Another Winter in Germany: Fun times with the Hanseatic League

This weekend we visited the European Hansemuseum, just a few blocks from our flat. It's a fantastic new museum featuring one of the oldest cultural influences of Europe, the Hanseatic League. The latest museum technology lets you program your visit according to what you're most interested in, in your preferred language.

To start the museum tour, you ride an ultra-modern, polygon-shaped glass elevator slowly down to an archaeological excavation of the earliest structures built in Lübeck, in the 1100s.

The excavated structures of early Lübeck dealt mainly with water, poo, and trash which continue to this day to be an issue for concentrated populations. (Getty Images photo of the elevator descending)

As you walk through the restored structures that were built 850 years ago, the background music is a low bass sound backed by a chord progression than never quiiiiite resolves -- designed, I'm sure, to keep you on edge, just like people back then obviously were most of their lives.

Bear with me: I love this stuff so will present to you the history of Lübeck -- learned at the Hansemuseum -- in a nutshell:

Things started gearing up in this part of Europe in the 700s, when Slavic settlers moved to this area (near what's now Denmark), and minor Slavic princes built a fortress on the land where Lübeck now sits. After a couple hundred years and a series of wars, they abandoned it all, and in 1143 a man named Adolf II, Count of Schauenberg (whoever that is) decided to start a new town at the old fortress site.

The count wanted to start a new trading center here, but needed people, so he sent messengers out to other lands to tell people that if they wanted "the most beautiful, the most spacious, the most fertile fields, replete with fish and meat," they should bring their families here. So they did, and that was the beginning of Lübeck.

As the populations around the area grew by the 12th and 13th centuries, merchants were having a rough time getting goods to everyone who needed them. There were so many ambushes and killings back then, the only way for merchants to succeed in trade and live to tell about it was to band together and travel in groups, using wooden boats to ship their goods.

Because navigation was so rudimentary, they had to stay within sight of shore in daylight, which was dangerous but necessary for survival. They only ventured onto open sea (the Baltic) at night, when they could see the Northern Star and keep their bearings.

These merchants established the Hanseatic League, a group of traders all around the Baltic Sea, and this was the beginning of Europe as we know it to this day. The areas they traded are shown in gold in the map below, but they also bought and sold goods inland as far as Asia (but not yet to the New World, of course, as Europeans hadn't realized it existed yet). When you visit the cities of this map today, you can see the influence of the Hanseatic League in the architecture: houses built side-by-side with brick facades.

The goods they traded give you a feeling for what life must have been like when the hottest commodities on the market were fish, salt, timber, resin, furs, birch bark, amber, wool, and wax. They were also already trading spices, fruits, and silks from Asia and Africa by this time, which goes to show you, globalization is nothing new.

I won't belabor this, but suffice it to say that the work and innovation that went on for hundreds of years to build northern Europe left us exhausted and ready for lunch.

We finished up by learning about the end of the mighty Hanseatic League: in the years following the Reformation and the Thirty Years War (which ended in 1648) it had become obvious that the formerly powerful merchant class could no longer control much of anything. The Hanseatic League died out from lack of interest. Much like our oil men of today, some of the Hanseatic merchants, who used to be such hot-shots around town, refused to believe their way of life was ending. It was kind of pathetic, really: they'd hold meetings, and no one would come. New markets opened up in the New World, Spain took over as a major economic force, and trading solely around the Baltic Sea suddenly wasn't such a big deal anymore. I believe we're witnessing the same thing with our fossil-fuel-based economy, slowly grinding to a halt while a new economy gears up. It helps me to know, from learning history, that this kind of transition can take over a hundred years. I might not live to see it but it will happen.

One more note about this history: It was interesting for me to learn that it was the Thirty Years War that was the death knell for the Hanseatic League, because that war played a big role in my own family history, too. My father's side of the family originated in what became Estonia and ended up in Germany in the 1600s. This was a mystery to me, as travel wasn't easy and you didn't just willy-nilly move from Estonia to Germany in the 1600s. We recently learned that our Estonian ancestor was drafted into the Swedish Army and sent to Germany during the Thirty Years War. So THAT was how he did it! He deserted the army in southern Germany, and a couple hundred years later his descendants emigrated from Germany to America, and so we thought we were of German descent until recently.

I'll end with a set of photographs. In the museum was a photo of the street near our flat in Lübeck, taken in the year 1868: