The Late Period of the Hanseatic League
The late period of the Hanseatic League, which historians usually date from the Burgundian wars of the 1460s to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, was a time of transformation and crisis. The League’s commercial dominance, which had been almost unchallenged in the fifteenth century, was increasingly threatened by new competitors, new trade routes, and new political powers. The League’s political cohesion, which had been held together by the Hansetag and the common legal tradition, was increasingly strained by the religious divisions of the Reformation and by the divergent interests of the member cities.
This article describes the late period, beginning with the Burgundian wars that marked the end of the golden age, continuing with the voyages of discovery and the rise of the territorial states, and ending with the outbreak of the Thirty Years War and the final dissolution of the League’s political institutions.
The Burgundian wars
The Burgundian wars of the 1460s and 1470s were the first major crisis of the late period. The wars began as a dispute over the herring trade and the privileges of the Hanseatic merchants in Bruges, and they escalated into a full-scale war between the League and the duke of Burgundy. The League’s fleet, which had been the largest in northern Europe in the fifteenth century, was defeated for the first time in a major naval engagement at the Battle of Reimerswaal in 1473. The defeat was a sign that the League’s military power was no longer what it had been, and the Peace of Cadzand in 1477 — although not catastrophic in its terms — marked the beginning of a new era in which the League could no longer impose its will on the great powers of the West.
The Burgundian wars also revealed the limits of the League’s political cohesion. The cities of the Wendish district, which had been the backbone of the League’s military power, were reluctant to commit their resources to a war on the periphery of their interests, and the smaller cities of the inland districts were even more reluctant. The Hansetag, which had been able to mobilise the resources of the League in the wars of the fourteenth century, found it increasingly difficult to do so in the fifteenth, and the wars of the late period were fought by coalitions of willing cities rather than by the League as a whole.
The voyages of discovery
The voyages of discovery of the late fifteenth century were a more fundamental challenge to the League’s position than the Burgundian wars. The voyages of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and the other explorers of the period shifted the centre of European commerce from the Baltic and the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The great Portuguese and Spanish empires, and later the Dutch and English empires, created new trade routes that bypassed the Baltic altogether.
The League’s response to the voyages of discovery was slow and uncertain. The cities of the Baltic had no Atlantic ports, and they had no experience of the long-distance trade of the Atlantic. The great merchant families, who had made their fortunes in the Baltic trade, were reluctant to invest in the new trade routes, and the Hansetag, which had always been a body of merchants rather than explorers, had no clear policy on the new world. By the 1540s, the Atlantic trade was dominated by Portuguese, Spanish, and (from the 1560s) Dutch ships, and the Hanseatic merchant fleet, once the largest in Europe, had shrunk to a regional operation.
The standard treatment of the impact of the voyages of discovery on the League is in Rolf Hammel-Kiesow, Die Hanse (4th ed., 2011), and in Michael North, The Baltic: A History (Harvard, 2015).
The rise of the territorial states
The late period also saw the rise of the territorial states, the centralised monarchies that gradually replaced the loose confederation of the Holy Roman Empire as the principal political units of northern Europe. The kings of Denmark, Sweden, and Poland-Lithuania consolidated their authority, centralised their administrations, and developed interests of their own in Baltic trade. The electors of Brandenburg, the dukes of Pomerania, and the bishops of the ecclesiastical principalities were also consolidating their power, and they were less willing than their predecessors to defer to the cities.
The rise of the territorial states was a particular challenge to the League’s commercial dominance. The kings of Denmark, for example, had long resented the League’s control of the herring fisheries of the Sound, and they were determined to break the League’s monopoly. The kings of Sweden, after the Kalmar Union, were also determined to assert their authority over the Baltic, and they were prepared to use force to do so. The kings of Poland-Lithuania, who had absorbed the territories of the Teutonic Order in 1466, were also asserting their interests in the Baltic.
The Reformation
The Reformation of the sixteenth century was another major challenge to the League’s position. The Hansetag had always been a body of merchants, and it had no mechanism for dealing with religious disputes. When the cities began to adopt Lutheranism in the 1520s, the Hansetag’s response was uncertain and confused. The religious tensions made cooperation more difficult, and the League’s ability to act collectively was further weakened.
The Catholic cities of the south, like Cologne and Goslar, found themselves isolated from the Protestant majority, and the Hansetag tried to remain neutral, but the religious tensions made neutrality impossible. The Hansetag of 1525 broke up in acrimony, and the Hansetag did not meet again for several years. The religious tensions continued to divide the League for the rest of its history, and they were a major factor in the League’s decline.
The Reformation in Lübeck in 1525, organised by Johannes Bugenhagen, became the model for the Reformation in other Hanseatic cities, and the Lübeck church order was adopted by many other cities in northern Germany and Denmark. The Reformation also led, through the radical phase under Thomas Wullenwever in the 1530s, to the Count’s Feud of 1534–36, which was the last major attempt by the League to act as a unified power in the religious wars.
The late Hansetag
The Hansetag continued to meet in the late period, but it met less frequently and its decisions carried less weight. The Hansetag of 1556 was the last Hansetag at which the League’s traditional policy of religious neutrality was reaffirmed, and the Hansetag of 1567 was the last at which the League’s privileges in the Baltic were seriously defended. By the early seventeenth century, the Hansetag had become a relic of a bygone age, and the last formal Hansetag, in 1669, was a meeting of cities that had little in common and less to do.
A useful research resource is the Hansische Geschichtsblätter, the journal of the Hansischer Geschichtsverein, which has published many of the standard articles on the late period.
The end of the League’s political institutions
The late period ended with the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618. The war devastated much of northern Germany, and it reduced many of the Hanseatic cities to ruins. The war also marked the end of the League’s political institutions, because the Hansetag could no longer meet, and the member cities were forced to look to the territorial states for protection. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 marked the end of the Holy Roman Empire as a serious political entity, and the League’s member cities were now subjects of the territorial states.
The end of the League’s political institutions is treated at greater length in the article on the last years and the article on the decline. For the impact of the Thirty Years War on the cities, see the articles on the individual cities.