In 1398, the monastic state of the Teutonic Order invaded Danish Gotland, an island which had long held great importance to the merchants of the Hanseatic League. The histories of the German Teutonic Order (or Teutonic Knights) and the Hanseatic League weave intimately around each other throughout late-medieval European history.[1] This paper will primarily address the history of the Hanse and its relationship to the sea, although I have chosen to contextualize it with the Teutonic Order in part because of the deep linkages between the two organizations. The significance of the sea to medieval commerce cannot be understated and indeed has not been, from the works of theorists like Henri Pirenne through Immanuel Wallerstein[2] and beyond. While the Hanse was primarily a maritime institution, reigning supreme over the commerce channels of the sea, the Teutonic Order (1190-1525) rarely ventured out onto the Baltic and almost exclusively kept its affairs landed, despite its involvement in numerous wars with other maritime powers in Scandinavia and northeastern Europe. The Order, like many contemporary Christian monastic orders, was founded in the Levant in the context of the Christian crusades for the “Holy Land.” However, by the middle of the twelfth century, the Knights had relocated their main headquarters to the Baltic coast in Prussia, where the Duke of Mazovia had commissioned them to assist his military campaigns against the non-Christian Prussian peoples. The Order soon took up the battle standard of the Northern Crusades, an extensive crusading effort initiated by Germans in the mid-11th century against the diverse non-Christian peoples of the Baltic coast (the Northern Crusades came to encompass lands from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany/Denmark all the way to Tallin in modern-day Estonia).
The Hanseatic League of German merchants, likewise, grew up in the context of military campaigns against the non-Christian peoples of northeastern Europe. The ad-hoc capital of the Hanse, Lübeck, was also one of the first and most prominent cities founded[3] by German settlers in the lands conquered from the Slavic peoples on the south coast of the Baltic, and the Hanse continuously sponsored, supplied, and traded with Teutonic cities as the Order expanded in the eastern Baltic,[4] all via the trade routes the League dominated on the Baltic Sea. The Hanse itself was a loose confederation of German merchants and cities that ruled the seas of northern Europe like the city-state-empires of Venice and Genoa did in the Mediterranean; although many individual Hanse cities lay inland, the organization derived its power largely from its domination of the northern European sea trade routes. The Baltic was the Hanse’s mare nostrum, and due to its geographic centrality on that sea, Gotland made a natural center for the League’s commercial activities.[5] The Teutonic conquest of Gotland sent ripples throughout the north-Germanic world and particularly in the commercial politics of the Hanseatic League, although the Gotland campaign is not often discussed in Hanseatic historiography. As an island, Gotland’s character is inherently maritime; from the age of the Vikings to the early modern period, the island continually played home to pirates, maritime traders, and royal navies vying for control of the sea. This paper will look at the representation of the Gotland around the time of the Order’s campaign, in the historiography of the Hanse, to elucidate the full importance of the sea and this unique maritime campaign to the League’s history.
The Gotland campaign found the Order and the Hanse at two very different points in each organization’s lifespan. In the words of Raymond H. Schmandt, author of “The Gotland Campaign of the Teutonic Knights, 1398-1408,” the Knights invaded the island at a time when, “as events soon revealed, their military power was in a precarious condition.”[6] Barely a decade later, in 1410, the Knights would experience their first of many crushing defeats at the hands of their Polish-Lithuanian neighbors, who by 1525 would completely eradicate the Order from Prussia. Meanwhile, 1398 found the Hanse in the middle of its Golden Age, wherein the merchant navies of the League held nearly uncontested domination over most international markets in the Baltic. As Schmandt notes, the Order’s motives for invasion—particularly given its maritime character—are rather lost to the mists of time, although the invasion occurred in the context of a larger sea war between Denmark and the Mecklenburg dynasty of Sweden—in which the Teutonic Order had taken the side of the former party. Schmandt argues that the Hanse’s take on this conflict was clearer than the Order’s: “[the merchants of the Hanse argued] peace had to be restored as quickly as possible so that the disruption of trade in the Baltic could cease. Yet the League inclined toward Margaret of Denmark, for its traditional privileges in Norwegian and Danish territory would have been seriously jeopardized by a Mecklenburg triumph.”[7] Particularly since the Mecklenburgers had been creating trouble on the sea for the Hanse for a while, it is hard for the reader to believe the author’s argument that the Hanse had a clear and pacific stance in the conflict. Rather, it seems as though the Hanse had a desire for peace in precarious balance with a commitment to the outcome of the fight. We will examine the Hanse’s stance here later on.
