by Michael Pye
In the 1380s the Danes were at war with the German Duke of Mecklenburg, who was busily trying to use pirates to beat up his Danish enemies; but these pirates, the Vitalienbrüder, were not so easy to control. Rostock and Wismar were on the duke’s land, and for once they felt obliged to do their duty by their overlord and shelter the pirates who were making the Baltic almost impassable. They went on protecting them when the campaign went far beyond Denmark and the pirates raided even Bergen, where the Hansa merchants were unimpressed by their offer to leave the Kontor alone and pillage just the rest of the town. Feeling some kind of local loyalty, they took up arms to defend the town and saw the Kontor plundered in revenge.30
Rostock and Wismar were unrepentant about sheltering the enemies of their allies in Bergen. They declined to hand back the goods the pirates had stolen and taken to their harbours. The disturbances went on long enough to force up the price of herring by ten times in Cologne, by three times in the lands of the Teutonic Knights, but even the knights were not inclined to save the Danes trouble by suppressing the pirates because they were busy with their own territorial ambitions. Punishing the rogue towns would have to wait perhaps years for a council meeting where there might or might not be a majority to vote for sanctions.31
The pirates left Rostock to become a freebooting scourge. They occupied the islands of Bornholm and Gotland for bases, and took any vessels that passed, killing the crews or throwing them overboard to die; their motto, logical enough, was ‘God’s friends and the foe of all the world’. They had every reason to avoid capture ruthlessly; the merchants of Stralsund took one pirate crew and stuffed them into barrels on the deck, heads sticking through holes cut at one end, packed like herring, and shipped them back to the gallows. They were also cunning. Around Stockholm one winter the commander Master Hugo realized his ships were at the mercy of the enemy Danes. He cut trees, made a wooden wall around the ships and poured water over the wall; it soon froze. Just outside the wall, he cut the ice to make a moat for his ice fortress, and in the night the cold and a scatter of light snow hid what he had done. The Danes attacked, they did not notice the thin ice on the moat, men and machines tumbled down into the frigid waters. The pirates could wait in their stockade for warmer weather so they could sail on.
Like the Hansa itself, the Vitalienbrüder were single-minded; their name for themselves was Likendeelers meaning the ones who divide the loot equally, and loot was what mattered. Even when the first excuse for their campaign was gone, and Rostock and Wismar were on better terms with the Danes, they sailed on; according to the chronicler Detmar of Lübeck they hit at Russia, they spoiled the Hansa’s trade, and they sailed on to the Caspian, to the Holy Land, to the world. That says something about Lübeck’s hopes for controlling them.
Hansa towns often did go each a different way. Bremen was more different than most. It was the 1440s and the Dutch were beating their way into the Baltic, which had been a Hanseatic sea for a century or more; war happened, inevitably. France and Scotland were busily attacking English ships because the Hundred Years War had not yet finished, and Scots pirates sometimes took ships from Flanders. The seas were constantly unsafe. The citizens of Bremen had lost ships to the Dutch, and lost other ships on Hanseatic missions against the Dutch, and nobody was willing to pay them the compensation they were sure was due; so they decided on their own radical solution to the problem of piracy.
They became a pirate port.
They brought Grote Gherd, ‘Big Jerry’, from Wismar, and captains from nearby Hamburg and Lübeck itself, and they offered a deal: sail from Bremen and you got to keep two-thirds of all the goods you captured, and half the ransoms of anybody who had not been pitched overboard. Do well at this, follow the quite detailed rules and regulations for what could be stolen and from whom, and orderly, successful pirates could be citizens of Bremen for life.
