Rise of the Hanseatic League

The Hanse had no founding date: it grew out of associations of German merchants trading on the Baltic and the North Sea. Lübeck, rebuilt by Henry the Lion in 1159, became a free imperial city in 1226 and from the middle of the 13th century was the leading town of the Hanse. In 1241 Lübeck and Hamburg formalized their cooperation in an alliance seen as a precursor of the league; in 1259 Lübeck and its neighbours on the Wendish coast joined forces, and the word Hanse appears in a document of 1267. German merchants kept kontors — privileged trading stations — in Novgorod (the Peterhof, under Lübeck’s control from 1293), Bergen, Bruges and London, and the town law of Lübeck was eventually adopted by about a hundred Baltic towns. The emblematic Hanseatic ship was the cog.

By the middle of the 14th century the merchants’ Hanse had become a league of towns: the first general diet, the Hansetag, met in Lübeck in 1356, although some historians date the first such assemblies to around 1300. In 1370 the Peace of Stralsund marked the height of the league’s power in the Baltic.