Introduction.

This study will look at the overlapping histories of the two foremost German organizations that emerged in the Baltic region in the time of the Northern Crusades: the Hanseatic League and the monastic crusading state of the Teutonic Order. The rulers of the Order, the Grandmasters, were officially members of the Hanseatic League (also known as the Hanse), and many of the League’s most important trading ports fell within Teutonic lands. Although historiography tends to focus on the Order’s continental politics, the Teutonic Knights were deeply involved with German commercial and military expansion in the Baltic Sea. For these reasons, exploring the overlapping spatial histories of the Hanse and the Teutonic Order can shed new light on the political and economic development of both organizations, and of their Northern European mare nostrum. This article uses research from a previous paper of mine on town settlement patterns in medieval Germany, which mapped these settlements in ArcGIS using German town charter data collected for Üniversität München’s “Princes and Townspeople” project.

This paper will begin to close a gap in the historiography of the medieval German Baltic and highlight the economic and military interdependency of these two organizations. Neither the Hanse nor the Teutonic Order have received much English-language scholarship in recent decades or even over the last century, although the Hanse has long been a subject of tangential interest for medieval historians. Philippe Dollinger’s The German Hanse (1970) is the most prominent of a very small catalog of historical analyses of the Hanse from anything approaching recent memory. Dollinger’s book provides a helpful survey of the political history of the League, but his approach glosses over a number of aspects of Hanseatic history that may strike the reader as important: the relationship between Hanse merchants and the politics of their home cities, between Hanse merchants and the regional princes under whose authority they nominally fell, and between the Hanse and the Teutonic Order (despite the heavy territorial overlap between the two organizations). Other works, such as Donald J. Harreld’s A Companion to the Hanseatic League and Ewert and Selzer’s Institutions of Hanseatic Trade cover specific aspects of the social and economic history of the League without connecting those stories to the broader framework of medieval European history.

The limited English-language historiography of the Order, likewise, is dominated by a few books and historians. It is difficult to even scratch the surface of the Order’s historiography without encountering the writings of William Urban, who since the 1980s has written a long list of books and articles on the political-military history of the Knights. In his The Northern Crusades (1980), Eric Christiansen examines the diplomatic and military mosh pit of northeastern Europe during the Crusades between a variety of different states–including the Teutonic Order and their Livonian brethren, as well as Denmark and Sweden in Scandinavia, Poland-Lithuania, Novgorod and Muscovy in Russia, and even the Ulug Ulus Khans of the Golden Horde in Crimea. Christiansen’s narrative is fascinating—and the same could be said of Urban’s writing—but it provides the reader with a rather one-sided pro-Christian understanding of the crusade against the pagan Baltic peoples.

Although violence is immediately obvious in any narrative of the history of the Teutonic Order, the historiographies of both the Order and the Hanseatic League often underemphasize the brutality of these organizations. The few English-language historians who have written on the Hanse and the Order have constructed a narrative in which both organizations appear as “bringers of civilization” via trade and conversion, and even military conquest. Only over the last two decades have (decidedly quieter) voices in academia begun teasing out the sheer complexity of these stories; yet, no English-language study exists of the mutually constitutive organizations of the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights.

Boom and Bust in Medieval Europe.

The 200 years between 1147–1347, during which the Hanse and the Teutonic Order both rose to prominence, also saw the greatest territorial and population growth of medieval Germany and the Holy Roman Empire in general. It is no coincidence that new political forces began cropping up during this period on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea: of the 2,214 towns chartered in German law between 1147 and 1347 (as recorded in the “Princes and Townspeople” dataset), 903 were chartered within regions across the Elbe river, along the Baltic coast northwest of the old heartland of the German kingdom. These regions had never before fallen under German or imperial control.

Why the date-range of 1147 to 1347? The end date is simple—after the arrival of the Bubonic Plague in Europe in 1347–1348, states and economies across Europe collapsed, and German settlement expansion all but ceased. It is rather the year 1147 which marks a defining moment in German history.

In 1147, Pope Eugene III called for an official crusade against the non-Christian Slavic peoples who occupied the regions (noted above) across the Elbe. These Northern Crusades are largely unknown to all but the more dedicated students of medieval Europe, but they hold such an enduring weight in German history that the rhetoric and culture surrounding them still had a key role in Nazi expansion into Slavic lands 800 years later.

The Northern Crusades.

The conquering forces of the Northern Crusades brought more territory under German control than nearly any other concerted expansion in the history of the Holy Roman Empire. These Crusades fell during a time of pan-European crusading fervor, spurred on by the initial successes that crusading forces found in the Levant during the First Crusade (1096-1099) for the Christian “Holy Land.”