Bremen now declared war on Flanders and Flanders declared war on Bremen and the pirates sailed out. They struck off the south English coast at Portland Bill, in the shelter of the Firth of Forth in Scotland as well as around the mouths of the Elbe and Weser rivers near their home port. Big Jerry ran up the flags of Hamburg, another Hanseatic town, to fool his prey, and worked the Øresund to such good effect that he took thirteen ships from Flanders in a single expedition. All this was extremely political in an incoherent sort of way: a Hansa town was often stealing from Hanseatic merchants in the interests of beating back the Hansa’s rivals. Hanseatic towns had difficulty getting their property back from Bremen, but when Big Jerry’s associates stole goods bound for Edinburgh, the Scots negotiated a deal: if there was proof of where the goods were headed, the pirates would hand them back. It was worth making deals to make friends; as long as the Baltic was sealed shut, Bremen had hopes of selling its own grain to Scotland.32
Now, piracy was crime, but it was also war being waged by towns that had no clear way to declare war. It was a practical business that sometimes seems almost respectable. In the National Museum at Gdansk there is the most glorious triptych painted by Hans Memling in Bruges in the 1460s, commissioned by a Medici agent who meant to ship it to Florence. It shows the Day of Judgement, Christ sitting on a rainbow waiting for the righteous, who are being helped by angels through a great marble gate, and on the other side the wicked endlessly falling into scarlet fire. In the centre, St Michael weighs man against man against woman in delicate scales. The picture was packed up with all kinds of spices and furs, and sent off from Bruges, but it never got beyond Dunkirk; the ship was taken by a Gdansk pirate, Paul Bencke. His ship sailed back through the North Sea and the Baltic and he presented the painting to the Basilica in Gdansk. It was pirate stuff and Medici agents threatened legal action to get it back, but the church still felt able to accept it. It would have seemed absurd to refuse such a Godly, lovely thing.33
The wonder is that the Hansa survived its ruinous divisions, that the merchants thought it so priceless that they paid a price to be in it.
Law divided it, for a start. Although Lübeck law was applied in some forty-three Hansa towns, the law of Frankfurt ruled in forty-nine, and there were outrider towns that took their law from Bremen or Hamburg. Until quite late, the Hansa had laws of its own only on issues like keeping a big crew under control, not shipping out during winter and not buying or selling goods that had been stolen or shipwrecked. Everything else was local. For anyone used to a state with a single source of authority, king, Parliament or constitution, it looks a quite impossible alliance, and it did sometimes come unglued: the Dutch Hanseatics wouldn’t go to war with their neighbours in Holland and Zeeland, the Prussian towns wanted to sell grain directly to the English without giving Lübeck a profit and when the Hansa blockaded the English out of Bruges the Hanseatic merchants of Cologne were perfectly happy to do business with the English at Antwerp. Even the epic Hanseatic war against Denmark involved fewer than a dozen Hanseatic towns.
Something did hold the Hansa together, though, and it was common purpose: the need to act like a modern cartel, impossible for one seaside town, possible for an association of towns. The first rule was to make sure of making money, which was not a simple matter. The Hansa ports dealt mostly in bulk goods: grain from the east, herring from the Baltic and cod from the Norwegian coast; timber from the north as well as pitch and tar from burning it, and cloth from Flanders and from England. The profit margin on these things was low, so the only way to make money was to control the trade, to have a monopoly at sea: to fight for privileges in every port and then control the sea lanes between them.34
Language mattered very much; all the Hansa towns, from the Low Countries to Russia, understood the same Low German. Taste also travelled with the Hanseatic ships: the same clothes and crockery, the houses built of brick and stone with their step gable roofs and their granaries in the loft and their salt stores, just like any Saxon farm. The towns all have narrow alleyways that run from the harbour to the central market square, the churches are all built as meeting halls. It is as
though Hansa households carried their hometowns with them, a shared defence against the foreignness of where they were: like the English drinking gin in the Himalaya. They all had stoneware for cups and plates, which carefully imitated fine glasses and platters, and tile-stoves that heated their houses and were dressed with painted and moulded tiles; in later years, a Hansa stove was almost holy, stuck all over with portraits of the heroes of the Reformation.35 There was also the insistence that a merchant who travelled was as good as any fixed and static noble any day: the Hansa creed. Rostock town council put doubtful coats of arms on their signet rings to prove the point, and so did Rostock merchants based in Malmö in Sweden (which never was a Hanseatic town and belonged to the Hansa’s Danish enemies); and so the habit went about the Baltic.36
Then there was violence, which may have been the strongest link of all: the immediate, instant response to any threat or rival, the powerful solidarity of the fight. Nations and courts can appeal to history and high-flown ideas of continuity and purpose, but two hundred Hanseatic towns had two hundred histories, often of fighting each other. Their mindset was traders defending the moment they make the trade, like soldiers in mid-battle dealing with each shot, each move, without needing a strategy for the whole war. They did not have to think about what seems ruinously obvious, the differences and even contradictions between the interests of the towns. If they ever did, if they thought like a single entity, they might all have to take the blame.
