The Hanseatic Cities

At a glance

• About 200 member cities at the League’s peak
• The three surviving Free Cities: Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen (until 1937 as Freie und Hansestadt)
• Five UNESCO World Heritage Sites have direct Hanseatic associations: Lübeck, Stralsund-Wismar, Tallinn, Riga, and (with a non-medieval overlay) the Speicherstadt in Hamburg
• Common features: brick Gothic architecture, council government by merchant guilds, Lübeck law, Kaufmannsgilde organisations

The Hanseatic League was, in the first instance, a league of cities. The merchants who traded under its banner were citizens of particular towns, and the privileges they enjoyed abroad were granted not to individuals but to the towns that sent them. To understand the League, you have to understand the cities that made it — and to understand those cities you have to walk, at least in imagination, through their streets, count their towers, look up at their gabled houses, and listen to the bells of their parish churches.

The cities of the League were not all alike. They differed in size, in wealth, in language, and in political institutions. But they shared certain features that made them recognisably Hanseatic: councils of merchants rather than feudal lords, markets and harbours built to a common standard, town halls and parish churches built in the same brick Gothic style, legal systems derived from the law of Lübeck, and merchant guilds that worked in close cooperation with the councils.

This page is the gateway to the articles on the cities of the League. It sketches the common urban culture, then turns to the great capitals — Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen — and continues with the cities of the Baltic, the cities of the Rhine and Westphalia, Bruges and the Flemish cities, and the Steelyard in London.

A league in numbers

The population figures are rough — late-medieval census data is patchy — but they show the order of magnitude. Lübeck and Danzig were the great commercial capitals; Cologne was the financial centre; Bruges was the great emporium but never a member. (For the populations, see Hammel-Kiesow 2011, pp. 89–94; for Bruges in particular, the Bruges UNESCO inscription is useful context.)

The Wendish prototype

The model for all the cities of the League was Lübeck. Founded in 1143 by Henry the Lion, refounded on a new site in 1159 by Flemish and Dutch settlers, it was rebuilt according to the urban traditions of the Low Countries. The new city was laid out on a regular plan, with a long market street running parallel to the river, a town hall at one end of the market, and a parish church in the centre. Houses were built of brick in the Gothic style, with steep gables and stepped gable ends. The harbour was enlarged and the river was deepened to allow seagoing vessels to reach the wharves.

The Lübeck model was exported across the Baltic. Wismar (founded 1229) was laid out on a plan that closely followed the Lübeck prototype. Rostock (1218) was granted Lübeck law. Stralsund (1234) was chartered by Wizlaw I, lord of Rügen, and rebuilt on the Lübeck model after a fire in 1278. Greifswald (1250) followed the same plan. Danzig, which received its town law from Lübeck in 1263, became the second city of the League. Elbing, Königsberg, and Riga followed. The result was a chain of cities, all built on the same plan, with the same kind of houses, the same kind of markets, and the same kind of town halls, that stretched from Lübeck to Riga.

The common architecture of these cities is known as Brick Gothic, and it is one of the most recognisable legacies of the League. Brick Gothic is not a single style but a family of related styles, all developed in northern Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries because the region lacked good building stone. The cities of the League built their churches, their town halls, and their great merchants’ houses in brick, and the bricklayers of the Baltic developed a technique of construction that was both economical and beautiful. The result is the distinctive red-brick skyline of the old Hanseatic cities, with their stepped gables, their tall, narrow windows, and their massive, fortress-like churches.

The cities of the Baltic

The Baltic cities were the heart of the League, and they are still, in many cases, the best preserved. Lübeck was the capital of the League, the seat of the Hansetag for most of its history, and the city whose town law was adopted by so many others. Its old town, surrounded by a ring of water that was once the moat of the medieval fortifications, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. The Holstentor, the great brick gate that stands at the western end of the old town, is the symbol of the city and, in some sense, of the League itself.

Hamburg, to the west of Lübeck, was the League’s great port on the North Sea. Founded in 808 by Charlemagne as a fortress against the Slavs, Hamburg grew to be one of the largest and most prosperous cities in northern Europe. The League’s privileges in England, France, and the Rhineland were largely administered from Hamburg, and the city’s merchants had a particular interest in the trade with the West. Hamburg remained a free imperial city throughout the Holy Roman Empire and retained the title of Freie und Hansestadt until 1937.

Bremen, to the west of Hamburg, was the third of the great Hanseatic cities that survived as Free Hanseatic Cities into the modern era. Founded in 787, Bremen was the seat of an archbishopric from the ninth century, and its archbishop was one of the most powerful ecclesiastical princes in northern Germany. The city itself, however, was governed by its merchants, and the archbishop had to share power with the council. Bremen’s principal trade was in wool and cloth, and its merchants had a particular interest in the trade with England and the Netherlands.

Further east, the Baltic cities of Rostock, Stralsund, Wismar, and Greifswald formed the second tier of the Wendish towns. These cities, all built on the Lübeck model, were the chief carriers of Hanseatic trade in the southern Baltic. Their merchants dominated the salt trade, the herring trade, and the grain trade, and they were the backbone of the League’s naval power. Danzig, on the Vistula, was the great port of the Polish grain trade and one of the wealthiest cities in the League. Riga, on the Dvina, was the easternmost of the great Baltic cities and the gateway to the Russian trade. Tallinn, on the Gulf of Finland, was the northernmost of the major Baltic cities and an important centre of the timber and tar trade.

