Ryan Reynolds (5:53)

So why was that? Why the sense of mystery? Why was it in the interest of members of the chanza to maintain this aura of mystery?

Sheila Ogilvie (6:01)

Well, I think because it was an organization of businessmen. It was trying to trade and get special privileges. Some of these privileges were perfectly legitimate. You know, it was a dangerous place. Medieval Europe, you were trading long distance, There were very high risks. You had to get permission from the local authorities. But while you were doing that, you also wanted to get, if you like, sort of little monopolies and special trade privileges and favors from the government. And if you could keep sort of mysterious how strong you were and who was really a member, then I think they felt that it improved their negotiating abilities.

Ryan Reynolds (6:44)

Can we dig a little bit deeper into the geography of the Hanseatic League? We've had a question in from CJ also on X, who was asking to what extent was it a German dominated organization? Now you've kind of touched upon this already, but could you basically talk us through the cities, the main cities that dominated this federation?

Sheila Ogilvie (7:08)

That's a really good question because, you know, we think of it, we call it the German Hanse. It's generally historians tend to call it the German Hanse. And it did start out as a loose network of merchants from a few north German towns in the late 12th century. But between about 1200 and 1450 it gradually admitted merchants from additional places. And ultimately it encompassed traders from around 200 towns in northern Europe. A majority of the towns were located in what is now Germany, places like Lubeck, sort of along the north German coast. But they also included towns in, by my count, eight other modern day European countries, including Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Russia. And thinking of it as German isn't quite right, both for that reason and also because it didn't include merchants from central and southern Germany. In fact, it deliberately excluded south German merchants that humid saw as dangerous competitors. So it was very much a sort of Baltic, North German, Scandinavian organization. I mean, the sort of lingua franca, if you like, was Low German, which is a dialect which you still hear sometimes in northern Germany, but it's quite closely related to Dutch and Flemish and it's a little bit related to Scandinavian. Apparently a about 50% of the words in modern Swedish come from this Low German language.

Ryan Reynolds (8:50)

Sure. Can we rewind a bit then back to the beginning? I've got a question here from Lenny Helming on Instagram who asks how did the Hanseatic League come into being and why?

Sheila Ogilvie (9:05)

Well, that question puzzled people even at the time, hence that very striking metaphor of the crocodile. The hanse didn't have a founding charter, a treaty or an agreement. It emerged really organically from about 1150 onwards. It always kept its exact membership a bit secretive. It didn't try to actually set up a town league until the 1550s, by which time it had existed for 400 years. And it mysteriously withered away by about 1670, still as mysterious in the 17th century as it had been in the 12th century. So how it came into being is one of those enduring mysteries which keeps us historians in business, why it came into being, I think that's a bit clearer. It was partly economics and it was partly politics. So as we were talking about a bit earlier, medieval trade was a really high risk activity. It was really dangerous. It meant you were crossing ill defined political frontiers. You were being attacked by bandits and pirates, but you were also being attacked by other merchants and even by governments, by rulers. So the hanza was political from the beginning. You couldn't rely, really on legal protection, on government protection for your own personal security. They wouldn't protect your property rights, they wouldn't enforce your business agreements. If you wanted to trade in a foreign city, you needed to get permission from the local authorities and you needed some sort of safety guarantee. Now, this was not formal. You would go in and you would offer the foreign government money or favors or make threats and say, okay, if you confiscate our things, when your merchants come to our city, we'll have reprisals on you. And so what merchants did was that they formed hunzas and foreign merchant guilds and communities to try to put pressure on foreign rulers. Part of this was very legitimate. They needed protection. But it was also what we would probably call corruption, because they wanted to get special privileges giving them advantages over other groups of businessmen. And so it was kind of a deal between the political authorities that were not uncorrupt and the businessmen who were also not uncorrupt, because once a merchant hanza got privileges. So say the German Hanza comes to Bruges in what is now Belgium. Once they got privileges from the government of Bruges, they had an incentive to exploit those privileges and exclude outsiders, try to act like a cartel, try to attack Bruges merchants or English merchants or, you know, Venetian merchants. So they were kind of using some of their cartel profits to offer bribes and favors to the local government to get better trading privileges. So it could be quite a malignant situation where there were a bunch of these sort of business cartels kind of slugging it out in foreign cities. So the answer is German Hansa came into being because of both trade legitimate reasons to need safety and politics, which is if you could get the government to give you favors, then maybe you could get a trade advantage over your competitors.

Ryan Reynolds (12:37)

Right, and you mentioned the word attacking there a couple of times. And that leads me on to a question that has been sent in by somebody called Kai Bode on social media, who asks, you know, whether rival forces physically attacked the Hanseatic League's vessels On the high seas? That's a great question, but I. I wonder if we could broaden that out a little bit, because I'd like to, to ask you, how muscular was the Hanseatic League in promoting and advancing its interests? Was it prepared to go to war with rivals? Was bloodshed involved in this enterprise?

Sheila Ogilvie (13:18)

It was the Hanseatic League. Because it didn't have a political existence, it found it pretty difficult to actually organize a war, although it occasionally did, or it would organize a navy and the navy would attack the French or something like that. What it preferred was violence on a lower level. And as the medieval period advanced, governments all over northern Europe began to regard the German Hansa with mingled respect and fear. Because the respect came because the German Hansa brought together a large group of very successful entrepreneurial merchants, was financially strong, so it could put pressure on rulers through bribes and loans. The Hunza made really big loads to governments in England and Flanders and Lithuania and Poland and Norway from the late 13th century onwards. And that was one reason it managed to get trading privileges and monopolies. So it tried to proceed in a peaceful, if corrupt way. But the obverse of the respect was fear. Because if you didn't do what the Hanza wanted, it could deny you loans for your next war. It could impose a trade embargo on your territory, which could choke off business and even cause famine. It could limit imports of essential supplies like grain and salt, or purchases of key exports like Russian furs or Scandinavian herring or Flemish cloths. And there were some very notable hansa embargoes. In 1277, the hansa embargoed Novgorod, which was its easternmost branch office in what is now Russia. It tried to reduce Western trade there to nil. And it did limit it enough to put significant pressure on Russian and Lithuanian rulers. In the 1280s, there was a joint embargo by the German Hunsa and the Spanish merchant guilds against Bruges in the southern Netherlands. All of the Spanish and German merchants decamped to Ardenburg, reduced the volume of trade in Bruges to dangerously low levels. Bruges gave in and granted sweeping concessions to both groups of merchants. And in the 1280s and the early part of the 1300s, the Hunza embargoed Norway and it affected grain imports so seriously that famine broke out. The ruler capitulated, granted better privileges. Bremen, which was a member of the Hanza, was actually punished by the Hansa itself for breaking the embargo. So I think the low level violence and holding the whole Population as a sort of human hostage against taking away Hanseatic privileges was more how the Hanza like to operate. It wanted to put pressure on and maybe kill people, but it preferred that sort of embargo reprisal method to active warfare. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Sometimes the most painful part of getting sick is the getting better part. Waiting on hold for an appointment, sitting in crowded waiting rooms, standing in line at the pharmacy. That's painful. Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy remove those painful parts of getting better with things like 247 virtual visits and prescriptions delivered to your door thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical Healthcare just got less painful. What's the best time of day to get a deal? All day with Jack in the Box's all day, big deal meal. You get to choose from four entrees like the supreme croissant and five tasty sides, plus a drink starting at $5. So hurry in or take your time. You've got all day at Jack. Every bite's a big deal.

Ryan Reynolds (17:19)

But it did like to flex his muscles occasionally. Then it could be, you know, a pretty aggressive organization by the sounds of it.

Sheila Ogilvie (17:26)

Yeah.

Ryan Reynolds (17:26)

Sheila, can we put some, some faces to this story, please? Could you maybe introduce us to two or three of the key players, you know, really drove forward the emergence of the Hansa?

