The Wars the Towns Paid For

Lübeck turns on its own council

In April 1408 fifteen of the twenty-three men who sat on Lübeck's council were forced out of it, and on 5 May a new council took their places. [CR] [M]

The town whose law other towns had copied wholesale, whose seal stood behind most of what the German merchants said to foreign rulers, and whose hall the assemblies met in because it was convenient, had changed its government by force inside a month.

The quarrel was about money and about who was allowed to see the books. Wealthy merchants with no seat on the council, together with the leading men of the crafts, wanted access to fiscal oversight: what had been levied, what it had gone on, and by whose authority. The sitting council held that taxation, diplomacy and the management of the foreign privileges were council business and nobody else's, and it had held that for as long as anyone could remember. Calling this the poor against the rich gets the shape of it wrong. The men pressing hardest had money and no seat.

What turned a local quarrel into everyone's problem was the paperwork. A privilege was granted to a named community and renewed with a named community, and the community that held it was in practice its council: the men who sealed the letters, received the envoys, and could be held to a bargain years afterwards. Change the council and every other party to those arrangements had to decide whether the new men were the same counterparty. Foreign rulers had to decide it. So did the other towns, which had their own privileges to protect and no appetite for seeing them attached to a council somebody could depose.

So the men who had been put out appealed outward, and the outside answered. Imperial pressure and Hanseatic pressure worked on the case for years, and the old council came back to Lübeck in 1416–1418. [CR] [M]

That is a long time to spend restoring a body of men who had already lost their seats once, and the length of it is the useful part. The League had no procedure for deciding who governed a member town. What it had was the ability to keep asking, to withhold recognition, and to wait.

Which leaves the question of what put a council in that position in the first place. Councils fell out with their towns over a good many things, and the reliable one was war. War was the largest single thing a town ever bought. It was bought out of taxation. And it was decided on by the same men who afterwards declined to show anybody the accounts. Everything in the decades that follow runs through that arrangement: who declared the war, who sent the ships, who stayed out of it, and who was holding the bill when it was over.

Six towns declare war

On 18 October 1426 Hamburg, Lübeck, Lüneburg, Rostock, Stralsund and Wismar declared war on Eric of Pomerania, who ruled Denmark, Sweden and Norway together. [CR] They went in as allies of his enemy in Holstein.

The reasons the record supports are the ones you would expect of towns rather than of a state. There was the Schleswig-Holstein succession, which was Holstein's quarrel before it was anybody else's. There was Eric's Scandinavian monarchy, which had put a single crown across every shore the Baltic trade touched. There were restrictions on passage and on commerce. And behind all of it there was what royal control of the water joining the Baltic to the North Sea could do to their traffic, which was to tax it or to send it somewhere else.

Then the part the received version leaves out. The Prussian towns did not enter the war as belligerents. Neither did the Livonian towns, nor the Hanseatic towns of the Dutch coast. Their objection was to the blockade.

A blockade in this period was a fleet sitting in a strait or off a harbour mouth and stopping what tried to pass: somebody's ships stopping somebody else's, with no legal regime behind it, no status in any law of war, and no way of telling an enemy's cargo from a neutral's except by boarding and looking. Which is exactly why the eastern towns objected. Their merchants were the ones shipping through the closed water, in hulls that flew nobody's flag in the modern sense and carried nothing but a bill of lading and a reputation. A grain cargo out of Danzig stopped in the strait by a Wendish captain was a loss to Danzig however the captain apologised afterwards. The towns that had voted the fleet were asking the towns that had not to underwrite it.

So the war remembered as the Hanse against Denmark was fought by one regional bloc while the League's eastern towns and its western ones stayed out, said so in the record, and went on trading. Nothing the League possessed could compel them. There was no treasury to withhold, no army to send, no court with jurisdiction over a member town's foreign policy, and the money for a war had to be voted by the towns that meant to fight it, one war at a time. The heaviest instrument the towns had was exclusion from the common privileges, and that was reserved for towns that broke the privileges, not for towns that declined somebody else's war.

The six went to war on their own account. What followed was theirs to pay for.

Copenhagen, twice

In the spring of 1428 the allied fleet came to Copenhagen and tried to shut the harbour.

The method was to sink vessels loaded with stone across a channel, so that anything drawing much water could get neither in nor out. It did not work. The report that describes the attempt, written by men on the towns' own side some weeks afterwards, records negotiations, fighting, trouble getting supplies, and a failure. [CR]

A second force came back in the summer, and this is where the record begins to argue with itself.

