Hanseatic League

The Hanseatic League was a famous merchant trade organization. Unlike today, merchants had to travel to their customers rather than the customers traveling to them. Because they had to travel, they had to protect their merchandise from any bandits or pirates. Sometimes other merchants would join together and form a team to protect their merchandise. They originally formed along the areas of the northern coast of Europe. Although later they did end up expanding in other parts of Europe.

The Hanseatic League then started to develop in Lubeck Germany. Lubeck was basically the central for all of the merchants to go. Lubeck ended up working hand in hand with another town which was Hamburg to help out with the salt-fish trade in the area.

After Hamburg joined Lubeck another area joined in which was Cologne in 1260. Everybody was helping out with the league and was not self-centered. This is when the Hanseatic League was officially established (1358). At their height they started to expand from their original cities to 70 to 170 cities.

There were two reasons why this Hanseatic League was created, economic reasons and plus to help out the protection for the merchants. Like in the beginning, merchants are traveling and are taking the risk to getting their merchandise stolen by pirates or bandits. To help out the protection side to the League all of the towns came together and formed their own army.

There was also another time in which the Hanseatic League expanded. The Scandinavians had started out by controlling another different trade route which was called the Baltic route. After the Scandinavians signed a treaty with the League they were officially part of the Hanseatic League.

In the 1360’s the League went to war as a team and this was an important part that happened with the League because it was able to expand even more than they already have. When they were at war they were able to take over Denmark and even achieve a monopoly in Scandinavia.

Unfortunately at a certain point the league did end up weakening. That started when the Swedish Empire was growing very strong which led to them weakening.  There were also some other reasons to them falling like when Denmark became independent and the rest of the people who supported the League became self-centered and didn’t support the League as much as they did before. The Hanseatic League did try and try again to revive themselves but they did end up collapsing in the late 16^th century.