Sheila Ogilvie (17:38)

Well, yes, because it was such a loose and amorphous entity, I don't think it's possible to identify individuals who deliberately shaped the rise of the Hanse. You know, even town councils and rulers weren't really central to its rise. I think the best way to think about the individuals in the Hanza and how the Hanza was pushed forward was by looking at individual merchants and entrepreneurs. And these were both male and female. So what I'd like to do is introduce two of these, Margaretha and Hildebrand Weckenhuisen, who were Hanseatic merchants in that pivotal period around 1400, when the Hanse reached its peak around 1400. But I'd like to look not just because I'm female, but because women actually played, they played a role in the Hanza, but one behind the scenes. Because the households, the firms, were headed by men, women were formally excluded from membership of the Hanza. And yet increasingly we realize from the surviving records that women were basically jointly running the business. So Margaretha Feckenhusen was actually born in Riga around 1382, and she emerges into history in about 1397, 1398, as a respectable maiden of 15 years, being married off to a hanseatic. Merchant called Hildebrand Vechenhusen, who was almost twice her age, which does not mean he was an old man. He was 28 years old and she was 15. So, you know, these were really young entrepreneurial types who were running the Hanse. And Hildebrandt and his brother Sivart were among the most respected Hanseatic merchants of their time. They were based in Bruges and in Lubeck, so two sort of major centers of Hanseatic activity. But they traded as far afield as Novgorod, London, Venice, the Atlantic coast of France, sort of all over Europe. And they traded salt and cloth and spices and wax, furs, timbers, fish, copper, you know, primary products from the north with luxury products from the south, and wool and cloth from England over the next 15 years or so. So Hildebrand and Margarethe married in 1398 and they had a great time for about 15 years. So they were at the peak of their business success. Margarete had seven children, but also ran the Lubeck office. And Hildebrandt traveled all over Europe doing deals. 14, 14 things begin to go bad. By that time, Hildebrandt was deep in business difficulties. He was losing money in Russia. He'd lent too much money to the Polish king Sigismund. He had set up a separate business, like a spin off business to trade in Venice, lost money there. He bounced international check bills of exchange in London. He borrowed money from money lenders, he speculated in salt and lost money. And finally he got into such trouble that he had to flee from his creditors and was thrown in the debtors prison in Bruges in 1422. During all of this, Margaretha was the safe pair of hands. She ran the Lubeck office, she brought up her seven children. She was the sort of captain, things on an even keel.

Ryan Reynolds (21:24)

And how old was she at this point?

Sheila Ogilvie (21:26)

She would have been in her late teens and her 20s.

Ryan Reynolds (21:31)

Wow. Right. Okay, so still really young. Yeah.

Sheila Ogilvie (21:33)

She was a hero. When Hildebrandt was thrown in the tower in Bruges and Hildebrandt's business in Lubeck, well, all over the north of Europe went bust. She had to pawn all of her property. She was evicted from her Lubeck house with her children. Her mother in law threw her out of the house. She had to live in rented lodgings in poverty. Her brother in law, Sivat, provided her with just enough money to mean that she wasn't begging, because that would have damaged his reputation. But basically she was living in poverty. She spent a lot of time, like agitating to try to get Hildebrandt out of the tower in bruges. Finally, after two years, in 1424, when she was 42, her husband was released from prison in Bruges. He came back to Lubeck, but promptly died a couple of years later. And Margarete, then she disappears. So we don't even know when she died. But I mean, I think we know so much about this very colorful couple, this young couple, because they left behind more than 500 letters, 10 business books. I think they show how entrepreneurial and young and risk taking the hanseatic merchants were. They show how important the role was that women played very young women were the backbone of the hunza.

Ryan Reynolds (23:02)

So that kind of proves then that the League did give sort of young, ambitious, intelligent people an opportunity to make something of their lives. Even though might sometimes end in tears, there was still an opportunity there provided by the League.

Sheila Ogilvie (23:18)

Yeah, absolutely. It was not just a force for globalization at the time, but it was also, you know, it was sort of like the dot com, you know, or canal or railway craze. It was something that young risk taking, entrepreneurial people got into. They might live, you know, at a very high level for a while and you know, some of them stayed in business and survived for a long time. But, you know, there were these really colorful characters who maybe because of bad luck, just, you know, they were at the peak and then, you know, they disappeared. They were thrown in the tower.