The cities of the Rhine and Westphalia

To the west of the Wendish cities lay the cities of the Rhine and Westphalia. These cities were older than the Wendish towns, and they had a different history. Cologne, the largest and most important of them, had been a Roman colony, an archbishopric, and a major commercial centre long before the League was founded. Its merchants were among the first to obtain privileges in England, and the London Steelyard was originally a colony of Cologne merchants. Dortmund, Soest, and the other Westphalian cities were major centres of the cloth trade, and they controlled the road from the Rhine to the east.

The Rhineland and Westphalian cities were not, in the first instance, Baltic cities. Their principal trade was with Flanders and England, and they supplied the manufactured goods of the West — cloth, metalwork, wine — to the markets of the League. They were also the principal sources of capital for the League’s long-distance trade, and the moneylenders of Cologne were famous throughout medieval Europe. The conflicts between the Rhineland cities and the Wendish towns over the control of the Hansetag were a constant feature of League politics, and came to a head in the Cologne Trade War of 1475–76.

The cities of Flanders and the Steelyard

The League’s relations with the cities of Flanders were different from its relations with its own members. The Flemings were not members of the League, but they were its principal trading partners in the West, and the great fairs of Bruges were the meeting point of the northern and southern trades. The kontor at Bruges, established in the 1250s, was the League’s most important trading post in the West, and the League’s conflicts with the counts of Flanders and the dukes of Burgundy were largely fought over the privileges of the kontor.

The Steelyard in London was different again. Originally a settlement of Cologne merchants, the Steelyard had been granted extensive privileges by the English kings, and by the fourteenth century it was a self-governing community of Hanseatic merchants living in the heart of London. The Steelyard was the centre of the English wool and cloth trade, and it was, in many ways, the model for the other kontore. Its privileges were the subject of constant dispute with the English, and they were revoked in 1551, in the reign of Edward VI.

The political life of the cities

The cities of the League were, in their internal politics, republics of one kind or another. They were governed by councils of varying size, usually elected by the merchant guilds, and they had a more or less elaborate system of checks and balances. Lübeck, for example, was governed by a council of twenty members, presided over by four Bürgermeister; the council was elected annually by the Bürgerschaft, the body of citizens. The smaller cities had simpler systems, but the principle was the same: the merchants governed themselves, and the guilds had a voice in the government.

The internal politics of the cities were not always peaceful. Guilds and patrician families fought for control, councils struggled with the larger citizen body, and factions within the merchant class competed for influence. The violent conflicts of the late medieval cities — the Knochenhaueraufstand (butchers’ uprising) in Brunswick in 1374, the 1411 rebellion in Danzig against the Teutonic Order, the long period of internal unrest in Cologne in the 1480s — were the price the cities paid for their freedom. The Hansetag was not, in general, a place where these internal disputes could be resolved, and the League often found itself unable to act decisively because its member cities could not agree.

A useful general account of city politics is Philippe Dollinger’s The German Hansa (1970), chapters 10–11; for a more recent treatment, see the contributions to Matthias Puhle, ed., Hanse – Städte – Bünde, 1996, which has the standard article on Brunswick’s Knochenhaueraufstand of 1374.

The cities in the modern world

The Hanseatic cities are still here. Lübeck, Stralsund, and Wismar are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Hamburg and Bremen are still major German cities. Danzig, now Gdańsk, is one of the largest cities in Poland. Riga, Tallinn, and the other Baltic cities are the capitals of modern states. The old Hanseatic networks have been revived in the form of the New Hanse, an international association of cities that promotes the common heritage of the League. The architecture, the layout, the legal traditions, and the commercial culture of the medieval cities are still visible in the modern cities, and the League’s legacy is, in many ways, more visible today than it has been in centuries.

Further reading

Cited above

• Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa (Stanford, 1970), chapters 10–11.
• Rolf Hammel-Kiesow, Die Hanse (C.H. Beck, 4th ed., 2011).
• Matthias Puhle, ed., Hanse – Städte – Bünde (Thorbecke, 1996).
• Hermann Barth, Lübeck: Die Bilder einer alten Hansestadt (E.A. Seemann, 2006) — the standard illustrated history of Lübeck.

Online resources

• The official UNESCO World Heritage List has detailed descriptions of Lübeck, Stralsund-Wismar, Tallinn, and Riga — the four Hanseatic inscriptions.
• The Hanseatic City of Lübeck archives hold the Lübisches Recht and other primary documents.
• The European Hansemuseum in Lübeck is the principal museum of the Hanseatic heritage.
• The City of Lübeck website has a useful overview of the city’s history.

Related pages

• Lübeck: the Queen of the Hanse
• Hamburg: gateway to the North Sea
• Bremen: the Hanseatic city on the Weser
• The Baltic cities: Rostock, Stralsund, Wismar, and beyond
• The Rhineland and Westphalian cities
• Bruges and the Flemish cities
• The Steelyard in London
• Brick Gothic architecture