A report of 21 June says that the second force started sinking ships on 15 June and had sunk twenty-four of them, enough on its own account to stop large royal vessels moving, while the defenders answered with heavy guns. [CR] A parallel report, describing the same operation, gives thirty-seven. [CR] That same document gives ten for the attempt in the spring [CR], which the report of 21 June does not total at all.

Two documents, then, both contemporary and both written by the winning side about its own operation. They disagree about how many ships were sunk and they disagree about how to divide them between the spring and the summer. Neither is a chronicle composed long afterwards by somebody who was not there, and neither is a hostile source. There is no third document that adjudicates between them.

Nor is the second disagreement smaller than the first. One report has ten ships in the spring; the other gives no total for the spring at all, which is not the same as reporting none. A report that does not count something has not counted nothing. The gap between those two states is where a good deal of medieval arithmetic quietly goes missing, because the second is so easily written down as a zero by somebody tidying up.

Both operations are drawn below, a row for each report and each operation, a mark for each ship. Nothing is combined.

A label is not a verdict. [CR] beside a figure says that somebody wrote it down at the time. It does not say the man was counting carefully, or could see the whole harbour from where he stood, or had no reason to make the number generous. The record does not say who did the counting, or on what day, or whether either writer was working from a tally or from what he had been told in the anchorage. Two men on the same side, writing about the same water in the same season, produced counts that do not match, and the useful response is to keep both and to say which document each one came from.

The alternative is to print a single smoothed number and drop the other quietly, which would read to you as knowledge and would in fact be a choice somebody made without telling you they were making it. That is what the labels on this page are for.

A toll that outlived everyone

Eric levied a toll on ships passing the strait, and the year almost every account gives is 1429.

Go looking for the document that would establish it and there is nothing there. No surviving register from 1429 records the foundation of the toll. [E] Historians who need a date are reconstructing the beginning of an institution out of later references to it, later complaints about it, and what the king was doing at the time, and they variously put it at 1425, 1426 or 1429. [E] Which is why the careful form of the sentence is that the Sound toll begins about 1429.

Think about what would settle it. A toll of this kind generated paper continuously: a book with a first entry, a first collector, a first ship charged. Any one of those, surviving, would fix the year the way a sealed treaty fixes a treaty. None of them is in hand, and what is in hand is downstream material, written by people who already assumed the toll existed.

That soft edge does something to every narrative built on top of it. “In 1429 Eric introduced the Sound toll” is a sentence in the grammar of an event: a king, a year, a decision, and the reader files it beside the treaty dates without noticing the change of footing. What stands behind it is an inference drawn from a scatter of later paper. The inference may well be right. It is a different kind of claim from the six towns' declaration of war, which survives as a document you can go and read.

And it mattered to the towns at once. From this point the toll is in the record continuously as a thing being argued about, complained of and negotiated over, which is how an institution whose birth nobody wrote down becomes perfectly visible for the rest of its life.

What the toll actually was is simple enough. It was a payment for going through, charged on the passage itself rather than on anything bought or landed: a levy taken by a king on other people's trade, in the water joining the Baltic to the North Sea, at the moment when the towns using that water had gone to war partly to keep royal hands off it. The salt and the cloth and the grain and the fish went on moving. Somebody else was now standing at the door counting them.

And the counting is what outlived everyone in this story. The towns counted their own trade when there was a fleet to pay for and stopped when the fighting stopped. The collectors in the strait went on counting for reasons of their own, which is why the Sound is the record it is.

Vordingborg, and what it did not say

The instrument concluded at Vordingborg on 17 July 1435 ended the claims and the hostilities between Eric and the towns that had fought him. [CR] A related royal charter restored their peaceful enjoyment of privileges, freedoms and old customs in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Ports were reopened to Danish subjects. Allies were included. A recurring meeting was to be held at Copenhagen before the Scanian season, to hear grievances and do justice between the parties, which tells you what both sides expected of the settlement: a standing appointment to complain. Hein Hoyer, mayor of Hamburg, negotiated for the towns. [CR] Related instruments cancelled the earlier alliance and settled the Holstein question with Duke Adolf, who secured Schleswig. That was the largest single gain anybody made out of the war, and it went to the towns' ally.

Which raises the obvious question. If the towns won, why was the toll still there when they went home?

Because what they were given back was what they had before. The charter confirmed old privileges, freedoms and customs; the ports opened again; the grievance meeting gave them somewhere to bring the next dispute. The main treaty contains no clause abolishing the Sound toll and no clause exempting the towns or their ships from it. [CR] The later records show continued argument over exemption and over breaches, and in the August after the peace was sealed the Prussians, who had not fought the war, were still writing about the new toll as a live grievance. [CR] English-language summaries that say flatly that the Hanseatic towns were exempted from the Sound dues are reporting something the surviving instruments do not state.

