Click here to read my article published in the Columbia Journal of History!
This study will look at the overlapping histories of the two foremost German organizations that emerged in the Baltic region in the time of the Northern Crusades: the Hanseatic League and the monastic crusading state of the Teutonic Order. The rulers of the Order, the Grandmasters, were officially members of the Hanseatic League (also known as the Hanse), and many of the League’s most important trading ports fell within Teutonic lands. Although historiography tends to focus on the Order’s continental politics, the Teutonic Knights were deeply involved with German commercial and military expansion in the Baltic Sea. For these reasons, exploring the overlapping spatial histories of the Hanse and the Teutonic Order can shed new light on the political and economic development of both organizations, and of their Northern European mare nostrum. This article uses research from a previous paper of mine on town settlement patterns in medieval Germany, which mapped these settlements in ArcGIS using German town charter data collected for Üniversität München’s “Princes and Townspeople” project.
Haus Lilienfeld 