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.
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