The First Hansetag of 1356
The first regular Hansetag of the Hanseatic League was held in Lübeck in 1356, and the meeting established the form of the central institution of the League. The Hansetag of 1356 was attended by representatives of the principal cities of the Wendish and Westphalian districts, and the meeting discussed the privileges of the League in Flanders and the conflicts with the count of Flanders. The meeting passed a series of resolutions that bound all the member cities, and the meeting established the procedure for future Hansetage.
Context
The Hansetag of 1356 was a response to the political and commercial challenges of the mid-fourteenth century. The League had grown rapidly in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and the growth had brought new challenges. The League’s privileges in Flanders and England were under threat, and the League’s principal cities had to coordinate their policies. The Hansetag was, in effect, a recognition that the League needed a central institution to coordinate the policies of the member cities.
A useful background: by the 1340s, the major cities of the League were coordinating informally through correspondence and ad-hoc meetings. The 1348 Black Death, which killed perhaps a third of the population of northern Europe, disrupted these informal networks. The Hansetag of 1356 was, in part, a response to the need for a more formal coordinating structure in the wake of the plague.
What happened in 1356
The Hansetag of 1356 was a relatively small meeting, with only a few dozen delegates in attendance, but it established the form of the Hansetag that would continue for the rest of the League’s history. The meeting established the procedure for convening future Hansetage, the procedure for making decisions, and the procedure for implementing the decisions. The meeting’s resolutions were the first formal decisions of the Hansetag, and the resolutions set the precedent for future Hansetage.
The Hansetag of 1356 also established the principle of collective action. The meeting’s resolutions were binding on all the member cities, and the cities were expected to implement the resolutions. The meeting’s resolutions were, in effect, the first formal recognition that the member cities had to act collectively on matters of common interest.
A useful note on the date: 1356 is the conventional date because the meeting of 1356 was the first regular Hansetag — that is, the first one that established a procedure for future meetings. Earlier meetings (1304, 1348) had been ad-hoc and were not followed by regular sessions. The 1356 meeting is treated as the institutional beginning of the Hansetag for this reason.
A milestone
The Hansetag of 1356 was a milestone in the history of the League. The meeting was the first regular meeting of the Hansetag, and the meeting established the form of the central institution of the League. The meeting was also the first formal recognition of the principle of collective action, and the meeting was the first formal recognition of the League as a political entity.
Earlier meetings of city representatives had taken place — most notably the 1304 meeting on the Steelyard privileges — but the 1356 meeting is generally treated as the first regular Hansetag because it established the form that subsequent meetings followed. The Hansetag would, in the next three centuries, become the principal political institution of the Hanseatic League, and it would meet — sometimes frequently, sometimes rarely — until 1669.