The towns of the League, stretching from Thorn and Krakow on the East to the towns of the Zuider Zee on the West, and from Wisby and Reval in the North to Göttingen in the South, were arranged in groups, following in the main the territorial divisions. Separate assemblies were held in the groups for the discussion both of local and Hanseatic affairs, and gradually, but not fully until the 16th century, the groups became recognized as the lowest stage of Hanse organization. The further grouping into “Thirds,” later “Quarters,” under head-towns, was also more emphasized in that century.
In the 15th century the League, with increasing difficulty, held a defensive position against the competition of strong rivals and new trade-routes. In England the inevitable conflict of interests between the new mercantile power, growing conscious of its national strength, and the old, standing insistant on the letter of its privileges, was postponed by the factional discord out of which the Hansa in 1474 dexterously snatched a renewal of its rights. Under Elizabeth, however, the English Merchant Adventurers could finally rejoice at the withdrawal of privileges from the Hanseatics and their concession to England, in return for the retention of the Steelyard, of a factory in Hamburg. In the Netherlands the Hanseatics clung to their position in Bruges until 1540, while trade was migrating to the ports of Antwerp and Amsterdam. By the peace of Copenhagen in 1441, after the unsuccessful war of the League with Holland, the attempted monopoly of the Baltic was broken, and, though the Hanseatic trade regulations were maintained on paper, the Dutch with their larger ships increased their hold on the herring fisheries, the French salt trade, and the Baltic grain trade. For the Russian trade new competitors were emerging in southern Germany. The Hanseatic embargo against Bruges from 1451 to 1457, its later war and embargo against England, the Turkish advance closing the Italian Black Sea trade with southern Russia, all were utilized by Nuremberg and its fellows to secure a land-trade outside the sphere of Hanseatic influence. The fairs of Leipzig and Frankfort-on-Main rose in importance as Novgorod, the stronghold of Hanse trade in the East, was weakened by the attacks of Ivan III. The closing of the Novgorod counter in 1494 was due not only to the development of the Russian state but to the exclusive Hanseatic policy which had stimulated the opening of competing trade routes.
Within the League itself increasing restiveness was shown under the restrictions of its trade policy. At the Hanseatic assembly of 1469, Dantzig, Hamburg and Breslau opposed the maintenance of a compulsory staple at Bruges in the face of the new conditions produced by a widening commerce and more advantageous markets. Complaint was made of South German competition in the Netherlands. “Those in the Hansa,” protested Breslau, “are fettered and must decline and those outside the Hansa are free and prosper.” By 1477 even Lübeck had become convinced that a continuance of the effort to maintain the compulsory staple against Holland was futile and should be abandoned. But while it was found impossible to enforce the staple or to close the Sound against the Dutch, other features of the monopolistic system of trade regulations were still upheld. It was forbidden to admit an outsider to partnership or to co-ownership of ships, to trade in non-Hanseatic goods, to buy or sell on credit in a foreign mart or to enter into contracts for future delivery. The trade of foreigners outside the gates of Hanse towns or with others than Hanseatics was forbidden in 1417, and in the Eastern towns the retail trade of strangers was strictly limited. The whole system was designed to suppress the competition of outsiders, but the divergent interests of individuals and towns, the pressure of competition and changing commercial conditions, in part the reactionary character of the legislation, made enforcement difficult. The measures were those of the late-medieval town economy applied to the wide region of the German Baltic trade, but not supported, as was the analogous mercantilist system, by a strong central government.
Among the factors, economic, geographic, political and social, which combined to bring about the decline of the Hanseatic League, none was probably more influential than the absence of a German political power comparable in unity and energy with those of France and England, which could quell particularism at home, and abroad maintain in its vigour the trade which these towns had developed and defended with their imperfect union. Nothing was to be expected from the declining Empire. Still less was any co-operation possible between the towns and the territorial princes. The fatal result of conflict between town autonomy and territorial power had been taught in Flanders. The Hanseatics regarded the princes with a growing and exaggerated fear and found some relief in the formation in 1418 of a thrice-renewed alliance, known as the “Tohopesate,” against princely aggression. But no territorial power had as yet arisen in North Germany capable of subjugating and utilizing the towns, though it could detach the inland towns from the League. The last wars of the League with the Scandinavian powers in the 16th century, which left it shorn of many of its privileges and of any pretension to control of the Baltic basin eliminated it as a factor in the later struggle of the Thirty Years’ War for that control. At an assembly of 1629, Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg were entrusted with the task of safeguarding the general welfare, and after an effort to revive the League in the last general assembly of 1669, these three towns were left alone to preserve the name and small inheritance of the Hansa which in Germany’s disunion had upheld the honour of her commerce. Under their protection, the three remaining counters lingered on until their buildings were sold at Bergen in 1775, at London in 1852 and at Antwerp in 1863.
