The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (64 page)

The Black Death had mortality rates as high as 90 percent in some parts of northern China, and killed perhaps twenty-five million people in Europe alone—between a third and a half of the total population—although local losses could be far worse: the population of Venice fell by 60 percent. Despite the agonizing and terrifying personal losses throughout Eurasia and
North Africa, Europe’s economy recovered quickly. Labor shortages led to higher wages for workers, whose numbers were increased by peasants leaving the land in search of work in cities, and higher wages led to an increase in consumption and improved living standards, which in turn stimulated trade. Industry also advanced as people developed new devices to compensate for the sudden shortage in manpower. Venetian and Genoese commerce recovered, too, even on the Black Sea.

Even without the convenience of Genoese shipping, the plague would have found its way into Europe from the east. Yet its spread along a clockwise circuit from the Mediterranean to the
ports of Europe’s Atlantic, North Sea, and Baltic coasts testifies to the rapid expansion of northern
European trade following the Italians’ opening of the sea route from the Mediterranean to Flanders. Here, trade was dominated by German merchants of what came to be known as the Hanseatic League. Prior to this, northern European trade had been in essence a regional commerce. Compared with the exotic trades and interplay of mature and mutually emulous cultures in and around the Mediterranean, northern Europe’s economic strength rose from a dull base. Traffic in high-value, low-volume goods represented only a fraction of total commerce on the Mediterranean, but it had even less of a role in the North and Baltic Seas. Nonetheless, Danes, Germans,
Flemings, English, and others enriched from the carriage of bulk commodities were gradually narrowing the gap between the relatively impoverished north and the prosperous south, and more immediate exposure to southern trade hastened the process.

The initiative for this came not from France and the British Isles, the kingdoms closest to the Mediterranean, but from Flanders and the Baltic. Following the dynastic struggle for the English throne in 1066, the North Sea became a relatively peaceable arena of long-distance trade as merchants sailed between Bergen,
Ribe,
Hamburg,
Bremen, Utrecht, and Flanders; up the Rhine to Cologne; along the coast of France; and to a variety of Scottish and English ports from Berwick in the north to
Bristol on the
Irish Sea. By the twelfth century the most active merchants hailed from Scandinavia and Flanders, but German merchants from the Rhine valley, especially Cologne, and Bremen began to join their numbers. At the same time, German merchants grew increasingly involved in the trade of the Baltic. This new orientation was linked directly to Germanic migration across the Elbe into central and eastern Europe. This accelerated in the tenth century but it was not until the twelfth century that growing population coupled with economic opportunity and
crusader zeal propelled the
Saxons into
Mecklenburg and Pomerania (western
Poland). In 1143 Henry III, “the Lion,” duke of
Saxony, founded the city of
Lübeck on an island between the Trave and Wakenitz Rivers. This location, about twenty kilometers from the Baltic and sixty-five kilometers east of Hamburg, on the Elbe, gave its merchants easy access to the North Sea, the
Rhineland, and central Germany.

As was true in the Mediterranean, the line between commerce and crusade was frequently indistinct. A contemporary of Henry the Lion wrote that
“during all the campaigns which he undertook as a young man into the land of the Slavs”—probably a reference to the disastrous Baltic theater of the Second Crusade—“there was never a mention of Christianity, but only of money.” More successful spiritually and otherwise was the
Livonian Crusade preached at the time of the Fourth Crusade in support of a church founded on the Western Dvina. In 1201, the capital of the see was moved to the new
city of Riga at the mouth of the Dvina, which opened the Christian east to military support and trade from
Lübeck. German crusading and colonization of coastal
Prussia began in the 1230s and despite many setbacks it was complete half a century later. The relationship between trade and crusade found succinct expression in the letter of a Reval merchant who in 1274 wrote a colleague in Lübeck: “
Our two towns belong together like the arms of Christ crucified.”

