The Baltic Trade 195
The Main Trade Routes
The connecting function constituted the basic element of the Baltic trade
system. Traffic from the east to the west of the Baltic Sea was the major task of
the Hanseatic trade in this area. Merchants brought their goods inland to the
great entrepôts, mainly at the eastern and southern coasts, where they were
consolidated into larger cargoes and then shipped to the west.
The Hanseatic merchants preferred two main westward routes. The first,
from the middle of the thirteenth2 up until the fifteenth century, was the route
via Lübeck and Hamburg. This route was the most secure but also one of the
most expensive routes in and out of the Baltic Sea. In this case, goods were
shipped to the harbor of Lübeck, repacked to carts, brought onto Hamburg
by land, or from 1398 by smaller boats with a voyage of about 97 km on the
Stecknitz channel to the river Elbe and to Hamburg harbor, from where they
were send to their final destinations in the west. This route was very secure
because Lübeck and Hamburg controlled both routes and provided for the
security of the merchants. But it was so expensive to load and unload three
times on the way to the west that mainly luxury goods and only a few bulk
goods were sent by this route.
The other route was the only sea route to the Baltic, the waterway around
the Skaw (Cape Skagen), the so-called “ummelandfart,” which was used
for transport from the beginning of the thirteenth century also. This route
was two hundred kilometers longer but cheaper and more practical, particu-
larly because it could accommodate the bigger ships with higher tonnage that
were developed in the beginning and the middle of the thirteenth century. But
the seaway west of the Skaw was one of the most dangerous in Europe until
the end of the nineteenth century and remained one of the greatest grave-
yards for ships until modern times. Therefore, in the beginning this route was
only used for bulk cargos and developed later into a full-fledged—albeit very
perilous—alternative to the Lübeck route. This seaway was first mainly used as
a connection between the Scanian markets and the west,3 but from the end of
the fourteenth century, it was used as a connection between the Dutch and the
246–259; Antoni Mączak and Henryk Samsonowicz, “La zone Baltique: L’un des éléments du
marché Européen.” Acta Poloniae Historica 11 (1965): 71–99.
2 Carsten Jahnke, “Handelsstrukturen im Ostseeraum im 12. und beginnenden 13. Jahrhundert.
Ansätze einer Neubewertung”, in: Hansische Geschichtsblätter 126 (2008): 145–185.
3 Carsten Jahnke, Das Silber des Meeres. Fang und Vertrieb von Ostseehering zwischen Norwegen
und Italien (12.–16. Jahrhundert) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 69ff.