The next time you’re in Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, Rostock, Lüneburg, or any of these
cities across northern Germany, take a look at their license plates.
Since German license plates show the city that the car was registered in, you can see
the abbreviations of every city in Germany.
With this in mind, you might have noticed that all the cities I just mentioned have
abbreviations starting with H, even cities like Lübeck and Bremen, so why do they have
an H in them?
Short answer, a little something called the Hanseatic League.
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The Hanseatic League was a merchant union between many of the great trading cities across
the Northern and Baltic Seas, stretching from Brügges in modern-day Belgium to Riga in
modern-day Latvia, and even with presences in Finland, Norway, and England.
However, their main players were many of the cities across northern Germany.
These sea lanes and their surrounding settlements were rich with resources like, timber, wax,
wheat, resins and KhAnubis merch (which you can now get by going to khanubis.tv and clicking
“store”, or clicking the link just below NordVPN’s link), and also in merchants of
all different kinds of trades.
Basically, it was the perfect place to establish a city in an online mobile game.
It was these such merchants which would eventually give rise to the Hanseatic League.
Across the northern shores of modern-day Germany, numerous guilds (known as “Hanse” in the
German of the time) were established for merchants of the area to form and protect business partnerships
and trading relations.
In 1241, the cities of Lübeck and Hamburg formed an alliance which was essentially the
precursor to the Hanseatic League.
Lübeck had access to the fishing grounds (err… waters?) of the North and Baltic Seas,
while Hamburg controlled access to the salt trade routes of Lüneburg.
Cologne joined this alliance in 1260, and the Hansas continued to grow over the next
100 years, until the Hanseatic League was truly formally established with the first
general diet of the Hansa in 1356 in Lübeck.
As the Hansas continued to expand, they came into fierce competition with the trading powers
of Scandinavia, who had previously controlled trade in these waters, at least until they
signed a treaty with Visby, which would become part of the League.
The Hanseatic League wasn’t necessarily an empire as we would know it in the traditional
sense, but was more of an economic and defensive alliance between the merchant powers of the
region.
You see, this region didn’t have a strong central power to govern it, and so… you
know, they kind of needed something.
Outside of their not-an-empire, the Hansas established various foreign trading posts,
each known as a “kontor”, meaning office.
These kontore were established in many different cities outside the League, including London,
Bergen, and Novgorod, with ports and warehouses owned by the League.
The traders of the League would also often establish trading settlements just outside--or
often in-- the walls of a new city they found would be good for trading.
As the Hanseatic League was not a single kingdom or empire, it had quite a unique political
structure for the time, with many experts liking it to a kind of medieval European Union
in some ways (notably Britain’s reluctance to get fully involved with them).
The League was essentially a conglomeration of different merchant towns and city-states,
although it kind of fell somewhere slightly in between a united state and a confederation
of independent city-states.
Perhaps the best way to describe it would be as a highly structured defensive and trade
alliance.
The Hanseatic League did have an army, as well as a legal system, taxes, and the member
cities would send envoys to the occasional diet meeting in the capital of Lübeck.
Hanseatic traders were often even exempt from local taxes and laws while trading abroad
in England, Scandinavia, or Russia.
The League thrived in this manner for a couple hundred years, until it eventually met its
downfall, starting in the 16th century, as they started getting territorially bullied
by the Swedish Empire and Denmark, and economically bullied by the suddenly vastly prosperous
British and especially Dutch East India Companies.
As the foreign kontore also started to close once their hosts started to stop liking them
as much due to often monopolistic actions and not following local laws, the remaining
cities of the Hanseatic League also started to look towards local interests, especially
as, you know, Germany was looking like it was about to approach starting to be a thing.
Of course, putting together foreign traders that want to trade in a city with low taxes
and a kingdom that wants to extract as much in taxes as it can from said traders goes
about as well as spaghetti and chocolate, or KhAnubis and not stealing joke prompts
from Half as Interesting.
In the last formal meeting of the Hanseatic League in 1669, only 9 member cities remained,
and by the time of its disillusion in 1862 with the rise of Prussia, only 3 cities remained:
Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen.
Honestly though, respect to Hamburg and Lübeck for playing it out until the very end, that’s
dedication!
Of course, nowadays the Hanseatic League is basically just the geopolitical equivalent
of a pile of dust and barely anything remains of it today, right?
Well, not really.
While the Hanseatic League might not really be relevant today, their legacy is still very
visible across the areas they once traded across.
Of course, the most visible source of this is all the references that are made to it
in modern day Northern Europe.
For example, the German cities of Bremen, Demmin, Greifswald, Hamburg, Lübeck, Lüneburg,
Rostock, Stade, Stralsund and Wismar, as well as the Dutch cities of Groningen, Deventer,
Kampen, Zutphen and Zwolle, all call themselves Hanseatic cities.
It’s not just the “Hanse Cities” though, but also several organizations in the region,
from F.C. Hansa Rostock to the Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen to biggest
airline in Europe (if including its subsidiaries), the Cologne-based Lufthansa (Luft [Air] Hansa).
Many experts even draw plenty of parallels between the freely trading Hanseatic League
and the European Union of the current day.
Now, speaking of online security (somehow), this video was sponsored by NordVPN.
When you think about it, NordVPN and the Hanseatic League weren’t all too different, since
they were both focused on keeping their customers safe from piracy.
Cringe-inducingly forced jokes aside, NordVPN is a highly rated VPN service that allows
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Of course, they also have over 5,000 servers around the world that you can log onto in
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See you on Sunday.