The Hansa Towns

by Helen Zimmern

The centre of the Hansa's power had ever been the Baltic Ocean. On its shores the idea of the League had first taken shape: here it had grown and flourished, and here also it was to receive its death blow. As we have said, in the course of the fifteenth century the Dutch gradually came forward as serious competitors of the League. Their geographical position made them freer than the Hanseatics; enclosed in a sort of inland basin to which at any moment they might lose the key, their astuteness was not less keen than that of their rivals, and like their rivals they wisely made use of any quarrels or dissensions that might be abroad. They were not slow, therefore, to discern that the Scandinavian people and also the Scandinavian kings groaned under the heavy despotism exercised by these German merchants. They proposed themselves as substitutes for the Hansa, offering money and support to the kings and easier and better conditions of trade to the natives. These proposals were unofficially accepted. Neither rulers nor ruled as yet dared oppose themselves openly to the League, but they were not sorry to see its power reduced.

CHARLES V.

For awhile the Hansa were able to keep their rivals in check, worrying them by piracy on the one hand, and insisting on their ancient claims and trade rights on the other.

But Charles V. had ascended the throne; the greatest emperor that had ever governed in Germany since his namesake Charles the Great. He was ruler not only of Germany, but of Spain and the Netherlands, and to the latter people he was especially well disposed. He looked with no friendly eye upon the League, which made itself a power within his territory, and he was not sorry to see it weakened by competition. When the Sound, their Danish Hellespont, the gold mine of the League, continued to be jealously guarded by them, and its navigation denied to other nations, Charles V. declared quite openly that "he would rather miss three royal crowns, than that his Burgunders should be excluded from the Sound." This was a sort of challenge to the Hansa. Let us hear how other circumstances came about to enforce it from other quarters.

It may be remembered that since the days of Waldemar Atterdag, the League had always had a voice in the election of a ruler to one of the three northern kingdoms, and that it regarded with no friendly eye the attempts made at a union of those kingdoms under one common head.

In 1513 Christian II. had ascended the Danish throne. He was an unscrupulous and cruel ruler, known to posterity as the Nero of the North. Before ascending the throne of Denmark he had been governor of Norway, and in that capacity had conceived a bitter hatred against the overbearing foreigners, "those German cobblers," as he called them, who once even ventured to close against him the gates of his own town of Bergen. He had already favoured by all ways in his power the trade of non-Hanseatics, and tried to obtain some gentler treatment for the oppressed burghers of Bergen. Still so great was yet the fear of the Hansa, that when in 1513 Christian was crowned King of Denmark, he made no difficulties about renewing all Hanseatic treaties and privileges, and only stipulated that the harbours of Norway should also be accessible to the Netherlanders. In return he desired their assistance against Sweden, with which country he was at war.

For a time the League, and above all Lübeck, were rejoiced at this new king and his attitude towards them, but not many years had passed before they found out that they had to do with a more logical and altogether sterner man than any of his predecessors had been. Christian hated the Hansa, and rebelled against the subjection of the Sound, a Danish sea, to foreign control, and the absolute sway of the Hansa in his markets. Among many unwise words and deeds that live bound up with his memory, it was not the most unwise which he repeated after Sigbrit Willem, the mother of his beloved and lovely friend, Digveke (Little Dove), "that good friendship must be maintained with the Netherlands, and that Copenhagen must be made the staple place of the North."