The Hansa was an association of mercantile cities along the Baltic Coast, including Hamburg, Gdansk, Lubeck and Bremen. They also maintained enclaves in Bruges, London, Bergen, and Novgorod. Beginning in the 12th Century, the Holy Roman Emperor had chartered the earliest member cities to take control of their own trade. They dealt in the most profitable commodities of the time: furs, salt, fish, and gold were among its chief commodities.
Denmark’s Provocation and Motives
Herring fisheries in the Baltic were a focus of great profit, but also of great contention during the Hanseatic era. Herring shoals tend to drift around over time, and those used by the League were off Skania, in Sweden, which was claimed by Denmark’s King Valdemar IV. He gained control of it, and then made the fees for maintaining the Hansa’s privileges in the town extremely irksome to them.
Valdemar was an ambitious monarch, with a ‘Denmark for the Danes’ policy, at a time when Denmark was very much in a junior position to the Holy Roman Empire. The Hanseatic League’s control of trade routes and commodity prices were infuriating to him, as was the Holy Roman Empire’s encroachment on lands he believed were rightfully Danish. Therefore, in 1361, King Valdemar made war on the League, attacking the island of Gotland, the hub of the trans-Baltic trade and the Hansa’s treasure house.
The Hansa’s Baltic War
Between the threat to Skania and the ransacking of Gotland, the League was not about to take this threat to their dominance lightly. The League did not have land, only trade privileges and money. Rather, therefore, than raising armies from serfs and knights, as Valdemar did, they could focus on raising a navy, crewing it with the mercenary warriors who usually hired themselves out to guard against piracy. The merchants attached to the League owned many ships, which could carry soldiers as effectively as cargo. The League was able to send a fleet to attack and ransack Danish ports, up to and including Copenhagen.
Danish Defeat
Valdemar was proud and had a voracious appetite for war. He waged a land war in Sweden and Northern Germany at the same time as he was attempting to face the League at sea, whereas the League could focus on attacking his under-defended coastline and supply lines. After nearly a decade passed with Valdemar’s wars stagnant, his nobility rebelled and he was forced to flee Denmark. At last, he was forced to sue for peace. In 1370, as sealed by the Treaty of Stralsund, the war was over in the favor of the League.
Conclusion
Valdemar’s overambitious war plans and the League’s supremacy at sea were the main lynchpins of the war’s progression. The war, as surveyed in this brief article, is also a puzzling reversal: an association of merchants, a medieval corporation, winning a war against a nation. It might be taken as a warning in modern times when commercial bodies can match or exceed government in scale and wealth.
Bibliography
Matthew Bennett, “Amphibious warfare in the Baltic: the Hansa, Holland and the Habsburgs (fourteenth-sixteenth centuries)” in Amphibious warfare 1000-1700 : Commerce, State Formation and European Expansion, edited by Mark Charles Fissel and D.J.B. Trim, Extenza Turpin, 2006.
E. Gee Nash, The Hansa: Its History and Romance, John Lane the Bodley Head Ltd., 1929.
Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa, Translated and Edited by D.S. Ault and S.H. Steinberg, Macmillan, 1970.