What the war cost is harder to see than what it settled, because a town's accounts of this period are line-item records of payments rather than anything you could call a budget. There is no page that adds it up. One reconstruction comes out of them: Lübeck's identifiable expenditure for the Danish war has been put at 78,792 marks lübisch. [M] It could not be independently verified for this page, and the appendix says what was tried and what came back empty. The mark was losing silver across these decades, so the number is a nominal one and does not carry across into any later unit.

Set that against a council which had already been put out of its own chamber once, by men who wanted to see what had been levied and where it had gone. The bill was real, it was large, and it did not arrive with a document abolishing the thing the war had been partly about.

The war opened by the other side

On 7 April 1438 Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, licensed Dutch shipowners to take the shipping of the Wendish towns and of Holstein. [CR]

A privateering licence, letters of marque, was a ruler's written permission for private owners to make war at sea on their own account. The ships were theirs, the crews were theirs, the losses were theirs, and what they took they kept, subject to whatever share the licence reserved for the man who signed it. It cost him nothing to grant and committed him to nothing. It also turned every Dutch shipowner with a hull and a grievance into a belligerent at a stroke, without a fleet being fitted out or a levy being voted anywhere.

Note which way that paper points. The retelling most readers meet has the Wendish towns going to war with the Dutch over the Baltic trade, and the document at the start of the fighting is a Burgundian grant of permission to attack them. The pressure behind it had been building for years. Dutch and Zeeland ships were sailing directly to Prussia and Livonia rather than buying through Lübeck; cargoes were being taken at sea by both sides; access to the eastern ports was in dispute, and the eastern ports themselves were not at all sure they wanted it settled in Lübeck's favour.

At sea the towns did well, and they did it with the instrument they already had. The Dutch fleet worked in and around the strait and could not get far into the Baltic, because the Wendish fleet held the passage, and it held it for as long as the fighting lasted. A war fought by shipowners under licence is a war of seizures and counter-seizures, and a strait held by somebody else is the one thing that kind of war cannot work around.

That is a clean sentence, and the war under it was not clean. “The Dutch against the Hanse” is a modern shorthand for something with a good many more parties in it. Contemporaries negotiated through the duke, with named provinces, with individual towns, with Prussian and Livonian interests, and through neutral mediators. The Zuiderzee towns were themselves Hanseatic and stood on the other side of the commercial argument from Lübeck. The line between two nations was drawn afterwards, by people who already knew which nations there were going to be.

What the mediators were working towards was a truce, and a truce is not a peace. A truce suspends hostilities for a stated term and then runs out, leaving the quarrel standing where it stood. A peace settles the claims, and does not run out. Which of the two the towns obtained decides what the fighting actually bought them.

Winning the sea and conceding the point

The agreement made at Copenhagen on 23 August 1441 is a truce of ten years between the six Wendish towns and Holland, Zeeland and Friesland. [CR] It restored trade both ways, abolished the innovations each side had brought in during the fighting, and set up a four-city neutral arbitration mechanism operating through Kampen, with provision for an overman if the arbitrators divided. Kampen had not been a party to the war.

That mechanism answers something left open at the start. The towns had no court of their own with jurisdiction over a quarrel like this one, and no officer who could enforce a finding against a member town, so a settlement had to be lodged somewhere outside the fight and staffed by people who had stayed out of it. Lüneburg was written into the agreement although the document itself describes it as not having taken part. A peace whose membership is negotiated and whose umpire is a bystander is a peace between blocs that had to be assembled, and both facts are on the face of the document.

A separate settlement on 6 September, between Prussian and Livonian interests and Holland, dealt with the prisoners and with the goods from about twenty-two seized ships, and required Holland to pay 9,000 Flemish pounds in four annual instalments, with further claims reserved. [CR] Reserved means unsettled: the parties agreed on a sum for what they had counted and left the rest of the claims alive.

That is what the instruments contain. The proposition usually attached to them, that the peace of 1441 admitted the Dutch to the Baltic or opened the grain trade to them, is a reading laid over the documents later. Holland and Zeeland merchants were already trading in the Baltic before the licence of 1438 was signed, and their direct sailings east went on growing afterwards for reasons the treaty says nothing about. What the towns signed was a truce with a term on it and a bill for damages.

Which returns the whole stretch to where it began. A war declared in 1426 by six towns while the rest of the League watched. A peace in 1435 that restored what those towns already had and handed the largest gain to somebody else. A second war they had not opened, fought well at sea and closed through the arbitration of a town that had stayed out of it. And underneath all of it the bills, paid by the towns that sent the ships, out of taxes voted by councils, in front of citizens who had already shown once what they would do about a council that would not open the accounts.