Hanseatic League: Walkout Vetoes, Norway Starved and Copenhagen Sacked

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For roughly 400 years the Hanseatic League, or Hansa, dominated northern Europe with no king, no standing army, no treasury and no founding charter. Its name comes from an Old High German word for a band or troop, first used for merchants traveling together against Baltic pirates and toll-hungry feudal lords. Henry the Lion's rebuilding of Lübeck in 1159 gave merchants a short overland portage between the North Sea and the Baltic, and the 1241 alliance of Lübeck's herring with Hamburg's access to Lüneburg salt gave the network a grip on salted fish, the protein that carried the north through winter. At its peak nearly 200 settlements across eight modern countries took part, with fortified kontors from Novgorod to Bruges to the Steelyard in London.

The only central body was the irregular Hanseatic Diet, usually held in Lübeck, where no city could be bound against its will: an envoy who disagreed simply left before the recesses were recorded. Cities that broke ranks faced expulsion from the network, a form of commercial death. When Norway restricted Hanseatic privileges in 1284, the League cut off its grain, and when Valdemar IV of Denmark seized its ships, the cities levied a poundage toll, hired a fleet and sacked Copenhagen, winning the Treaty of Stralsund in 1370. The decline came quietly through Atlantic trade routes, stronger monarchies and cheaper Dutch fluyts that tempted the Prussian cities to bypass Lübeck.

• Apprentices in the kontors lived under curfews and were often forbidden to marry local women.
• Stralsund handed the League key Danish coastal fortresses for 15 years and two thirds of local tolls.
• The Victual Brothers, privateers hired in a Scandinavian succession war, seized Gotland and preyed on Hanseatic shipping for decades.
• Ivan III closed the Novgorod kontor in 1494, and Elizabeth I expelled the Hansa merchants from London in 1597.
• After the Great Fire of London destroyed the Steelyard, only a handful of cities attended the 1669 diet and none would pay to rebuild it.