The Fifteen Years

The term

Fifteen years from 24 May 1370 is 1385, and everyone who set a seal on the settlement at Stralsund could do that sum. The term was in the text. Both sides kept a copy.

The Danish council of the realm did not sign one document that day. It sealed two, catalogued since as 460a and 460b, and the difference between them is what 1385 turned on.

The first is a charter of compensation. The four castles on the Scanian shore are in it, and the two-thirds of the Scania revenue that went with them [CR], and it is the charter carrying the term. Denmark owed the towns for what the war had cost them, and the castles and the revenue stood against that debt until it was discharged. Property handed over to be held until an obligation is satisfied, and then handed back, is a pledge. That is what the castles were.

The second charter granted the liberties. Those were the working immunities that decided whether a German merchant standing on a Danish beach was a guest with enforceable rights or a stranger at the mercy of whatever the local custom happened to be. Nothing in that charter carried a term. It was granted to hold.

So the half of Stralsund that everyone remembers, the half that made the settlement look like a victory over a kingdom, is the half with an expiry date written into it. The other half is where the merchants actually lived, and it had no date in it anywhere.

Which leaves the only question worth asking about 1385. When the clock stopped, what was still standing? That is quicker to see than to describe.

A king the towns did not choose

Valdemar IV of Denmark died on 24 October 1375 and left no son. The claim ran through his daughters. Albrecht of Mecklenburg had it through the elder of them; Oluf had it through Margrete.

On 20 January 1376 both parties came to Wismar and put their case to the towns.

Stop on that sentence, because it is what the Stralsund clause was for. The towns had no crown to give and no army standing in Denmark. What they had was a line in a charter saying that no new king was to be received except with their counsel, and not before he had sealed their liberties under the great seal of the realm. The line did not make them electors. It made them a party whose agreement had to be arranged before anybody could be comfortably settled on the throne, and both claimants behaved as though that were true. They came in person, to a Baltic port, to be heard by town councillors.

A merchants' association had written itself into the succession arrangements of a kingdom, and the arrangement was being honoured by the parties with the most reason to ignore it.

The Emperor wrote to Lübeck separately, telling it to support the Mecklenburg claim. Lübeck was an imperial free city with nobody between it and him. It heard the instruction and did not act on it.

Oluf was chosen in 1376, by a Danish political community with reasons of its own, and the towns' counsel was one weight among several rather than a decision. Then comes the move that is easy to read straight past. On 7 September 1376 Lübeck and Stralsund promised their ratifications of the settlement, and both ratifications excepted the article on royal election.

A ratification that excepts an article is a precise instrument, and worth reading precisely. Everything else in the settlement stood. The two towns confirmed it, went on holding the castles and went on drawing the revenue. What they took out was the one clause that had brought both claimants to Wismar that January.

They gave it away. Nobody overruled them, and the record shows no defeat on the point. They stopped asserting the clause in the same year that had just demonstrated what it was worth, and while the term it belonged to still had years to run.

The castles go back

The term ran out on schedule, and the paperwork ran slightly ahead of it.

The towns assembled at Stralsund on 24 June 1385 and drafted the instrument of restitution into the recess. A recess, Rezess, is the written record of what an assembly resolved, and it is much of what survives of how the Hanse decided anything. Envoys were named to carry the business through: Heinrich Westhof and Gregor Swerting.

A charter of the king and council of Denmark acknowledging that all four castles had been returned, and discharging the towns from any further claim over them, is dated 11 May 1385. That is earlier than the assembly which drafted the instrument and earlier than the handover it acknowledges, because it is backdated to the expiry of the term. It closes an account on the day the account fell due. It survives as a Lübeck original with eight seals on it [CR]. On 6 October, Lübeck wrote to the Prussian towns that envoys had been sent to resign the castles.

That is the file. No report from the surrender embassy survives. There is no account of the day itself: no castle gate, no Danish officer taking delivery, nothing from the men who rode out. The concession is minutely documented and the handover is not documented at all.

Why hand the castles back? The towns held them, and the crown that wanted them had lost the war that lost them. The answer sits in the other charter. The castles were security, and security goes back when the account closes. What the towns actually traded on was granted without a term.

What did not go back was everything in the other charter. Strand law, the rule that goods washed ashore belonged to the lord of that shore, stayed lifted. So did collective liability, the practice that let one merchant's goods be seized for another man's debt. The towns' own bailiff went on judging on the Vitten, the fenced Hanseatic trading grounds on the Scania beaches, each with its own court. None of that carried a term, so none of it fell in with the castles. In 1385 the towns handed back what they had been holding and kept what they had been granted.

A coin four towns could agree on

On 9 February 1379, at Lübeck, the councils of Lübeck, Hamburg and Wismar agreed on money.

