THE HANSA
Systematic commerce in the north of Europe, broadly speaking, begins with the traffic of the Hansa towns, whose rise may be traced to the sudden development of civic life forced on Germany in the tenth century by the emperor Henry I, as a means of withstanding the otherwise irresistible raids of the Hungarians.[711] Once founded, such cities for their own existence' sake gave freedom to all fugitive serfs who joined them, defending such against former masters, and giving them the chance of earning a living.[712] That is by common consent the outstanding origin of German civic industry, and the original conditions were such that the cities, once formed, were gradually forced[713] to special self-reliance. Faustrecht, or private war, was universal, even under emperors who suppressed feudal brigandage; and the cities had to fight their own battle, like those of Italy, from the beginning. As compared with the robber baronage and separate princes, they stood for intelligence and co-operation, and supplied a basis for organisation without which the long German chaos of the Middle Ages would have been immeasurably worse. Taking their commercial cue from the cities of Italy, they reached, as against feudal enemies, a measure of peaceful union which the less differentiated Italian cities could not attain save momentarily. The decisive conditions were that whereas in Italy the enemies were manifold—sometimes feudal nobles, sometimes the Emperor, sometimes the Pope—the German cities had substantially one objective, the protection of trade from the robber-knights. Thus, as early as the year 1284, seventy cities of South Germany formed the Rhenish League, on which followed that of the Swabian towns. The league of the Hansa cities, like the other early "Hansa of London," which united cities of Flanders and France with mercantile London, was a growth on all fours with these.[714] Starting, however, in maritime towns which grew to commerce from beginnings in fishing, as the earlier Scandinavians had grown to piracy, the northern League gave its main strength to trade by sea.
Its special interest for us to-day lies in the fact that it was ultra-racial, beginning in 1241 in a pact between the free cities of LÜbeck and Hamburg,[715] and finally including Wendish, German, Dutch, French, and even Spanish cities, in fluctuating numbers. The motive to union, as it had need be, was one of mercantile gain. Beginning, apparently, by having each its separate authorised hansa or trading-group in foreign cities, the earlier trading-towns of the group, perhaps from the measure of co-operation and fraternity thus forced on them abroad,[716] saw their advantage in a special league for the common good as a monopoly maintained against outsiders; and this being extended, the whole League came to bear the generic name.
See Kohlrausch for the theory that contact in foreign cities is the probable cause of the policy of union (History of Germany, Eng. tr., p. 260; cp. Ashley, Introd. to Economic History, i, 104, 110). As to the origin of the word, see Stubbs, i, 447, note. The hans or hansa first appears historically in England as a name apparently identical with gild; and, starting with a hansa or hanse-house of their own, English cities in some cases are found trading through subordinate hansas in other cities, not only of Normandy but of England itself. Thus arose the Flemish Hansa or "Hansa of London," ignored in so many notices of the better-known Hanseatic League. Early in the thirteenth century it included a number of the towns of Flanders engaged in the English wool-trade; and later it numbered at one time seventeen towns, including Chalons, Rheims, St. Quentin, Cambray, and Amiens (Ashley, Introd. to Economic History, i, 109; cp. Prof. Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, 1889, i, 6, citing Varenbergh, Hist. des relations diplomatiques entre le comte de Flandre et l'Angleterre au moyen Âge, Bruxelles, 1874, p. 146 sq.). There is some obscurity as to when the foreign Hansards were first permitted to have warehouses and residences of their own in London. Cp. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. i, § 68; and Ashley, i, 105, following Schanz, who dates this privilege in the reign of Henry III, though the merchants of Cologne (id. p. 110) had a hansa or gildhall in London in the reign of Richard I. Under whatever conditions, it is clear that London was one of the first foreign cities in which the German Hansard traders came in friendly contact.