Ryan Reynolds (23:59)

That's a fascinating story. Now, I've had a question in from a few people actually asking why was the Hanseatic League called a league? Can I use this as a bit of an excuse also, Sheila, to get you to drill down into kind of the nuts and bolts of the way that the league worked?

Sheila Ogilvie (24:19)

Yeah, so we call it the Hanseatic League in English. And that's totally fine. It's just, you know, I don't think we should debate about terms, but we're probably the only language in Europe that calls it a league because people at the time, as I said, called it the German hanse. The hanse was an ancient German word for sort of band or troop of people. And it wasn't actually until the mid 16th century, so after the Hanse had existed for 400 years, that they first formally tried to form a league of towns. That plan didn't even work out. So it was kind of never a league, but it was a loose network. It worked for them. They did have an institutional expression which was these hanseatic diets.

Ryan Reynolds (25:14)

So what is a diet? Sorry, I imagine a lot of our Listeners won't quite understand. I'm not entirely sure that I do, to be honest. I completely understand what you mean by a diet.

Sheila Ogilvie (25:23)

So the diet is when a representative body meats. So it's like, you know, when our parliament in Britain here is in session, we could call it a diet. It was like a representative body being in session. And so when the Hanseatic Diet was summoned, all of the towns that at that time had not been thrown out of the Hanse or decided to leave the Hanza or were under embargo because they were selling grain to Norway. When the embargo was in Forth, all of the towns that were currently regarded as their merchants being part of the Hunza would get letters sent to them saying, we're going to have a meeting of the Hanseatic representative body in normally Lubeck, but sometimes somewhere else in northern Germany. And it's going to be on particular dates, please come. And they spend a couple of weeks in Lubeck holding meetings. They tried to plan strategy, but I don't get the impression they did it terribly well. There have been some comparisons between the Italian Medici merchant companies and so on trading in Bruges and the Hansa, and they suggest that the Italian merchants were able to respond to crises and make decisions much better. And the Hanse was incredibly cumbersome and took more months and months to respond, could never agree, took a response. But by then business conditions had changed. So it was quite a cumbersome decision making process. The other thing was that the Hanseatic merchants were always in conflict with one another, which was probably good for the economy in the sense that they were competing rather than colluding. And the Diet would have to spend some time trying to resolve that conflict.

Ryan Reynolds (27:18)

Now I've had a question from thegoldenfromgolden, which is what was England's relationship with the League? There was certainly a presence, wasn't there, in England, from the Hanseatic League? And I believe you can actually maybe see evidence of that today. So yeah, I wonder if you could tell us about that, please.

Sheila Ogilvie (27:36)

As with everything in the Hunza, there were two main strands to the Hunza's activities in England Economic a commercial side and a political side. So the commercial side was pretty important. The Hansa had four branch offices, the so called Kontors and London was one of them. So the others were in Bruges, Baggen in Norway and Novgorod. So London was one of the four. In London, the Hansa occupied this big complex called the Steelyard which was located on the north bank of the Thames. Kind of almost exactly where Cannon street tube station is now. It's been built over by Cannon street tube station because the Great Fire of London in 1666 burnt down the steelyard. And so it was just, you know, built over. The steelyard was kind of a cool phenomenon because it was a walled compound. Hundreds of German merchants lived there. Women were not admitted. So on paper, women were excluded from the Hunza, although we have records that women of the night were sometimes admitted secretly through the gates into the steel yard. I mean, you've got to imagine this is a bunch of young guys. They were guys in their 20s, maybe teenagers sometimes. The compound was actually threatened by mobs of Londoners. So you can understand why the Hanseatic merchants wanted to have their own compound.

Ryan Reynolds (29:08)

Why were they targeted by Londoners? What was the source of the hostility?

Sheila Ogilvie (29:12)

It was partly that they were too commercially successful. They were immigrants, they spoke a weird language, they competed with English merchants. But it was also the political side, because the Hunza offered really big loans to English kings in return, not just for trading privileges, but sometimes trading monopolies. So the German Hansa in London was basically like a credit banker, lending huge sums to the English crown. In 1327, Hansa loans helped Edward III to the throne and then helped him fight war in France.