Bibliography.—Hansisches Urkundenbuch, bearbeitet von K. Höhlbaum, K. Kunze und W. Stein (10 vols., Halle und Leipzig, 1876-1907); Hanserecesse, erste Abtheilung, 1256-1430 (8 vols., Leipzig, 1870-1897), zweite Abtheilung, 1431-1476 (7 vols., 1876-1892); dritte Abtheilung, 1477-1530 (7 vols., 1881-1905); Hansische Geschichtsquellen (7 vols., 1875-1894; 3 vols., 1897-1906); Inventare hansischer Archive des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (vols. 1 and 2, 1896-1903); Hansische Geschictsblätter (14 vols., 1871-1908). All the above-mentioned chief sources have been issued by the Verein für hansische Geschichte. Of the secondary literature, the following histories and monographs should be named. G. F. Sartorius, Geschichte des hanseatischen Bundes (3 vols., Göttingen, 1802-1808), Urkundliche Geschichte des Ursprunges der deutschen Hanse, herausgegeben von J. M. Lappenberg (2 vols., Hamburg, 1830); F. W. Barthold, Geschichte der deutschen Hansa (3 vols., 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1862); D. Schäfer, Die Hansestädte und König Waldemar von Dänemark (Jena, 1879); W. Stein, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Hanse bis um die Mitte des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts (Giessen, 1900); E. Daenell, Die Blütezeit der deutschen Hanse. Hansische Geschichte von der zweiten Hälfte des XIV. bis zum letzten Viertel des XV. Jahrhunderts (2 vols., Berlin, 1905-1906); J. M. Lappenberg, Urkundliche Geschichte des hansischen Stahlhofes zu London (Hamburg, 1851); F. Keutgen, Die Beziehungen der Hanse zu England im letzten Drittel des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (Giessen, 1890); R. Ehrenberg, Hamburg und England im Zeitalter der Königin Elisabeth (Jena, 1896); W. Stein, Die Genossenschaft der deutschen Kaufleute zu Brügge in Flandern (Berlin, 1890); H. Rogge, Der Stapelzwang des hansischen Kontors zu Brügge im fünfzehnten Jahrhundert (Kiel, 1903); A. Winckler, Die deutsche Hansa in Russland (Berlin, 1886).
(E. F. G.)
HANSEN, PETER ANDREAS (1795-1874), Danish astronomer, was born on the 8th of December 1795, at Tondern, in the duchy of Schleswig. The son of a goldsmith, he learned the trade of a watchmaker at Flensburg, and exercised it at Berlin and Tondern, 1818-1820. He had, however, long been a student of science; and Dr Dircks, a physician practising at Tondern, prevailed with his father to send him in 1820 to Copenhagen, where he won the patronage of H. C. Schumacher, and attracted the personal notice of King Frederick VI. The Danish survey was then in progress, and he acted as Schumacher’s assistant in work connected with it, chiefly at the new observatory of Altona, 1821-1825. Thence he passed on to Gotha as director of the Seeberg observatory; nor could he be tempted to relinquish the post by successive invitations to replace F. G. W. Struve at Dorpat in 1829, and F. W. Bessel at Königsberg in 1847. The problems of gravitational astronomy engaged the chief part of Hansen’s attention. A research into the mutual perturbations of Jupiter and Saturn secured for him the prize of the Berlin Academy in 1830, and a memoir on cometary disturbances was crowned by the Paris Academy in 1850. In 1838 he published a revision of the lunar theory, entitled Fundamenta nova investigationis, &c., and the improved Tables of the Moon based upon it were printed in 1857, at the expense of the British government, their merit being further recognized by a grant of £1000, and by their immediate adoption in the Nautical Almanac, and other Ephemerides. A theoretical discussion of the disturbances embodied in them (still familiarly known to lunar experts as the Darlegung) appeared in the Abhandlungen of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in 1862-1864. Hansen twice visited England and was twice (in 1842 and 1860) the recipient of the Royal Astronomical Society’s gold medal. He communicated to that society in 1847 an able paper on a long-period lunar inequality (Memoirs Roy. Astr. Society, xvi. 465), and in 1854 one on the moon’s figure, advocating the mistaken hypothesis of its deformation by a huge elevation directed towards the earth (Ib. xxiv. 29). He was awarded the Copley medal by the Royal Society in 1850, and his Solar Tables, compiled with the assistance of Christian Olufsen, appeared in 1854. Hansen gave in 1854 the first intimation that the accepted distance of the sun was too great by some millions of miles (Month. Notices Roy. Astr. Soc. xv. 9), the error of J. F. Encke’s result having been rendered evident through his investigation of a lunar inequality. He died on the 28th of March 1874, at the new observatory in the town of Gotha, erected under his care in 1857.
See Vierteljahrsschrift astr. Gesellschaft, x. 133; Month. Notices Roy. Astr. Society, xxxv. 168; Proc. Roy. Society, xxv. p. v.; R. Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 526; Wochenschrift für Astronomie, xvii. 207 (account of early years by E. Heis); Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (C. Bruhns).
(A. M. C.)