ABSTRACT

The maritime supremacy of the Scandinavians in northern waters was destroyed, replaced and ultimately surpassed by the seapower of a society of a radically different order—urban, bourgeois, commercial, culturally undistinguished and almost uniquely averse to the acquisition of territory. This was the Hanseatic League, an association of north-German towns and cities, and one of the most remarkable manifestations of a more extensive European, and in the end German, push to the East. By 1370, the redoubtable Hanseatic League, with Lubeck at its head, was in existence. At sea, the Hanse was to meet in the Dutch and the English, opponents more single minded. Both, by the late Middle Ages, were major producers of woollen textiles for which, with the shrinking markets of a European economy in recession, they were eager to find new outlets. Of all the early maritime empires that of the Hanse is the most elusive, its influence and achievement the most difficult to assess.