Ryan Reynolds (29:51)

So how did it do that? How did it help him get to the throne? How did that work out?

Sheila Ogilvie (29:56)

Well, he just needed money. I mean, you couldn't do politics without money. He needed to, you know, sort of for his way through his enemies to the crown. And in return, the English monarchs granted the German Hunza wool exporting monopolies and the rights to collect customs used from other merchants. And that's really what explains why sometimes violent mobs surrounded the steelyard, because basically the English government was selling monopolies to a bunch of Germans. And it didn't go down terribly well.

Ryan Reynolds (30:33)

Now, you said earlier that the league lasted for, say, four or 500 years. Where did it go wrong then? Why did it eventually go into decline?

Sheila Ogilvie (30:41)

I think you can divide it into two phases. An upward phase from about 1150 to about 1400 was very entrepreneurial. Its members behaved in a competitive way. Fortunately, they competed with one another as well as with outside merchants. That was good for the economy at large, even if it meant that a few people went bankrupt and the Hanza itself expanded. But very sadly, after about 1400, I think the Hanza went into its second declining phase, which lasted until it went out of existence around 1650, 1670, I think. After 1400 the Hanza became increasingly violent and increasingly restrictive. Previously it had opened up trading routes especially to Russia and Scandinavia. But it was increasingly doing its political violence side. After 1400 it used coercion and violence and privileges to prevent even other merchants from participating in the North European trade. It tried to act like a cartel and fortunately it wasn't successful. I mean it was unfortunate for the Hunza but it was actually fortunate for the economy at large because increasingly what they called interlopers, that is people who, you know, Dutch and English merchants, started kind of horning in on the old Hanza monopolies in the Baltic and the North Sea. Even deviant Hanza merchants increasingly evaded the Hanza regulations. And especially Scottish and English and Dutch merchants started having better ships and nimbler entrepreneurial practices. And the old hidebound cartelistic Hanseatic merchants, they stopped being so entrepreneurial and this was bad for them, but it was probably really, really good for the emergence of Northwest Europe as the powerhouse of Europe in this period.

Ryan Reynolds (32:52)

Now this seems a perfect moment to ask you a question which was submitted by vintage Gi. How did the Hanseatic League change Europe? Can we draw any similarities between the League and say the eu? I mean there clearly are some similarities, but is it easy to overplay those similarities?

Sheila Ogilvie (33:14)

If you look on the Council of Europe website, you will see that the Hansa can be seen as a medieval forerunner of the European Union. You know, it had European values. It shared core European values like free trade and free movement and protection of citizens and democracy. It's a really romantic view, but I think it's a wrong one. I think the Hanza was the exact opposite of a free trade bloc like the EU. Especially after about 1400 it usually sought to act as a protectionist cartel. It tried to protect its members against disruptive competition. It secured cartel profits for its members, but it harmed rival merchants and ordinary consumers. It didn't even guarantee free trade among the different Hanza cities. So these continued to erect trade barriers against merchants from other Hunsa cities. They used their so called staple regulations as much against each other as they did against non hanseatics. Gdansk was a famous Hanse city that used these sort of regulations against the others. To give an example, in the 14th century merchants from the other Hanseatic towns accused the Cologne merchants of excluding them from the hunts as privileges. In London, Prussian merchants complained that Lubeck merchants tried to exclude them in Novgorod. So they were even trying to act like monopolists against each other. And the other thing that they're not like the EU is that they limited the free movement of people. So each Hanza city had barriers to immigration. It might let in individual traders but deny them citizenship so they couldn't become merchants. And then in the 15th century, the Hanza started limiting access to citizenship, so it imposed birth requirements. It excluded the Dutch and the English and the Jews and anyone that was locally not liked, they would exclude from trade. So it isn't really the way that the EU either is or wants to be seen.

Ryan Reynolds (35:25)

So I think it's safe to say then that the differences are probably starker than the similarities. Okay, then what about the argument then, which I have read, that it was kind of a standard bearer for capitalism, like a proto capitalist organization. What do you say to that?