First, let us look at the historical context of the Hanse on Gotland. In the early days of the Hanse, the Gotland town of Visby held nearly unparalleled commercial prominence in the Baltic Sea. Rivaled only by London, Bruges, Bergen, and Novgorod, Visby housed one of the largest populations of German Hanse merchants in northern Europe outside of the kingdom of Germany proper, and formed a critical waypoint for many trade routes on the Baltic. In his landmark study Die Hanse (1964; English: The German Hanse), historian Philippe Dollinger argues that Visby was the center of Hanseatic trade until the middle of the 13th century.[8] Gotlanders often even held superior rank to Lübeckers in Hanse politics. According to Carsten Jahnke, author of the essay “The City of Lübeck and the Internationality of Early Hanseatic Trade,” Gotland Hanse merchants had established market presence at many points across the Baltic Sea before Lübeckers had: “Since Lübeck merchants were, for instance in Novgorod, dependent on the good-will of the Gotlanders in using their trading post (St. Olav’s court), they had to cooperate with the established merchant groups before they could begin to think of achieving dominance.” [9] Furthermore, Gotland’s premier location on the Baltic Sea trade routes gave it more than just basic commercial power; Gotland merchants also played a big role in the supply chain of the Northern Crusades. According to Rolf Hammel-Kiesow, author of the essay “The Early Hansas,” “all the crusaders and their materials were shipped by way of Lübeck to Gotland and then on to Livonia,” and additionally, “the first missionary [in Livonia], Meinhard, arrived in the mid 1180s ‘in the company of merchants’[10] (cum comitatu mercatorum).”[11]
Because Visby eventually fell by the wayside in Hanseatic commerce, the town and Gotland generally are often forgotten in popular understandings of the history of the League, so the significance of Visby becomes even more important to drive home. The Baltic cities Lübeck, Stralsund, Rostock, Danzig, and even Tallin are remembered as archetypal Hanse cities at the vanguard of commerce in the Middle Ages; for the popular history enthusiast, the entire island of Gotland may be unknown, not to mention the small town of Visby. But that town once sat at the meeting-point of the commercial world of maritime northern Europe, and its merchants directed the traders of the better-known Hanse centers.
But unlike Lübeck and other well-known Hanse cities, Visby’s merchant community met with an early demise. As Dollinger notes, by the late 13th century, the “Gotland Community” of German merchants had largely been overshadowed by Lübeck’s rising power in the Baltic trade zone. This stemmed in part from Gotland’s rather confused relationship with the German base of the Hanse. Although the Gotland Community held official membership in the Hanse, its constituent merchants still claimed autonomy from the central authority of the League, which other Hanse member towns did not approve of: “as the towns developed, establishing contacts among themselves and increasing political power, they were bound to look askance at an association [the Gotland Community] which claimed to be a separate authority and whose decisions might drag them into costly and dangerous enterprises.”[12] Separated from the Hanseatic heartland by the sea, the Gotland merchants tried to maintain their own sphere of influence but eventually lost the commercial and rhetorical power to dominate the networks of the sea.
Thus, whereas the 13th century had found Gotland at the height of its prosperity, the 14th century was marked by slow but forceful decline. The merchants of Lübeck and other central German towns gradually stripped Gotland’s merchants of their old privileges, which were transferred to Lübeck itself and to the increasingly formal association of the towns. Hammel-Kiesow explains this in greater detail: Lübeck organized a coalition which successfully relocated the League’s main trade appellate court from Visby to Lübeck in the early 14th century, giving the latter city greater juridical authority over the Hanse while removing power from the Visby community. Furthermore, the Lübeck coalition removed the Gotland community’s long-held “common merchant” status which denoted Visby’s executive power in Hanseatic commerce and politics. Hammel-Kiesow concisely summarizes this affair:
The prohibition on the further use of the common merchant’s seal is even more revealing of the stance taken against Visby… the decision clearly stated that the seal of the common merchants was never to be used again on Gotland. This prohibition was justified by the rational that other cities did not have this chance… this withdrawal of a centralized legal means for authentication within a particular city corresponds to the legal constitution for the alliance of those cities, which were unwilling to permit that something they had not unanimously consented to, should receive a seal of approval in the name of them all.[13]
The fall of Gotland, then, facilitated (or was facilitated by) the decentralization of the Hanse, and the rising power of individual Hanse towns spread along the shores of the Baltic. The “Hanse of the Towns,” as historians know this development, came to define the League’s character for the rest of its tenure as northern Europe’s economic powerhouse.