They bound themselves to a common standard for the Witten, the four-penny silver coin the agreement standardised, and for the small penny below it. Each town's coin was to pass at face value in the others, so that a piece struck at Hamburg spent in Wismar without argument or discount. Assay was to be done jointly, at Lübeck, which is the clause that made the rest of it enforceable: a coin could be tested against the agreed standard in one place, by assayers every signatory had to accept. Debasement carried penalties. Foreign small coin was to be kept out. The whole arrangement was set up as a trial with a fixed term rather than as a permanent settlement. Lüneburg joined in 1381.

The Witten struck to that standard ran about 1.33 grams gross and about 1.12 grams of fine silver [E].

Look at the towns. Lübeck, Hamburg, Wismar and Lüneburg are the Wendish core: the group that had voted the pound toll, fitted out the ships and taken Copenhagen. The coalition assembled to fight a king was still assembled, and it had found something to do with itself in peacetime. That is a real fact about how the Hanse worked, and it is also easy to over-read. Cologne was not in this. Neither were Danzig, Riga or Reval. Four neighbouring towns settling the coin they handled in each other's markets every day is a regional agreement, and it is not the same thing as a Hanseatic currency. What the standard then did to the money in circulation is a story of its own, and it comes later in this series.

The original of the agreement had already gone from the Lübeck archive by the time Koppmann came to edit the Hanseatic recesses, so the text is known through a later copy, which is worth knowing before leaning on any word of it.

Out of Bruges

In 1388 the merchants left Bruges and took the trade to Dordrecht. It was the second time the towns had done this to Flanders, and the second time Dordrecht received them, so the merchants were going somewhere that already knew how to house them and what to charge.

Holland moved on it at once and granted privileges in 1389 to draw the diverted traffic in, which is the ordinary consequence of a boycott. Somebody nearby is delighted.

Then the League's own complaint record begins filling up with the names of its own members. Merchants of Thorn, of Danzig, of Kampen, accused of trading through the withdrawal their towns had voted for. Ships were still going up the Zwin.

That record is worth pausing on, because it is the League catching itself. There was no customs service to police a withdrawal, no permanent official anywhere with the job, and no fleet stationed at the mouth of the Zwin. Enforcement was towns reporting each other, and the reports came in. Whether either of the Flemish withdrawals actually worked is a separate and contested question, and no published study has established a price or volume response at Bruges to either of them.

What can be watched is the bargaining, because the other side kept minutes. Flanders spoke through the Four Members, the standing body that represented the county's great towns, and between August 1389 and September 1392 the Four Members met 141 times. At least 40 of those meetings dealt with getting the Germans back [M]. That is a foreign committee spending a substantial share of its own agenda on a group of merchants who had walked out of the city.

The settlement of 1392 came as a cluster of instruments, several documents closing separate pieces of the quarrel, which is what a negotiation of that length usually leaves behind. There is no single sheet of paper to point at and call the peace of Bruges. Among them was an indemnity of 11,000 pounds groats [CR], agreed in May 1392 and reckoned in the Flemish money of account.

The merchants went back, and the second withdrawal joined the first as the standard thing the towns did when a host city became difficult. A withdrawal is an instrument aimed at somebody who wants the traffic back. It works by being expensive for the other party and by giving them somewhere to sign. Within the same decade the towns would be dealing with people who wanted nothing from them and had nowhere to sign anything.

A peace against other people's wars

In 1392 a Lübeck councillor named Johann Niebur kissed the cross at Novgorod.

That was the form. A Russian agreement was sworn on the cross, and the man who swore bound the party he had come for. The settlement is still called the Niebur peace after him, which says something in itself about how these things were made: one councillor with a commission, and an oath taken in the other side's manner because that was the manner that bound anybody in Novgorod. He had come with a delegation drawn from Gotland, Riga, Dorpat and Reval, and what they agreed ran in both directions: the privileges of the Germans in Novgorod renewed, and the privileges of the Russians in Livonia and on Gotland renewed alongside them. Mutual, and written as mutual.

The clause worth the journey is the one about other people. The privileges were to hold even during wars involving third powers.

To see why that clause mattered, look at what had actually been closing the road. The Peterhof sat at the far end of a route that ran through country belonging to neither party, and the thing that shut it was hardly ever a quarrel with Novgorod. It was a Livonian campaign, or a Swedish one, or the Teutonic Order moving against somebody, and the trade stopped because the ground in between was at war. The Germans and the Russians could settle their own differences at a table. Everybody else's they could not.

So they tried to write around it, with an agreement whose operation did not depend on the peace holding anywhere except between the two parties to it.

It held for a century. Then it was broken by a power that had not signed it.

The men who were paid to fight at sea

The word vitalienses is attested from 1390, applied to seamen taking part in the wars in the Baltic and the North Sea. In German it becomes Vitalienbrüder, the victual brothers: the armed companies of that sea war, and the name has been misleading people ever since.

