178 Ewert and Selzer
A Functional Perspective: The Economic Meaning of
Social Networks
The Structure of Trade Networks and Characteristics of
Commercial Exchange
Much of the Hanseatic trade was operated by self-employed merchants, fam-
ily businesses, and small-scale firms. Because of their small size, complex
hierarchical structures are seldom, if ever found among them. The company
of Falbrecht-Morser-Rosenfeld,34 which operated during the early fifteenth
century in England and Hungary and the business-house Loitz from Stettin,35
founded in the sixteenth century, were among these rare cases. However, the
simple organizational structure of single firms was only part of the trading
pattern in the late Middle Ages that can be observed in the Baltic and the
North Sea region. A more complex structure of commercial exchange had
emerged from the interactions between the simply structured firms. Hanseatic
merchants formed trade networks of different sizes, densities, and endur-
ances. These networks were medium-term or long-term cooperations between
legally independent merchants who traded goods with each other. A spatial
specialization—as it is called in organization science—was achieved because
traders from different places in the Baltic could feed many different prod-
ucts and goods into such networks. Hanseatic merchants usually employed
each other as commercial agents in distant places. As a result of many com-
mercial exchange relations being handled in this particular manner, widely
im spätmittelalterlichen Ostseeraum,” in Sunhild Kleingärtner and Gabriel Zeilinger, eds.,
Raumbildung durch Netzwerke? Der Ostseeraum zwischen Wikingerzeit und Spätmittelalter
aus archäologischer und geschichtswissenschaftlicher Perspektive, Zeitschrift für
Archäologie des Mittelalters, Beiheft 23 (Bonn: Habelt, 2012), 117–130.
34 Wolfgang von Stromer, “Der innovatorische Rückstand der hansischen Wirtschaft,” in
Knut Schulz, ed., Beiträge zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte des Mittelalters. Festschrift
für Herbert Helbig zum 65. Geburtstag (Cologne: Böhlau, 1976), 204–217; Franz Irsigler,
“Hansischer Kupferhandel im 15. und in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Hansische
Geschichtsblätter 97 (1979), 15–35, 22–24.
35 Johannes Papritz, “Das Stettiner Handelshaus der Loitz im Boisalzhandel des Odergebietes
unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Beziehungen zum brandenburgischen
Kurhause,” (Dissertation manuscript, Berlin, 1932); Id., “Das Handelshaus der Loitz zu
Stettin, Danzig und Lüneburg,” Baltische Studien N.F. 44 (1957), 73–94; Heidelore Böcker,
“Das Handelshaus der Loitz. Urteil der Zeitgenossen, Stand der Forschung, Ergänzungen,”
in Detlev Kattinger and Horst Wernicke, eds., Akteure und Gegner der Hanse. Zur
Prosopographie der Hansezeit. Konrad-Fritze-Gedächtnisschrift, Hansische Studien, vol. 9,
(Weimar: Böhlau, 1998), 203–218.