Despite its decline in relative prominence as a trade site in the 14th century, Gotland still shows up frequently in the historiography of the Hanse in that century. The triangular sea-based relations between continental Germans, Visby merchants, and Novgorod appears to have remained a key factor in Baltic commerce through the end of the 14th century, when the Teutonic Order invaded the island. After six years of intermittent conflict between the German Teutonic Knights and the Novgorodian principality, historian Jürgen Sarnowsky notes that “envoys from Lübeck and Visby came to Novgorod to secure the peace which had been established [in 1371],” and that merchants of Visby joined a coalition of continental Germans against Flanders.[14] Both of these instances speak to cooperation across the sea gap between the Gotlanders and the Hanse’s political center, rather than the power-vying that characterized earlier relations between Visby and the north German Baltic cities of the League.
Furthermore, Burkhardt notes that Visby merchants had [albeit ever-declining] executive authority over Hanseatic activities in Novgorod: “the kontor[15] of Novgorod was run by a council of aldermen and deputies… here, however, the alderman was not elected by the merchants, but appointed by envoys of Lübeck or Visby. These two towns competed for influence at the Kontor. Visby was the front-runner in the early years of the Kontor, but lost ground to Lübeck and Reval during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.”[16] Burkhardt leaves this timeline here rather vague, but presumably he means Visby’s power in decision-making slowly declined over the three centuries listed. This structure of foreign-based election—a rather unusual occurrence in medieval history—was likely made possible or easier by the Baltic Sea, as such bodies of water allowed medieval peoples a communication the efficiency of which could not be even remotely matched by land-based networks. The unusual commercial and communication networks facilitated by the sea in medieval times naturally also created stand-out political structures.
Thus, by the late 14th century, at the brink of the Teutonic Order’s invasion of Gotland, we find Gotland’s merchant community comparatively weakened by the rising power of Lübeck and other cities, but had not yet disappeared. Finally, in 1392, Hanseatic merchants implicated Visby in a major resolution—called “Niebur’s kiss of the cross” after one of the German emissaries who executed the deal—to the various conflicts between Novgorod, the Order, and the Hanse. Sarnowsky qualifies the importance of this resolution to Baltic trade as follows: “[Niebur’s kiss of the cross] would regulate the relations between German merchants and the Russians for more than 100 years. It contained the mutual renewal of all privileges concerning the trade of the Germans in Novgorod and of the Russians in Livonia and Gotland.”[17] Even a century after Lübeck took the mantel of commercial supremacy from the Visby community, Gotland still played a vital enough role in Baltic trade to feature in this landmark resolution. It is also worth noting that by this time, there existed a significant Russian population on the island, reinforcing its maintained relevance on the international scene. However, by this point, Gotland merchants no longer appear to be the ones sending envoys or making such deals; rather, the political and commercial powers of authority had passed firmly to Lübeck and other key Baltic coastal cities.[18]
By the time the Teutonic Order invaded Gotland, the politics around that island had thus become rather complicated. Beyond the unclear status of Visby vis-à-vis the Hanse, by the late 14th century, various bands of pirates and privateers had made their homes in the coves of the Gotland coast. Raymond Schmandt, author of “The Gotland Campaign of the Teutonic Knights,” notes in his conclusion that “the merchants of the towns alone benefited in any significant way from the cleansing of the Baltic of the free-booters based in Gotland.”[19] Schmandt refers specifically to the merchants of the Prussian towns here, many of whom were Hanse merchants as the most powerful cities of Prussia (Marienburg, Danzig, Thorn, Elbing, and Braunsberg, as listed on page 252 of Schmandt’s article) were also key members of the Hanse. Schmandt notes that these same cities, along with the Teutonic Grandmaster,[20] co-executed the call for the invasion of Gotland.[21] However, while Lübeck and other non-Prussian Hanse members may have also benefited from the “cleansing” of the pirates, the Hanseatic center’s priority would almost certainly always have been the maintenance of peace, as Schmandt correctly argues. The difficulty and indeed the complexity of the invasion of Gotland is that it created a war which destabilized the commerce channels of the sea, but collaterally (or perhaps intentionally, depending on the casus belli of the Teutonic Order) created a more peaceable sea by addressing the problem of the pirates which had been plaguing the Hanse and the Baltic for decades. By the signing of the peace treaty in 1408, Gotland seems to have finally fallen into peripheral status. But its prime position on the routes of the golden-age Hanse meant that, as long as the Hanse ruled the Baltic Sea, Gotland retained its place on the trade maps of northern Europe. The Teutonic Knights’ invasion of the island may have been unique in the Order’s history, but for the maritime Hanseatic League, control of the sea was a matter of life and death; the Order’s eradication the Baltic pirates and assertion of German authority in the region meant renewed life for Hanseatic commerce.
