph of Miss Zimmern (_The
Hansa Towns_: Story of the Nations Series) gives a good idea of the
reality. See in particular pp. 82-147. It should be noted, however, that
Luebeck is credited with being the first northern town to adopt the
Oriental usage of water-pipes (Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_, 1802,
i, 381).]