The Baltic Trade 197
The Main Trade Centers
In the course of time some places on the Baltic developed into important
trading-centers at the cost of other, mostly older places from the Viking age.
One might say cum grano salis that since the end of the twelfth century one
type of trading place was the most successful: the harbor-town with German
municipal law and a central market with main church and guildhall. This kind
of town—which in the older tradition wrongly was called “Gründungsstadt”—
was the future model of all Baltic town constructions. The most important
“new” towns were not established in the open countryside, but based on older
and well-known trading centers. The first example of this kind of town was
Lübeck, an older Slavonian settlement which was granted German rights in
1158/59, and shortly thereafter Slesvig, which was remodeled at the end of the
century. (See Chapter 1 in this volume). Emanating from Lübeck, this type of
town law and construction spread to the whole Baltic area, mostly to the south
and east coast, but also to the north. The number of these “new” cities increased
to 204 in the thirteenth century from 38 cities before 1200.6 Beginning with
Riga in 1201, the deltas of the most important rivers developed into trading
centers as did the endpoints of the main inland roads at the most important
bays and fjords. A tightly woven network of merchant towns had thus devel-
oped by the middle of the thirteenth century around the Baltic: Reval (Tallinn)
since 1230, Pernau (Pernü) 1251, Dorpat (Tartu) after 1224, Altstadt Königsberg
(Kaliningrad) 1255, Danzig (Gdańsk) 1238, Thorn (Toruń) 1231, Elbing (Elbląg)
1241, Stettin (Szczecin) 1237, Greifswald 1241, Demmin around 1231, Rostock
1218, Wismar 1228, Kiel between 1232 and 1242, Flensburg latest 1284, Næstved
at the end of the twelfth century, Køge 1288, Copenhagen 1254 and Stockholm
around 1250 were only some of the many new modeled towns that opened
their gates for an extended trade.7
The remodeling of the old trading centers went along with a change in the
religious, social and ethnological structure of the whole area. Parallel to the
movement of merchants, German farmers also moved east, in the German
tradition called “Ostkolonisation,” changing the methods of agricultural
6 Konrad Fritze, “Zur Entwicklung des Städtewesens im Ostseeraum vom 12. bis zum 15.
Jahrhundert.” In Der Ost- und Nordseeraum. Politik—Ideologie—Kultur vom 12. bis zum 15.
Jahrhundert, ed. K. Fritze, E. Müller-Mertens and J. Schildhauer (Weimar: Böhlau, 1986), 9–18.
7 Philippe Dollinger, Die Hanse, (Stuttgart: Körner, 1989), 49–52; Thomas Riis, “Die Urba-
ninisierung Dänemarks im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert.” In Die Stadt im westlichen Ostseeraum.
Vorträge zur Stadtgründung und Stadterweiterung im Hohen Mittelalter, i, ed. Erich Hoffmann
and Frank Lubowitz (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1995), 195–213, Kieler Werkstücke, A, 14.