Hanseatic League declined in power - What if the confederation had endeavored expanding in America?

[Abdul Goatherd]

Hanse scholarship puts their economic heyday before the famines, black plague, as their formation and was directly tied to the Commercial Revolution which started in the 9th century. What you are talking about is the upwelling I am speaking of. It might have become a revival if not for their removal Brugge, but because of that the downward trend picked right back up. The Diets are just a more official version of what was already happening - information sharing and attaining collective priviliges. They also tried to do legislature but in the end it was up to the towns to decide what to do with that.

EDIT: Oh god I just checked the wiki article for the Hanse. Absolute garbage.

Also, technically I should not say decline, but transition into something else.

That doesn't sound right. Who are these "Hansa scholars" you are referring to?

The 9th C. is when the Vikings were on their rampage. These places didn't exist then. The Commercial Revolution only starts in the 11th C., and even then not yet in northern Germany, where Christian missionary settlements were still being routinely overrun by wild Danes and Slavs. Northern Germany wasn't safe for civilization until the Wendish Crusade of the 1140s. Lubeck didn't even exist until 1160. And the Baltics quite later of course.

While admittedly the origin of the hansa-style arrangements are obscure, the commonly cited founding date is 1282, when we have the first known agreement between Lubeck, Hamburg and Cologne merchants. The earliest we can push a formal date back is to a treaty between Lubeck and Hamburg in 1241 for mutual support against pirates. But the 1270s-80s is a fair estimate for when it began to move beyond just those two.

While it is certainly hopeless to try to fix a founding date, given that we can assume a long gestation phase of a variety of haphazard arrangements, in various degrees of progress, in various geographical regions, all indications suggest the Hanseatic League were just beginning to emerge in the late 13th C. Even if we can't pinpoint their origins, we can certainly track their subsequent progress. The 14th C. is doubtless their century of ascent, and 1370 heralds their golden age. And they were still going strong through much of the 15th C.

So you are cutting it way too short. You're dating its decline near the beginning, before it even really got going.

 

[Samitte]

That doesn't sound right. Who are these "Hansa scholars" you are referring to?

S. Selzer, J. Wubs-Mrozewicz, M. Pelus-Kaplan, S. Jenks, R. Hammel-Kiesow, U. C. Ewert, J. M. Murray, to name a few.

he 9th C. is the beginning of the Vikings rampage. These places didn't exist then. The Commercial Revolution only starts in the 11th C., and even then not yet in northern Germany, where Christian missionary settlements were still being routinely overrun by wild Danes and Slavs. Northern Germany wasn't safe for civilization until the Wendish Crusade of the 1140s. Lubeck didn't even exist until 1160. And the Baltics quite later of course.

Oops, yeah that should not have said 9th century but 11th as you rightly stated. Been doing a lot of research related to the 9th century the last few days and it just wont let me go.

The Hanse emerged during the period of explosive economic growth in Europe which lasted from the eleventh to the middle of the fourteenth century. According to Rolf Hammel-Kiesow, three conditions were of prime importance for the expansion of Hanseatic traders: first the inclusion of the Baltic in the trade system; second, the increased demand for goods in consequence of population growth at third-world rates from the twelfth century; and finally, the growing urbanization of Northwestern Europe. Under these circumstances, traders united under a brand name and chose to safeguard their rights in a large group. From an economic point of view, as Selzer stresses, the heyday of the Hanse lay around 1300. Thereafter, the strains on agrarian production, combined with climate change and the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century, made life more difficult not only for the average man, but also for the average Hanseatic trader. The politically halcyon days between 1370 and the 1470s stood in stark contrast to the everyday struggle to transport one’s goods safely (piracy and robbery were rife), sell it at a profitable price (without running into conflict with the locals or their rulers, who could grant or rescind privileges) and in turn purchase goods which would not prove to be counterfeit (as many new products and their imitations were coming on the market, for instance woollen cloth).

Wubs-Mrozewicz, J. and Jenks, S., The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2012) p. 13.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

S. Selzer, J. Wubs-Mrozewicz, M. Pelus-Kaplan, S. Jenks, R. Hammel-Kiesow, U. C. Ewert, J. M. Murray, to name a few.



Oops, yeah that should not have said 9th century but 11th as you rightly stated. Been doing a lot of research related to the 9th century the last few days and it just wont let me go.

Hm. Something must be lost in translation.

I happen to have an edited volume on the Hanseatic League from Brill, which contains chapters by both Hammel-Kiesow and Selzer, two of the authors your passage references. Hammel-Kiesow is ok I guess, but he admits he is doing proto-Hansa history and throws in everything plus the kitchen sink. He mentions nothing of what's attributed to him above (maybe he does elsewhere, but not here, despite covering the entire transition from Viking to early Hanse). The second author, Selzer doesn't touch on anything relevant to this discussion, since he is playing purely inside the 15th C. The volume's central chapter, by the way, happens to be "The Golden Age of the Hanseatic League", which the author (Jurgen Sarnowsky) dates from the 1350s all the way down to 1474. He calls the late 13th and early 14th as a formative period, pretty much as I did. There's a pretty good chapter by Jahnke which puts the dividing line in 1370, and dates the first phase (1250-1370) and the second phase after that.

So I don't see anything of what your authors are attributing. And I certainly don't see where your authors get the impression that the "heyday of the Hanse lay around 1300" unless their definition of "Hanse" is very peculiar or particular. Maybe they mean only the pure loose merchant traveling clubs without formal arrangements or city protection? But that doesn't really apply then either. I don't know what their rationale is. Maybe a misprint?

At any rate, the Hanseatic League we're referring to in this thread is certainly the Golden Age Hanse, not some vague proto-Hanse clubs.

[P.S. - One thing I find rather disappointing in going again through this volume is that all these "scholars" seem pretty fast and loose with town charters. Particularly as these are frontier areas, they should be more careful. Moreover, they inexplicably ignore the heaps of info we have from ecclesiastical sources (bishops, parishes, etc.) which are much better indicators of town development. Jahnke is the only one who doesn't fall into the charter trap.]