The towns of North Germany shared to the full this primitive savagery, but they learned the secret of co-operation that their wealthy southern neighbours utterly missed, and in so doing became for a time a political force of world-wide fame.
The ‘Hansa’
Such was the commercial league of ‘the Hansa’, formed first of all by a few principal ports, Lübeck, Danzig, Bremen, and Hamburg, lying on the Baltic or North Sea, but afterwards increased to a union of eighty or more towns as the value of mutual support and obligations was realized.
Law in the Middle Ages was personal rather than territorial—that is to say, a man when he travelled abroad would not be judged or protected by the law of the country to which he went, but would carry his own law with him. If this law was practically non-existent, as for a German during years of anarchy when the Holy Roman Empire was thoroughly discredited in the eyes of Europe, the merchant stood a small chance of safeguarding himself and his wares.
It was here, when emperors and kings of the Romans failed, that the Hanseatic League stepped in, maintaining centres in foreign towns where the merchants of those cities included in the League could lodge and store their goods, and where permanent representatives of the League could make suit to the government of the country on behalf of fellow merchants who had suffered from robbery or violence.
As early as the tenth century German traders had won privileges in English markets, for we find in the code of Ethelred ‘the Rede-less’ the following statement: ‘The people of the Emperor have been judged worthy of good laws like ourselves.’
Later, ‘steelyards,’ or depots somewhat similar to the Flemish ‘staple-towns’, were established for the convenience of imperial merchants; and owing to the energy of the Hanseatic League these became thriving centres of commerce, respected by kings of England if jealously disliked by their subjects.
Protection of the merchants belonging to ‘the Hansa’ while in foreign countries soon represented, however, but a small part of the League’s duty towards those who claimed her privileges. The merchant must travel safely to his market by land and sea; but in North Germany he had not merely to fear robber knights but national foes: the hostile Slav tribes that attacked him as he rode eastwards to the famous Russian market of Nijni-Novgorod to negotiate for furs, tallow, and fats: or even more dangerous Scandinavian pirates who sought to sink his vessel as he crossed the Baltic or threaded the Danish isles.
One of the chief sources of Hanse riches was the fishing industry, since the law that every Christian must abstain from meat during the forty days of Lent, and on the weekly Friday fast, made fish a necessity of life even more in the Middle Ages than in modern times. Now the cheapest of all fish for anxious housekeepers was the salted herring, and as the herring migrated from one ocean-field to another it made and unmade the fortune of cities. From the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the fifteenth century it chose the Baltic as a home of refuge from the North Sea whales, and in doing so built the prosperity of Lübeck, just as it broke that prosperity when it swam away to the coasts of Holland.
For two months every year the North German fishermen cast nets for their prey as it swept in millions through the narrow straits past the coast of Skaania; but here lay trouble for ‘the Hansa’, since Skaania, one of the southernmost districts of modern Sweden, was then a Danish province, and the Danes, who were warriors rather than traders, hated the Germans heartily.