Seal of the city of Lübeck from 1280. The Hanseatic merchants of Lübeck sought explicitly to marry “across sand and sea” the distinctive expertise of seafaring and overland merchants, identified here by their characteristic dress. While the hull has the double-ended form and quarter rudder typical of the Vikings’ ships, the lack of oarports identifies this as a cog dependent entirely on sails for power, although one steered with a
firrer
rather than a centerline rudder. From Ernst Wallis’s
Illustrerad Verldshistoria
(Chicago, 1894).

More important, the establishment of Lübeck signaled a new development in the conduct of trade in northern Europe, one that sought explicitly to marry “across sand and sea” the distinctive expertise of seafaring and overland merchants in partnerships that furthered their mutual interests. Maritime trade always depends to a greater or lesser degree on a combination of inland and sea routes, but the Lübeckers were apparently the first to recognize the benefits that would accrue from an exploitation of the local knowledge unique to each. The oldest extant
Lübeck city seal, of 1224, shows a cog—the principal cargo ship of the day—carrying two men, one dressed in a landsman’s traveling coat, the other, at the helm, in seaman’s attire. This simple illustration identified Lübeck as the meeting place of seafaring merchants of the Baltic and beyond and overland merchants from the Rhineland. Mariners benefited from their inland counterparts’ familiarity with markets in the interior, while the Westphalian merchants profited from the sailors’ knowledge of the Baltic and North Seas. Because they could coordinate their purchases on the basis of what would be most profitable, they were able to maximize their earnings.

Like many innovative forms of business enterprise, this partnership proved extremely attractive. In 1241,
Hamburg and
Lübeck concluded a treaty granting each other’s merchants reciprocal privileges. Similar agreements were concluded with other coastal and inland towns, and Lübeckers easily convinced their fellow Germans to trade exclusively with them, thus extending the reach of the
hanse
—in effect a merchant guild—via a network that crossed Germany and, as merchants and settlers branched out, Prussia (northeast
Poland), Lithuania,
Livonia (roughly
Latvia and
Estonia), and Novgorod. Hanse merchants established
kontors
(trading centers) where they tended to congregate or be confined to special quarters depending on local circumstances. There were gated Hanse establishments in Novgorod (founded around 1200) and at the
Steelyard in London (1281), but there were fewer restrictions at the
kontors
in
Bruges (1252) and Bergen (1343). By the mid-1300s, the Hanse had evolved from “
a community of German merchants” who traveled together both for safety and to increase their leverage in securing privileges in foreign lands to “an association of Hanseatic towns” in which the needs of individual traders were superseded by those of the city from which they came. The “Hanse of the Towns” originated in an assembly of merchants’ representatives held in 1356 to address agreements made by merchants in the
kontor
of Bruges with the count of Flanders and the king of England. Trading privileges had always been negotiated by merchants on the spot, but by 1374 representatives of the Hanse towns had established the principle that all decisions made by individual
kontors
were subject to approval by a general diet of the Hanseatic towns.

As in the Varangian period, there was a lively trade between the Baltic and the
Black Seas, although as a consequence of the
Mongols’ destruction of
Kiev in 1240, the preferred route had shifted to the west and now went by way of the Oder or Vistula
Rivers to Kraków and the Prut, a tributary of the Danube, or the Dniester. Farther west, the
primary arteries of trade in Germany flowed north through Wendish territories to the Baltic: the Trave near Lübeck and
Starigard, the Peene and Oder near
Wolin and
Szczecin, respectively, and the Vistula at
Gdansk. Lübeck was the primary seat of trade to which other Hanse towns (about eighty-five in all) generally looked for guidance, and the Low German spoken by the majority of Lübeckers became the lingua franca of commerce in the Baltic. At the same time, the Hanse’s monopolistic power effectively barred competitors—
Gotlanders,
Wends, P
russians, Estonians, and Russians—from the most lucrative trades.

