Social Networks 181
reciprocal sale operations was not necessary. The striking feature of this sort of
mutual transaction is that it was usually handled without a written contract.
Neither written long-term agreements between two merchants, nor occasional
transaction-specific written instructions existed. Even during the sixteenth
century, this form of reciprocal cooperation was prevalent among Hanseatic
merchants.43 Another feature of Hanseatic commercial exchange is that the
trade networks usually were also characterized by a “cooptition”.44 Since the
reciprocal commercial exchange allowed merchants to cooperate with more
than one trading partner and operate potentially conflicting sales with dif-
ferent sides, cooperation and competition could be found at the same time
within one network. During the late Middle Ages, the Hanse never forbade this
sort of competition.45
This pronounced network pattern of commercial exchange between
Hansards emerged in the period of demographic expansion before 1300 when
many towns in the Baltic were founded. With a simulation approach, a meth-
odology which partly can make up for the significant lack of written sources
on Hanseatic merchants in this early period, it is shown, that slow transmis-
sion of information and high transportation costs in the Baltic as well as the
und Sozialgeschichte, vol. 34 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1984), 130–146; Walter Stark, “Über
Techniken und Organisationsformen des hansischen Handels im Spätmittelalter,” in
Stuart Jenks, Michael North, eds., Der hansische Sonderweg? Beiträge zur Sozial- und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Hanse (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 1993), 191–201; Cordes,
Gesellschaftshandel (see footnote 22); Id., Wie verdiente der Kaufmann sein Geld? (see
footnote 40).
43 This is proved with the example of Bertram Bene from Oslo and his trading partners
of the Kron family from Rostock. See on this Hildegard Thierfelder, Rostock-Osloer
Handelsbeziehungen im 16. Jahrhundert. Die Geschäftspapiere der Kaufleute Kron in Rostock
und Bene in Oslo, Abhandlungen zur Handels- und Sozialgeschichte, vol. 1 (Weimar:
Böhlau, 1958), 194–197.
44 “Cooptition” is a coinage out of “cooperation” and “competition” that recently came
in use in the theory of network organizations. Thilo C. Beck, “Cooptition bei der
Netzwerkorganisation,” Zeitschrift für Organisation 67 (1998), 271–276.
45 Rolf Sprandel, “Die Konkurrenzfähigkeit der Hanse im Spätmittelalter,” Hansische
Geschichtsblätter 102 (1984), 21–38, 28. An example of an explicit prohibition of competi-
tion between trading partners is that of the company formed by Hermann Carsten, Gert
vom Brocke and Heinrich von Kampen in Lübeck in the middle of the sixteenth century,
which nonetheless is not typical in the sense, since it was one of the later companies in
which already the bureaucratic-hierarchical style had been adopted. Cf. Pierre Jeannin,
“Lübecker Handelsunternehmungen um die Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift des
Vereins für Lübeckische Geschichte und Altertumskunde 43 (1963), 19–67, 46, 57.