In the 1440s, the Bergen Hanseatics were angry with the king’s representative, Olaf Nielsson; they accused him of supporting the English, trying to separate the German craftsmen in Bergen from the Kontor and encouraging pirates to steal their ships. Nielsson was deposed and sent packing but he traded his castle to the king for the chance to return for another six years in Bergen. On his way back in 1445 he happened to capture three Hanseatic ships, and he gave permission for English ships to sail north of Bergen to buy stockfish, something the Hansa had long ago agreed not to do. Lübeck was appalled. It sent out an old Bergen hand to remind the merchants of their privileges, but by the time of the meeting the men had already heard about the loss of three ships and they could guess what Nielsson’s return might mean. They scrambled out of the meeting and down to the quays and they wrecked the ship which brought Nielsson back. The king’s man did not stay around to see what the merchants meant to do next; he went across the water to the Munkliev monastery, with his followers and with the Bishop of Bergen, and he waited.
The merchants went up against the monastery as though it were an enemy town. They killed the bishop among many others, and after one night they found Olaf Nielsson hidden in the bell tower. He was allowed a few hours to confess and repent all his sins, and then they killed him, too. The Hansa men had to make their excuses later to the Norwegian authorities, which they did with a fifteen-point complaint about the dead man, his various sins including the illegal capture of the castle he had just given to the king and a suggestion that they had been encouraged to attack so they were not the only ones to blame. It was a classic defence: it wasn’t just us, he deserved it, things aren’t as bad as they look. The Hansa, like a modern corporation, didn’t know about personal responsibility. But the Norwegian king was busily struggling for the Swedish crown and he wanted no trouble with them; his people had to be fed, the seas had to stay open, he didn’t want pirates. For the life of Olaf Nielsson, the Bishop of Bergen and all the other men who were in the way, the Kontor agreed to pay a penalty: a small fine. You can’t hang a confederation, after all.37
Their violence began to seem old-fashioned after a while, but not because their rivals were peace-loving and considerate. Their rivals simply had other ways of waging trade wars by making them into hot wars, nation to nation, which national interests and alliances might bring to an end; their rivals fitted the new system of states.
In 1484 the Amsterdam town council complained to the Bergen Kontor about German trouble-making, and demanded that the violence stop. ‘All good merchants should support each other,’ Amsterdam wrote, ‘and never hinder each other; they should not scare each other or resort to violence.’38 That had never occurred to the Hansa men, who constantly tried to get rival merchants thrown out of ports or disadvantaged when they weren’t organizing blockades or pirate raids or incidents in which inconvenient people ended up dead or disappeared. They knew their power depended on other people’s needs, Norway’s lack of grain for a start, and they had no intention of sharing their power by letting others satisfy the needy.
In Amsterdam they now faced a major trading power, soon to be the greatest of them all, which seemed to see business quite differently from the simple force on which the Hansa relied. The Dutch talked about credit, which the Hansa resisted, and kept sophisticated double-entry books, which the Hansa adopted late; they could make trade abstract. The Hansa was going out of style before it went out of business.
The legend of the Hansa is much more golden than the reality. It was taken once to be a time of German hegemony on the seas, a matter of national pride, but the Hansa had nothing to do with nations, least of all Germany: its flexibility, its success, depended on not being national, and often on staying far away from the Emperor who was the one central power in what now is Germany or else opposing him. It was taken as some kind of model for the European Union, even though it lacked any centre, any commissioners in Brussels, any common law and common regulations, any attempt to have one point of view on the world and where to fight it. It was too loose to be a model for a nation or a true federation.