Among the Hanseatic merchants’ most determined competitors were the Danes, who were also trying to establish themselves in the eastern Baltic. Henry the Lion’s pressure on the Wends had driven many of them to piracy and their raids on the Danish coast as far north as
Jutland compelled
Denmark’s
Valdemar I, “the Great,” into an
alliance with Henry. In 1169, the Danes destroyed a Wendish fortress on the island of Rügen at the mouth of the Oder River and took advantage of Frederick Barbarossa’s preoccupation with Italy and crusading to extend their rule in the east. In the second half of the thirteenth century, Denmark relapsed into civil war and much of their trade fell into German hands. Yet the Danes had laid the foundation for a prosperous trade. Many towns had been established in Denmark, notably
Copenhagen (København, or “merchants’ harbor”) on the
Øresund near the rich
herring
fisheries off
Skåne, then Danish territory in what is now southern Sweden. The productivity of these fishing grounds, which remained a primary engine of economic growth in the Baltic for centuries, can be glimpsed in the exuberant description of the thirteenth-century
History of the Danes:
“
The east side of Zealand [Sjælland] is separated from Scania by a strait which annually brings a rich booty to the fishermen’s nets. The entire sea is generally so full of fish that often the vessels are stopped and can hardly be rowed clear through great exertion and the booty can no longer be caught by artificial means but can without difficulty be caught by hand.” Many of the merchants who purchased fish at Skåne were Germans bearing silver from the newly opened mines of the Harz Mountains, and salt—an essential commodity in the fish trade—from Lüneberg, south of
Hamburg.

Although Hanse traders never dominated Denmark the way they did
Norway, where the Bergen
kontor
was established in 1343, many German merchants settled in Denmark. Rising
tensions led to war between the Hanse of the Towns and Denmark in the 1360s. The
Treaty of Stralsund (1370) confirmed Hanse control of Skåne, restored their trading privileges in Denmark, lowered customs dues, and gained the Hanse towns a voice in the election of the Danish king. This was the high point of Hanse political power in the Baltic. Twenty years later, the crowns of
Denmark and Norway were brought together in a personal union under
Margaret of Denmark, who envisioned a confederation of the three
Scandinavian kingdoms with Denmark supreme. To that end she supported a revolt against the king of Sweden, whose father was the duke of
Mecklenburg. In retaliation, the duke’s subjects, including citizens of the Hanse towns of Wismar and Rostock, waged a pirate war against Margaret and her allies. These pirates were known as
Vitalienbrüder, or “victual brothers”—victual referring to the fact that they were self-sufficient in food, brothers attesting to their essentially egalitarian organization. (This and similar names were also used for outlaw gangs on land.) That they lived beyond the law and knew it is obvious from their motto, “
God’s friends and the foe of all the world,” a sentiment reminiscent of
Cicero’s condemnation of piracy. The Vitalienbrüder were active across the Baltic; an estimated fifteen hundred pirates were reported along the Livonian coast in 1392, and two
years later as many as three hundred ships were at large in and around the
Danish archipelago. When the pirate wars ended in 1395, the Vitalienbrüder retained a base on the island of
Gotland from which they continued to plunder merchant shipping and hired themselves out to princes from
Calais to Finland and Russia. Their reign of terror lasted until 1401, when the Teutonic Knights of
Prussia rounded up and executed hundreds of them and occupied Visby.

Four years earlier, Margaret’s nephew,
Eric of Norway, had been acknowledged as king of Denmark and Sweden. The
Kalmar Union over which he ruled was a federation of three countries with a common king but it especially helped establish Danish merchants in the Baltic on a par with those of the Hanse. The weakening of the union at midcentury reflected both the growing sense of national identity within the three kingdoms and the diminished threat posed by German traders. The political power of the
Hanse was likewise undermined by the rise of nation-states elsewhere in Europe, while Dutch competitors threatened their commercial supremacy. The Danes preferred dealing with the Dutch because they posed no threat of cultural dominance like that exercised by the Germans. Moreover, because they sailed between the Baltic and North Seas, they diminished the importance of the Hanse’s
Lübeck-
Hamburg axis. The Dutch also became a source of revenue for the Danish kingdom when in 1429 the crown began forcing ships to pay tolls before transiting the Øresund.