The original impetus for the Pope’s call in 1147 came not from the Pope himself but rather a secular lord. Public history often treats European crusades as religiously motivated acts of holy fervor, but economic and geopolitical concerns often overshadow any alleged divine mission. In the case of the Northern Crusades, the “crusading” element was more of a convenient justification for Count Adolf II of Holstein’s expansionism. Adolf sought loot and arable land for his expanding subject base, and began gathering recruits from across the Empire, with whom he launched a series of invasions into Wendish lands along the southwest Baltic coast. Adolf did not lack recruits for the Northern Crusades; as Nicholas Morton argues in his article In Subsidium, “indulgences on this front could be won at a lower cost and in a fraction of the time necessary to complete a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.” Many Europeans perceived the Baltic Crusades as an easier ticket to salvation, where—if they had to die for the faith—they would not die in a land thousands of miles from home.

The Hanseatic League

The Hanse was a confederation of German merchants and cities that emerged from the regions of the Northern Crusades in the 1200s. Lübeck, as the founding city and de facto capital of the League, was one of the most important cities established during German colonization of the Baltic Sea coast.

By the late thirteenth century, the Hanseatic League dominated much of northern Europe’s long-distance trade. Although the League is often forgotten in popular understanding of medieval Europe, its commercial power and prestige rivaled that of the far better known Mediterranean city-state-empires of Venice and Genoa. Indeed, world systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein defines the medieval European economic space as divided into two spheres: the Mediterranean Sea controlled by the Italians, and the Baltic and North Seas dominated by the Hanse.

As a confederation of cities and individual merchants, the Hanse had a loose political structure and no territorial autonomy, and its elites successfully kept its affairs as distant as possible from the princely geopolitics of the European continent.Although the League was initially formed by a coalition of German cities (led by Lübeck), it soon held key outposts all across coastal northern Europe, and its members influenced politics and commerce in cities as distant as London and Novgorod.

This loose political framework makes the history of the Hanse a rather confounding subject of study, since few formal structures in the group’s organization means a disorganized and ultimately lacking catalog of primary sources available to the modern historian. Lübeck and the majority of the member cities fell within the lands of the Holy Roman Empire and thus were in principle subject to the Empire’s feudal hierarchy that culminated in the power of the Emperor. However, the empire itself was already a decentralized state, wherein the emperor could only truly project authority in his place of immediate residence, which—given the constant imperial struggle to rein in the Italian city-states—tended to be in the south, far away from the main regions of the Hanse. To the extent they involved themselves in German political affairs at all, it tended to be at the level of local or regional politics; for the most part, Hanse members’ commercial dominance and substantial coffers placed control of the League in members’ hands rather than imperial ones. In fact, as T.H. Lloyd argues in his book England and the German Hanse, the merchants of northern Germany formed the Hanse in union against princely intervention. But as Dollinger notes in The German Hanse (1964), the Hanseatic League even “puzzled contemporary jurists,” since it “did not even have a common seal or officials or institutions of its own, except for the Hanseatic diet or Hansetag.” Even the diet was poorly attended and had little practical authority over Hanseatic affairs. The present study will focus on the Hanse in their mare nostrum, the Baltic Sea, in the aftermath of the Northern Crusades.

As historian David Abulafia points out in a lecture given at the Legatum Institute, Hanse members played an active role in the crusading efforts by acting as supply lines and naval reinforcements for the conquering forces. As Dollinger shows, Hanse member cities also actively contributed manpower and ships to the conquering armies, as the League stood to gain a great deal of commercial and economic opportunity from the German conquest of northeast Europe.  It bears remembering that, contrary to the tenets of doux commerce, trade usually goes hand in hand with war and other acts of violence, whether state-based or individual. 

The Order as Hanse Member

The Hanse and the Teutonic Order both expanded rapidly in northeast Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries as a direct result of the German conquest of land along the Baltic coast. Both were unique and quintessentially medieval geopolitical entities, with unusual relations to their German homeland and to foreign lands around the Baltic Sea. And both experienced their "golden ages" in the 14th century.

But they had a direct relationship, too. The Grandmasters of the Teutonic Knights were official members of the Hanse, making the Order the only autonomous landed state to hold membership in the League—all other members were either cities or individual merchants. Dollinger argues that the significance of Prussian and eastern Baltic cities (most of which fell under Teutonic control) to the trade networks of the Hanse lent the Order a particular importance in Hanseatic affairs.