The story attached to it is that they were called victual brothers because they ran food into Stockholm while the Swedes had the city blockaded. The story has a source, and the source is Reimar Kock, a Lübeck chronicler writing in the middle of the sixteenth century. Cordsen traced the word somewhere else entirely, to French precedents from the naval war against England, where crews serving on that footing already carried it. The victualling of Stockholm is a later explanation for a word that was in use before anyone needed one.

The companies did not appear out of nowhere either. They came out of troops the Mecklenburg dukes had been raising for the Swedish crown, and the employers who used them afterwards are documented: the Mecklenburgers, Wismar, Rostock, and later the Count of Holland. What is not documented anywhere is the Hanse employing them. From 1395 Danzig was spending pound-toll money on peace ships to hunt them.

The reason they are so hard to place is structural, and it is Rohmann's point. The sea was not yet a settled legal space. No authority could say with any general force which violence at sea was lawful and which was robbery, and the towns themselves went to sea in Auslieger, privately run armed ships fitted out at a town's own expense and sailing under its licence, crewed by the same sort of men. A crew was a licensed combatant while its employer was at war and something else the moment the employer stopped paying. The difference between the two conditions was a piece of paper and somebody's continuing interest, and both of those expired. Prisoners were called pirates when nothing political argued otherwise.

Gotland is the island in the middle of the Baltic that everything sails past, which is what had made it the first place German merchants organised themselves abroad and what made it worth taking now. The Teutonic Order took it in 1398, and that is usually where the account ends, with the island cleared and the companies scattering west into the North Sea. The campaigns ran on to 1408.

Look at what the towns had done to themselves. They had spent a generation teaching men to fight at sea, paying them by the voyage, and licensing them to take enemy cargo. When a war ended, the ships and the crews and the skills were still there, and the men who had them still had to eat. And no instrument the League possessed reached them. A boycott is aimed at a city. Verhansung is aimed at a member town. Neither has anything to say to a crew that owns its own ship.

One of those crews produced the only Hanseatic name most people know.

What the records say about Störtebeker

Hermann Korner was a Dominican in Lübeck, and he wrote his world chronicle more than once. Modern editors can date the versions: one in 1423, one about 1430, one in 1435 [M]. That sequence is unusually useful, because it lets you watch a detail arrive.

In the earlier versions, the sea captains taken off Helgoland and executed at Hamburg have no forenames. From the version of about 1430 the leader has one. He is Nicolaus Stortebeker, and every retelling since has taken the name from there, some thirty-five years after the events it belongs to [M]. A surname on its own is a report. A forename makes a person, and a person can carry a story.

Korner is not being caught out in a lie here. He is often the only witness there is for the sea war, and much of what is known about it comes through him. The point is narrower than that. On this one detail his own manuscript tradition shows the name arriving late.

Meanwhile there is a man in the Prussian archives with the same surname, and he is far better documented than the one in the chronicle. He is Johann Stortebeker, of Danzig, and the paperwork follows him for years.

In April 1405 he was before the Grand Master at Marienburg, accused of breaking the boycott of England, with one Danzig burgher standing surety for him until he should return from a pilgrimage to Rome [CR]. In March 1406 he was fined 25 marks and 23 English nobles for smuggling [CR]. In 1409 he paid the Danzig pound toll four times in the year, on ships of 100 and 120 lasts [CR], a last being the standard measure of bulk in that trade. In 1411 the Königsberg Grossschäfferei, the Teutonic Order's own commercial office, held shares in the ship he was sailing. On 21 September 1413 Henry V of England took him and forty men into his protection [CR].

Take the first of those on its own. A man arraigned before the Grand Master's court for trading into England against a Hanseatic boycott is a merchant, and he is being prosecuted by his own side for a commercial offence. A Danzig burgher stands surety, which means a townsman with property was willing to be answerable for his return. And he is going to Rome. That is a man with a business, a reputation and creditors.

The last entry works the same way. A safe-conduct from the king of England covers somebody the English crown expected to have dealings with, and forty men is a crew.

Read the sequence again and notice what kind of documents these are. A court register, a fine, a toll book, a share ledger, a safe-conduct. Every one of them is somebody's routine paperwork, written to settle an account rather than to make a case about the man.

Then the execution. Korner writes that some of them were put to death, ex eis, and the phrase does not have to take in the captains he has just named; it can as easily mean some of the men. The execution is unambiguous and independently confirmed for exactly one of the captains, Gödeke Michels, whose end is recorded in the Hamburg chamber accounts as well as in the chronicle.

What the record will support is smaller than the legend, and stranger. Johann Stortebeker was a licensed combatant, a smuggler, a shipowner, a debtor of the Teutonic Order and a merchant. He was several of those things inside one decade, and the clerks who wrote him down did not find that odd, because in the Baltic of his lifetime they were not yet different jobs.