130 Burkhardt
home. They stayed in a social environment with codes and unwritten rules dif-
ferent from what they were used to. Although medieval English, Norwegian,
and Low German were by far not as different as their respective descendants
are today, the languages spoken in the towns often were hard to understand
for the Hanseatic merchants. The kontors provided a place where they could
feel at home, especially for newcomers. Merchants could start their businesses
right away without having to adjust to foreign customs first. Economics aside,
the kontors provided merchants with other benefits. They provided a place for
the merchants’ questions to be answered in their mother tongue. Also, being
able to conduct small talk without difficulty must have meant a lot to the mer-
chants’ sense of well-being. Finally, having an organized community of fellow
countrymen was important in case of any problems. The kontor as an organi-
zation along with fellow merchants provided aid in legal matters, cases of ill-
ness, material losses to tricksters, robbers, or officials, economic negotiations,
and death. The kontor provided Hanseatic merchants with potential business
partners and social contacts. In many cases, we find merchants who served
as assistants at one of the Hanseatic kontors and still remained connected in
a business or social network years after they had left the outposts. The time
spent together in a potentially hostile environment and the joint memories
from the days at the kontor provided a strong base for maintaining social rela-
tions and served as a solid foundation for mutual trust in business matters.
Security can be seen as the overarching reason for the existence of Hanseatic
kontors. From the towns’s point of view, the kontors provided possibilities for
internal control and thus secured the privileges and the towns’s credibility.
Local authorities might have taken advantage of the kontors’ security system.
They saw that the Hansards took care of most dangers concerning inner secu-
rity and social peace for hundreds or even thousands of foreign young men
populating the town. The merchants themselves found regulations that would
guarantee them a certain minimum income without restricting them from
making high profits. Furthermore, living at the kontors provided reliable secu-
rity for goods and lives, and offered social security, mutual aid, and a huge vari-
ety of potential business partners and social relations.
The kontors were as much socio-political entities as they were economic
ones. As social and political conditions underwent major changes during the
late Middle Ages, the merchants’ organizational environments had to adjust.
Thus, we can see a permanent differentiation in the organizational level of
Hanseatic merchants abroad. The kontors were not set up by Hanseatic towns,
rather they developed from loosely connected merchant associations to
more systematically structured entities representing the will of all Hanseatic
merchants. This development fits well with Norbert Elias’s observations in