Bibliography
Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. London: Verso, 2003.
Dollinger, Phillipe. The German Hansa. London: Macmillan, 1970.
Ewert, Ulf Christian and Selzer, Stephan. Institutions of the Hanseatic Trade: Studies on the Political Economy of a Medieval Organisation. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016.
Harrison, Gordon Scott. “The Hanseatic League in Historical Interpretation.” The Historian 33, no. 1 (1970): 385–97.
Harreld, Donald J., ed. A Companion to the Hanseatic League. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2015.
North, Michael. The Baltic: A History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Schmandt, Raymond H. “THE GOTLAND CAMPAIGN OF THE TEUTONIC KNIGHTS, 1398-1408.” Journal of Baltic Studies 6, no. 4 (1975): 247-58. Accessed June 18, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43210707.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Wubs-Mrozewicz, Justyna, and Stuart Jenks, eds. The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016.
[1] I have written a general and rather basic introduction to the overlapping histories of the Teutonic Knights and the Hanse, found here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/c84ef180028d437dba0ac22606d5cb54
[2] In Medieval Cities (1925) and The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (2011) respectively
[3] Or re-founded, since non-Christian Slavic peoples had had settlements at the location for a while before the German arrival
[4] Lilienfeld, Aidan. “Baltic Frontiers.” Columbia University, 2021. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/c84ef180028d437dba0ac22606d5cb54
[5] Raymond H Schmandt, “THE GOTLAND CAMPAIGN OF THE TEUTONIC KNIGHTS, 1398-1408,” Journal of Baltic Studies 6, no. 4 (1975): 247-58. Accessed June 12, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43210707. 248.
[6] Schmandt, 247.
[7] Schmandt, 247-249.
[8] Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa, trans. D.S. Ault and S.H. Steinberg (London: Macmillan, 1970), 43.
[9] Jahnke, 47
[10] Likely German merchants and thus, given the timing, likely those involved in the Gotland Community.
[11] Hammel-Kiewsow “The Early Hansas,” in Harreld, Donald J., ed. A Companion to the Hanseatic League. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2015, 31.
[12] Dollinger, 43. The Hanse, being a confederation of merchants and cities led only loosely by Lübeck, admitted of no “central authority” in the typical meaning of that phrase; what I mean here is the rhetorical center of Hanseatic power located in the German Kingdom proper, as the overwhelming majority of Hanseatic member cities lay in German lands
[13] Hammel Kiesow, 60.
[14] Jürgen Sarnowsky, “The ‘Golden Age’ of the Hanseatic League,” in Harreld, Donald J., ed. A Companion to the Hanseatic League. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2015, 79.
[15] The kontor were the four major Hanseatic outposts outside of German-held lands; the other three stood in Bruges, Bergen, and London. As an aside, the London Kontor is the main focus of my master’s thesis, and was arguably the most important of the four.
[16] Mike Burkhardt, “Kontors and Outposts,” in Harreld, Donald J., ed. A Companion to the Hanseatic League. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2015, 141.
[17] Sarnowsky, 79-80
[18] Many of which were in Teutonic Prussia, rather than the kingdom of Germany proper.
[19] Schmandt, 257.
[20] The Grandmaster was himself a member of the Hanse and, in fact, the only territorial lord to hold membership in the League
[21] Schmandt, 252.
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “Seeing Like the Sea” at Columbia University, June 2021
Haus Lilienfeld 