Social Networks 177
economic success usually meant that the respective person moved from the
west side to the more reputable east side of Greifswald. Therefore it seems
plausible to assume that spatial vicinity or even a direct neighborhood of the
councilors and mayors of the town would have increased the frequency of
social contact as well as it improved the density of social networks. In terms of
sheer numbers, this situation cannot be compared to modern cities because
even the medieval city of Lübeck, one of the larger examples, is estimated to
have had only about 25,000 inhabitants, while the population of a town like
Greifswald was likely to have had only about a quarter of Lübeck’s, between
5,000 and 6,000 inhabitants. Given these relatively small population figures,
communication between the inhabitants of the town should have been pos-
sible, which makes the spatial social segregation in such a small town even
more astonishing. And compared to Italian towns of those days, which very
often were divided into separate neighborhoods each dominated by a powerful
family of the town’s ruling class, the social networks of Hanseatic leading fami-
lies were based not only on social but also on spatial nearness within the town.
The fact that both elements—social proximity and spatial vicinity—were
often combined in the social networks of Hansards, can be derived from the
case of the group of those merchants from Lübeck who traveled to or traded
with Bergen. The oldermen of this merchants’ company, who stood in the
center of a sustained social network, usually occupied also a leading politi-
cal role in the city of Lübeck, and they and their descendants lived for a very
long time—well into the nineteenth century—nearby to each other in only a
few streets in the inner city of Lübeck.32 A more in-depth investigation of this
social network formed out of merchants who traded in the same area, which
was done by Mike Burkhardt using graphical and mathematical techniques
of social network analysis, reveals for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a
strong coherence of social proximity, kinship bonds and commercial coopera-
tion around a core of a few families, but also a visible change towards a less
kinship-based trade pattern during the late fifteenth century.33
32 Georg Asmussen, “Die Älterleute der Lübecker Bergenfahrer (1401–1854). Eine
Führungsposition in Lübeck im Vergleich über mehrere Jahrhunderte,” in Stephan
Selzer and Ulf Christian Ewert, eds., Menschenbilder—Menschenbildner. Individuum und
Gruppe im Blick des Historikers. Werner Paravicini zum 60. Geburtstag, Hallische Beiträge
zur Geschichte des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, vol. 2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
2002), 121–152.
33 Mike Burkhardt, Der hansische Bergenhandel im Spätmittelalter. Handel—Kaufleute—
Netzwerke, Quellen und Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte, vol. 60 (Cologne,
Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2009); Id., “Kaufmannsnetzwerke und Handelskultur. Zur
Verbindung von interpersonellen Beziehungsgeflechten und kaufmännischem Habitus