2 Harreld
meticulously detailed to the point of serving as a reference manual for later
scholars.
Several contemporaries, Rudolf Häpke, Fritz Rörig, and Walther Vogel,
among others, formed what might be considered the next generation of Hanse
historians. Rudolf Häpke’s most well know contributions to Hanse history
focused on the league’s presence in the Low Countries, and particularly in
Bruges, which was the topic of his dissertation.4 Fritz Rörig, an expert on the
history of Lübeck and the Hanse more broadly,5 was particularly interested in
the Hanse towns. His best know work in English, The Medieval Town, is a trans-
lation of the book Die Europaïsche Stadt im Mittelalter.6 In it, Rörig examines
the reasons for he saw as the decline of the Hanse towns’ due to Dutch and
English competition. While Rörig was most interested in the Hanse towns, his
sometime collaborator, Walther Vogel focused on Hanse ships and shipping.
Vogel’s work, Geschichte de deutschen Seeschiffahrt, continued to be influential
for researchers for decades after its publication.
Following the Second World War, political overtones infused Hanse scholar-
ship particularly as Marxist scholars attempted to fit Hanse history into their
theoretical framework,8 but scholars’ understanding of the character of the
Hanse began to undergo significant change in other ways as well. One of the
best-known attempts at writing a general history of the Hanse in the decade or
so following the war was Karl Pagel’s Die Hanse, which perpetuated the notion
that the Hanse acted as a homogenous body and a powerful arm of the Holy
Roman Empire.9 Pagel had missed the mark according to many of the scholars
of the time, including Ahasver von Brandt who set out to refute Pagel’s charac-
terization of the Hanse cities as a medieval power bloc.10 It was, in effect, von
Brandt who soon set a new tone for Hanse scholarship with his characteriza-
4 Rudolf Häpke, Brügges, Entwicklung zum mittelalterlichen Weltmarkt (Berlin: Curtius,
1908). See also, Rudolf Häpke, ed., Niederländische Akten und Urkunden zur Geschichte der
Hanse und zur deutschen Seegeschichte (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1913).
5 See for example, Fritz Rörig, Der Markt von Lübeck: Topographisch-statistische
Untersuchengen zur deutschen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Leipzig: Quelle &
Meyer, 1922).
6 Fritz Rörig, Die Europaïsche Stadt im Mittelalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht,
1955).
7 Walther Vogel, Geschichte der deutschen Seeschiffahrt (Berlin: Reimer, 1915).
8 Andreas Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective: the East German approach
(London: Taurus, 1986), 97.
9 Karl Pagel, Die Hanse (Brunswick: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1952).
10 Ahasver von Brandt, Die Hanse und die nordischen Mächte im Mittelalter (Opladen:
Westdeutscher Verlag, 1962).