Sheila Ogilvie (35:41)

I think in the early period, I mean in the time up to Margarethe and Hildebrandt Feckenhusen, they were quite entrepreneurial at least and they had a lot of capital, so you could call them capitalistic. But in general, I think especially in the period after about 1400, the Hansa merchants were rich, but it was more a sort of non capitalistic being rich. It became less entrepreneurial. As I mentioned, the Hunza tried to make the Northwest European economy into the opposite of capitalism. It tried to impose barriers to entry, tried to exclude entrepreneurial merchants from other places. The other way that maybe you shouldn't see it in its later period as capitalistic is that it increasingly failed to adopt the pioneering early capitalist practices that were being developed elsewhere in medieval Islamic world. In Italy and southern Germany, merchants were developing really huge companies with huge capital resources. They used financial instruments, they used double entry bookkeeping, they used foreign exchange arbitrage. This all kind of sounds capitalistic to me. They started setting up sort of proto factories. And then from about 1500 on, the Dutch and the English started doing this. And the Kansa either explicitly forbade its members to adopt these practices or or it used its cartel privileges to shelter its members from competition so they could stay in business despite failing to adopt these new capitalistic practices. So, you know, I think in the pre1400 period you could see the Hanza as proto capitalistic. In the post 1400 period, it was losing out to not just to other parts of Europe, but even to Islam.

Ryan Reynolds (37:39)

Okay, finally, Sheila, if I was to go and dig out my passport and head out towards Germany and around the Baltic, is there much remaining physical evidence of the Hansa that I could check out on my travels? And if so, where should I head to?

Sheila Ogilvie (37:55)

There are the most gorgeous, beautiful stately hanseatic buildings in many, many towns in what was then the hanse. If I had got my passport out next summer, I would go to one or more of the six beautiful cities of Visby, Lubeck, Rostock, Gdansk, Riga, and Tallinn. They have the greatest wealth of architectural treasures. I have two favorites, which are Visby and Lubeck. Visby, which is on the Swedish island of Gotland, is probably the most perfectly preserved of the hanseatic cities. It was a major viking trading hub in the dark ages, so even before the hanse, it was one of the earliest hanse members. It was the richest city in Scandinavia around 1300, which is kind of an amazing concept. But trade then moved eastward, and Visby stagnated, which was too bad for it, but lovely for us, because the town is like a time capsule. It's the most perfectly preserved medieval town in scandinavia. It's got 12 hauntingly beautiful ruined churches. Its main thoroughfare is lined with hanseatic houses, and it's so well preserved precisely because it's stagnated early. So I would go to Visby, and the other place that I think one would want to go to is Lubeck. We saw how it was the de facto capital of hanse, and it profited hugely, both from the legitimate entrepreneurship we saw, but also the coercive trading policies. And what happened was that as the merchants there got so rich, they invited French architects in and asked them to build gothic buildings like France had. But because there was so little stone available in northern Germany, the architects had to use brick. So they invented a new style, very flamboyant new style, called brick gothic. And it's got these stepped gables and ornately patterned brickwork. And you can still see that in Lubeck's famous old hanseatic town, it's got seven church spires which form a sort of gothic coronet on the skyline. It's got 180 little alleys leading into beautiful courtyards. And it was basically the center of Lubeck, was a hanseatic enclave. And you can still just walk around there. And it's a modern city, but it's got this core of being like it was back in the 15th or 16th century. And I think connecting up this architectural beauty with what we've been talking about in this podcast, Visby and Lubeck and the other hanseatic towns are so lovely now precisely because of the economic trajectory we were talking about. So, you know, the entrepreneurial rich phase, which brought the wealth in, and then the stagnation phase, which meant that the beautiful buildings were not built over. And so we've got, you know, this amazing architecture preserved in aspic. And, you know, we can feel happy now. Even though I feel sort of sad that the HANSE stopped being so entrepreneurial, stopped, you know, creating new opportunities for 15 year old young women and 28 year old men to kind of make their fortune and lose their fortune. It's sort of sad that it became a much stuffed fear anti competitive institution later on, but it left us with these amazing cities and that's wonderful for us.

Lewis Dobbs (41:43)

That was Sheila Ogilvie, professor of Economic History at All Souls College, University of Oxford. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Lewis Dobbs.