During the Commercial Revolution—roughly from the 10th to the 14th century—medieval Europe experienced a demographic recovery, an improvement in agricultural productivity, a revival of its long-distance trade, and the diffusion of market institutions. In this context, the Hanse were merchants from Lower Germany and the Elbe river basin who found themselves scattered across a vast region around the North and Baltic seas.
Far from their respective political communities, they decided to form a group—literally hansa means crowd or troop—to support each other through voluntary services and to better defend their interests when interacting with foreign authorities in the many localities where they did business. Note that my definition stresses the importance of private individuals deciding freely to form an association, and I avoid using the expression Hanseatic League. When other writers, including libertarians and conservatives, use the term “League,” they accidentally shift the focus to the political sphere, as if the Hanse were a sort of alliance between the governments of some German and other North European towns. While the phenomenon of leagues of free towns is surely a fascinating aspect of medieval governance, and itself an alternative to the modern Leviathan, the case of the Hanse was a different, much more radically anti-state arrangement.
First of all, the Hanse was shaped by bottom-up agreements between private merchants. As nicely summed up by Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, “towns were members of the Hanse through their burghers, not the other way round.” Only after many merchants from a certain city had already joined the Hanse, their town council would be considered as belonging to the league and could be represented at the Diet—an assembly where concerns from the different merchant communities were voiced.
The voluntary, non-political nature of the Hanse is confirmed indirectly by the lack of a precise chronology for its life. The association emerged perhaps in the 12th century, initiated by merchants from cities such as Hamburg and Lübeck, and could be considered as still in existence as late as the 17th century. At different times, different cities belonged to the Hanse, numbering even more than 200, yet a complete list remains almost impossible to draw. The Diet did not possess any legislative or executive powers, so many of the cities belonging to the Hanse often decided not to attend its meetings. But, besides the informality of its birth and institutional ties, there are a series of specific characteristics that demonstrate how the Hanse was a radical alternative to state governance. For example, the Hanse did not have a fixed constitution, a treasury, or any coercive power. The only punitive measure that the Hanse could take was the exclusion of members who had committed fraud or who were considered guilty of other illegal actions.
At this point, we could ask the question: if the Hanse was really so informal and non-coercive, then what exactly were the benefits that it could bring to merchants and communities belonging to it? Traveling from their town in Lower Germany and finding themselves as strangers in lands where their home government had no representation, no influence, and no ability to defend them, the Hanse merchants gathered in a flexible but effective international group that could offer a number of services, such as diplomatic and legal representation. Representing merchants who brought significant revenues, the Hanse obtained tax exemptions, access to internal markets, the right to purchase local products previously forbidden to them, the right of assembly, and the right to bear arms for self-defense even though they were foreigners.
The second kind of provisions delivered by the Hanse were spaces, objects, institutions, and information. In the most important cities visited by German merchants, pools of Hanseatic businessmen purchased and maintained buildings that included secure warehouses, lodgings, and eating halls. In these sort of factories, often called Kontoren, Hanse merchants would support each other in times of need, organize convoys, and gain access to common weights and measures for checkout scales that diminished transaction costs. Hanseatic merchants could also enjoy a sort of extraterritoriality, through the right to private arbitration and the possibility to settle any dispute or draw up contracts according to their own laws.
Another crucial service offered by the Hanse was the diffusion of up-to-date information—invaluable to determine the viability of business operations and investments—and access to a network of merchants incentivized to trade honestly, not because of violent punishments, but because of the importance of reputation and the threat of simply being expelled from the Hanseatic association.
The effectiveness of such arrangement is demonstrated by the success of the Hanse, which came to dominate trade along the Baltic routes and to sustain the founding of urban centers along the coasts of Germany, Estonia, and Latvia, including cities like Stralsund, Tartu, and Riga. Between the 13th and the 15th century, Hanse merchants controlled the export of British wool and raw metals, bought wine and broadcloth from French ports, retailed engraved copper and books from the Flanders across the Baltic region, and traded grain, furs, and timber from Poland and Russian territories, while also tapping into flows of Asian goods reaching Novgorod. These impressive achievements, which fastened the international division of labor across vast regions, were favored by the economic aims of the Hanse and its pragmatic support to wholesalers risking capital and goods. In some circumstances the Hanse could become a military league and defend the interests of its towns. This happened for instance in 1369, when a Hanseatic alliance defeated the Kingdom of Denmark. Yet, nobody could requisition ships, force the payment of quotas to arm a navy, or compel all the citizens of fighting age from all the Hanseatic towns to join any military operation.
As pointed out by Alexander Fink, three features in particular render the Hanse especially intractable for scholars who wish to fit it into models of state governance or jurisdictional prerogative. First, the Hanse never had any power to tax.
Second, members of the Hanse—both individual merchants and towns that later decided to send representatives to the Diet—did not give up any right of association or their prerogatives of self-government. Belonging to the Hanse was only one aspect of the economic activities, civic identity, and political life of German merchant communities and cities, so much so that town chronicles are usually silent about the Hanse. The decision to enter the Hanse did not affect nor diminish a town’s opportunities to join other associations or alliances. For example, in the 13th century, Hamburg, Lübeck, Rostock, and Wismar decided to form a monetary union, establishing a common coinage standard. This Wendish Coin Union was, however, completely independent from the Hanse. In fact, Hanseatic cities remained free to form not only coinage agreements, but alliances of any kind with cities or jurisdictions that were not members of the Hanse.
Finally, the third—and perhaps most fascinating aspect of the Hanse—is that its participatory mechanism remained bottom-up and truly voluntary. This is an aspect that marks an enormous difference between the Hanseatic model and the contemporary European Union. While almost all the cities that joined the Hanse were part of a larger territory falling under the jurisdiction of an overlord, the decision to join the Hanse was taken autonomously at the local level by their own merchants and their own civic councils. At different times and depending on the circumstances, the Hanse could be more or less attractive, more or less useful to different communities even though they belonged to the jurisdiction of the same lord.
Therefore, attempts to whitewash the European Union by claiming that it is in continuity with a long European tradition of multinational institutions like the Hanseatic League are disingenuous at best. Not only because the current EU is effectively a European superstate—with powers to impose taxes, tariffs, regulations, and even economic penalties to member states. But also because in the case of the EU, any participatory variability within member states is impossible. Practically speaking, today, if a European state through its central government decides to join the EU, then every lower political entity within that territory (including every city and individual citizens) are coerced into joining the European superstate. As pointed out by Frink:
In the case of the European Union, regions, counties, and cities become associated with the supranational unit as parts of the federal structure of their country, which is represented on the highest hierarchical level by the federal government.
This is precisely the opposite of the participatory mechanism of the medieval Hanse.
For all these reasons, the free, voluntary association of German merchants (and—only subsequently—German towns) that we usually call Hanseatic League should instead be called with the more neutral term of Hanse. This informal, fluid, yet effective, institution was not in the first instance a league formed by the decision of political authorities, did not imply the forfeiture of any individual right, did not require coercion of any kind, and did not transfer any political prerogative from local communities towards a centralized state. As such, the case of the Hanse suggests that medieval governance was even more diverse and inventive than we are normally ready to recognize.