A reciprocal and normal egoism furthered as well as thwarted the Hansard enterprise. Trade in the feudal period being a ground of privilege like any other, the monopolied merchants of every city strove to force foreign traders to deal with them only. On the other hand, the English nobility sought to deal rather with the foreigner directly than with the English middlemen; and thus in each feudal country, but notably in England,[717] the interest of the landed class tended to throw foreign trade substantially in foreign hands, which did their best to hold it. In the reigns of the Edwards privileges of free trade with natives were gradually conferred on the foreign traders[718] in the interests of the landed class—the only "general consumers" who could then make their claims felt—in despite of the angry resistance of the native merchant class. For the rest, in a period when some maritime English cities, like those of France and Germany, could still carry on private wars with each other as well as with foreign cities,[719] a trader of one English town was in any other English town on all fours with a foreigner.[720] When, therefore, the foreigners combined, their advantage over the native trade was twofold.
Naturally the cities least liable to regal interference carried on a cosmopolitan co-operation to the best advantage. The Hansa of London, being made up of Flemish and French cities, was hampered by the divided allegiance of its members and by their national jealousies;[721] while the German cities, sharing in the free German scramble under a nominal emperor much occupied in Italy, could combine with ease. Cologne, having early Hansa rights in London, sought to exclude the other cities, but had to yield and join their union;[722] and the Hansa of London dwindled and broke up before their competition. As the number of leagued cities increased, it might be thought, something in the nature of an ideal of free trade must have partly arisen, for the number of "privileged" towns was thus apparently greater than that of the outside towns traded with. To the last, however, the faith seems to have been that without monopoly the league must perish; and in the closing Protestant period the command of the Baltic, as against the Dutch and the Scandinavians, was desperately and vainly battled for. But just as the cities could not escape the play of the other political forces of the time, and were severally clutched by this or that potentate, or biassed to their own stock, so they could not hinder that the principle of self-seeking on which they founded should divide themselves. As soon as the Dutch affiliated cities saw their opening for trade in the Baltic on their own account, they broke away.
While the league lasted, it was as remarkable a polity as any in history. With its four great foreign factories of Bruges, London, Bergen, and Novgorod, and its many minor stations, all conducted by celibate servitors living together like so many bodies of friars;[723] with its four great circles of affiliated towns, and its triennial and other congresses, the most cosmopolitan of European parliaments; with its military and naval system, by which, turning its trading into fighting fleets, it made war on Scandinavian kings and put down piracy on every hand—it was in its self-seeking and often brutal way one of the popular civilising influences of northern Europe for some two hundred and fifty years; and the very forces of separate national commerce, which finally undermined it, were set up or stimulated by its own example. With less rapacity, indeed, it might have conciliated populations that it alienated. A lack of any higher ideals than those of zealous commerce marks its entire career; it is associated with no such growth of learning and the fine arts as took place in commercial Holland; and its members seem to have been among the most unrefined of the northern city populations.[724] But it made for progress on the ordinary levels. In a world wholly bent on privilege in all directions, it at least tempered its own spirit of monopoly in some measure by its principle of inclusion; and it passed away as a great power before it could dream of renewing the ideal of monopoly in the more sinister form of Oriental empire taken up by the Dutch. And, while its historians have not been careful to make a comparative study of the internal civic life which flourished under the commercial union, it does not at all appear that the divisions of classes were more steep, or the lot of the lower worse, than in any northern European State of the period.
The "downfall" of such a polity, then, is conceptual only. All the realities of life evolved by the league were passed on to its constituent elements throughout northern Europe; and there survived from it what the separate States had not yet been able to offer—the adumbration, however dim, of a union reaching beyond the bounds of nationality and the jealousies of race. In an age of private war, without transcending the normal ethic, it practically limited private war as regarded its German members; and while joining battle at need with half-barbarian northern kings, or grudging foreigners, it of necessity made peace its ideal. Its dissolution, therefore, marked at once the advance of national organisation up to its level, and the persistence of the more primitive over the more rational instincts of coalition.