What makes the Hansa seem modern is something quite different. It is the abstract idea of trade, business, money, as a profession and a force without roots in the world or responsibilities, ready to go anywhere in pursuit of profit and deals. Nothing mitigates. Nothing softens. Nothing forces or even allows compromise. Those ships in the Øresund were chasing profit by rigging a market, they were trying to enforce a legal arrangement that Norway did not want, and they expected to kill people on the way: to starve them, women, children and men.
Money rules.
10.
Love and capital
She was shouting, and Katelijne Vedelaer had every reason to shout. There were three men and one woman who grabbed her and took her by force out of the quiet of her community, over the water and out of the town of Bruges. They were not just kidnapping her. They were telling her she had no right to choose her own life among the holy women, that she had to be married and she had to marry Lievin van Aerlebecke and she had to share all she had with him instead of the community of her friends.1
She shouted to prove she wanted her life back. She wasn’t running off with a lover, she was being snatched for her property, taken off for the rape that would force her to marry. She made such a racket that the town aldermen were alerted, but they could do nothing; the holy women, the ‘beguines’, were under the special protection of the Count of Flanders. Aldermen went to the count’s bailiff and it was the bailiff who sent out the sheriff with a band of law officers. They knew which way to ride because van Aerlebecke came from Harelbecke in the flatlands to the south of Bruges, but they lost so much time on the Harelbecke road that the posse caught up with the kidnappers a full half-day later, twenty-five miles away, in the town of Roeselaere.2
The man van Aerlebecke, his brother and his servant were all arrested, along with Lizebette van Dudzele, who rode with them: all respectable persons, even grand. Their families had position in the town, guaranteed the money lent to churches, supervised the tanners and shearers in the cloth business, went abroad to serve as jury in cases which involved citizens of Bruges. They still considered rape and kidnap as a tactic. The Church was preaching marriage between those who freely consented, even loved each other, and the law in Flanders agreed, but money was money and property was property and a woman like Katelijne was forced to keep shouting.
Back in Bruges, she was handed over to the official who took care of abducted women; he also kept watch when
there was a duel being fought, for which he got a fat half-pound candle for Candelmas and a feast four times a year. The bailiff himself came to take Katelijne back to the beguines. Her kidnappers were brought to trial, and van Aerlebecke was given the harshest sentence possible: one hundred years and a day of banishment, and the promise that he would have his head cut off if he ever came back to Bruges. The accomplices were all banned for six years each, the men to be hanged if they came back early, the woman to be buried alive; they had to pay sizeable fines, fifty pounds a head.
The women in the beguinage were not quite sure the matter was settled, even so. They asked for an official record of the verdict, carrying the seals of the bailiff, the mayor and the two citizens who wrote the report; they wanted it quite clear that Katelijne did not want to leave them, that she had no part in her own kidnapping. That record survives in a private collection, which is how we know what happened.
The beguines had every reason to be careful. They had chosen a religious life, but outside the rules of convents and religious orders: they made a woman’s world. They did not marry, although some had been married and were widows, and they made their own living, often by manual labour: working fields or making cloth, which is why every beguinage had to be built by a body of running water to wash the wool. Their independence worked, and that disrupted other people’s plans to use them to make alliances by marriage, to get land or money.
The beguines were known for teaching girls manners, but also Latin, French and theology in a time when Philippe de Navarre, soldier, diplomat, lawman and a monster of official standing, could say flatly that ‘a woman must not be taught letters or writing, unless she is to be a nun; for many evils come from women writing and reading … you don’t give venom to a snake who has quite enough already.’3 Sometimes they even preached, which was not proper: grudgingly Henry of Ghent conceded a woman could teach, but privately and in silence, and she could teach only women ‘both because their address might incite the men to lust (as they say) and also would be shameful and dishonourable to the men’.4 Worse, they talked about God as though they loved Him, body and soul, with all the madness and passion of love, and as though they could go to Him directly, without church or priest in the way; this was such an alarming heresy that Marguerite Porete died for it in 1310. And, to make matters even worse, they used everyday language and not Latin; everybody knew what they were saying.