Kontors and Outposts 157
One More Kontor?
When we talk about Hanseatic kontors and outposts, we usually have four kon-
tors in mind. However, there is one trading place that needs special attention—
Scania of Denmark. Trade in Scania was far greater than the other outposts
(Faktoreien) and its character and organization was much closer a kontor than
the others. Scania was best known for its herring fairs.85 In the Baltic Sea at
Scania, the southernmost part of the Scandinavian Peninsula, huge schools of
herring gathered every year. From the early thirteenth century, Hanseatic mer-
chants came in large numbers to buy the fish and sell it in continental Europe.
Led by those from Lübeck, merchants came with salt and traveled to Scania,
where the herring was caught and preserved with the salt. The herring fish-
ery was a huge industry in Scania in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Thousands of Danish fishers and packers, men and women alike, found a liveli-
hood in the fishery season lasting from late July to early November. But trade
at Scania was much more than an exchange of salt and fish. Half of Europe
met at the Scania fairs. Hansards, Hollanders, Englishmen, Scandinavians,
Scotsmen, and Frenchmen came to Scania to trade with all kinds of merchan-
dise. Everything from grain to fish, metals to timber, and cloth to luxury goods
was sold at this interregional trading place.
Scania was especially attractive to the merchants from the Wendish towns
at the southern shores of the Western Baltic Sea as it only was a short sea travel
away from their hometowns and very cheap to access. In Scania, merchants
from a certain origin lived together at special areas, the so-called Vitten. Each of
the around thirty Vitten was autonomous in jurisdiction, administration, and
trade. The most important and best situated of them were those of the mer-
chants from Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock, and Stralsund. In 1400, there were about
900 merchants from Lübeck active in herring export from Scania. This number
shows the attractiveness of the Scanian fairs to the Wendish merchants. But the
Hanseatic merchants didn’t just play an important part in the maintenance of
this lively junction of interregional trade; the Hanse towns also laid the cause
for its rapid decline in the early fifteenth century. In 1426, the Danish king, Eric
of Pommern, raised a toll for all ships passing the Sound between Seeland and
Scania. This measure was taken as a reaction to a Danish-Wendish conflict. The
Wendish towns supported Duke Adolf of Schleswig against the Danish king.
This dispute resulted in an armed conflict. Both the war and the sound toll
caused a tremendous decline in the number of ships coming to Scania. As the
councilors of Lübeck tried to keep Dutchmen and Englishmen out of the Baltic
85 About the herring trade and the fairs in Scania, see: Jahnke (2000).