The Hansa Towns

by Helen Zimmern

THE HANSA LOSES ITS COLONIES.

The prominence which we have had to accord to the history of Lübeck in the preceding chapters would almost make it appear as though we were dealing with the adverse fortunes of only one town, of a town moreover that was fighting mainly for its private and special interests and that succumbed in the combat. But this conception would be wholly erroneous. In those days the German Empire had no maritime commerce save that carried on by the Hansa; this commerce had no protection save that afforded to it by the League. The League was only powerful so long as Lübeck with a firm hand and high spirit held together its various members and led and encouraged their more feeble and often vacillating steps. For there were few among the cities that heartily supported the Queen of the Hansa in these latter days. At the cost of great and real sacrifices she insisted that the prerogatives of the League should be maintained, and if in return she also asked for some privileges for herself, this can scarcely excite wonder. It is therefore obvious that the declining power of Lübeck necessarily brought with it an enfeeblement of the whole federation.

After the failure of Wullenweber's bold schemes and his ignominious death, after the enmity against Lübeck, and consequently against the League, that had been fanned to yet greater fury by late events, it is easy to understand that the relations of the Hansa to the Scandinavian kingdoms suffered an entire change. Denmark was the first to avail itself of the liberty it had regained. The country forthwith began to draw profit from its "gold mine" the Sound. Then Norway followed suit. The town of Bergen, above all, so long oppressed by the League, now took its revenge. Gradually as the inhabitants beheld the enfeeblement at home and abroad of their rivals they withdrew from them privilege after privilege until the time came that the natives of Bergen recovered both their commercial activity and their fortune.

The justice of history is less pressed for time than the justice of man, but it is yet surer and more inexorable.

This inevitable justice, which punishes the children for the sins of their fathers, fell upon the Hanseatics in full measure at Bergen. The time actually came when it fell to the people of Bergen to advance funds to impoverished or ruined Hanseatics, and, on the principle of returning a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye, insult for insult, they advanced these moneys under the same hard conditions that had been employed towards themselves. The dispossession of the Hanseatics was naturally a work of time, but in course of years it became complete. The last occasion when the four chief "games" were performed, which according to a reporter at the Hanseatic Diet were designed "to keep off rich folks' children from Bergen and secure the profits of the trade to poor young fellows," seems to have been about 1590.

It is true that up to the eighteenth century German merchants retained certain prerogatives in Norway, but they were no longer the Hanseatics of the League, they were merely the members of an association reduced to slender proportions, an association as impotent to sustain its dignity as to restore the rights of its predecessors.

Sweden was no less happy in its efforts after emancipation from Hanseatic tutelage. Gustavus Vasa laid the foundations for this exemption from tolls, monopolies, and harassing restrictions. He taught his subjects the great lesson how to trade to their own profit. After his position as ruler was once well assured he did not hesitate to speak in open court of the German merchants as "butchers," comparing his predecessors to "good milch kine," and adding that he should never forgive himself, but should be ashamed before God and man, did he sacrifice the well-being of his kingdom to the rapacity and selfishness of the Lübeckers. And he kept his word. So long as he lived he checkmated the League with all the resources at his command, and he left his desire to raise the commercial prosperity of his kingdom as a legacy to his son.

Nor was it enough that men had come to hate the Hansa with that fierce hatred which is felt towards those who, holding power in their hands disgust and oppress their inferiors by overbearing conduct. Even nature seemed to turn against them in that dark moment of their national life. In the years following the burgomaster's war, as Wullenweber's war grew to be called, the herrings which had already failed once or twice during the course of the fifteenth century, either entirely abandoned the Scanian coasts, or came in such small quantities as not to repay the cost of maintenance of the "Witten." There was yet worse in store. Not only did the herrings abandon the Hansa, but they favoured their rivals the Netherlanders, coming in great masses into their waters, and thus enriching them at the expense of their enemies; a circumstance that furnished the pious preacher Bonnus with the theme for a sermon, in which he pointed out, to his own satisfaction, how this was the direct punishment inflicted by Almighty God, for the war so wantonly entered upon by the Hansa.

A fresh blow of great force came to the League in the year 1553. The English, so long forcibly kept outside the navigation of the Baltic, had suddenly opened out for themselves a road to the mouth of the Northern Dwina by means of the Arctic Ocean, thus discovering the White Sea, and offering a new route to merchants trading with Russia.

The discoverer of this new ocean route was Sir Richard Chancellor, who, together with Sir Hugh Willoughby, had been commissioned by an association of London merchants, to undertake the search of a road to China by way of the icy sea. They set forth in three stately vessels, the Bona Esperanza, the Bona Confidentia, and the Edward Bonaventura. For four months the ships kept close together, but in the region of the North Cape the Edward Bonaventura, which Chancellor commanded, was separated, owing to ice and storms, from its comrades—never more to rejoin them.