224 Jahnke
The transport of wood is very complex. Because of this, sea- and river-
transport is the best and cheapest possibility, so wood predominantly came
from forests connected to the big river systems. In the Vistula area the wood
came from the big Polish, Galician, Volhynian, and Lithuanian forests con-
nected to the Vistula water-system. The felled trees were bundled in the forests
and floated to the main entrepôts such as Thorn or Danzig.120
Finally, the wood was processed in Danzig—whole trees were not exported
to the west but completed products; some of the Prussian specialities
were wainscot, tunhold and bowstaves, used to build ships or barrels or for
military purposes.121 The entire English, Hanseatic, and later the Dutch fleet
was as dependent on the supply of Baltic wood, as were the archers in the
armies, the west European cathedral architects, and Dutch painters like
Rembrand or Breughel. The wood trade, especially the Hanseatic portion of
it, between the East and the West was the lifeblood of the late medieval trade.
In the area of the wood trade, there is also a lack of evidence to enumerate
the total quantity of exported wood. What we can estimate, however, is the
amount of floated wood on the Vistula in the years 1464 and 1465, as shown in
the following graph.122
The main product floated on the Vistula during this time was wainscot, fine,
knobfree and sawed oak-wood of finest quality. This wood was used for all
building purposes, from ships to cathedrals, all over the West, and this wood
made the Baltic famous. And so it should be no wonder that in 1464 that of the
983,066 pieces of wood floated on the Vistula, 739,718 were wainscot.123
Not only was raw wood exported to the West, but also wood-products. Among
these products, alkaline materials played a large role because of the growth
of the English, Flemish and Dutch cloth industries, which needed more and
more potash and dyer’s weed-ash to dye. The producing of potash is a typical
byproduct of the wood-trade, created when wasted wood was burned at very low
120 H. Oesterreich, “Die Handelsbeziehungen der Stadt Thorn zu Polen. Von der Gründung
der Stadt bis zum Ende des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts, 1232–1577, Teil i,” Zeitschrift des
Westpreussischen Geschichtsvereins Heft xxviii (1890), 1–92, here 87.
121 W. Childs, “Timber for cloth,” 194.
122 Marian Biskup, “Handel Wiślany w latach 1454–1466,” Roczniki dziejów społecznych i gos-
podarczych, Annales d’Histoire, sociale et économique xiv (1952), 155–202, here 180f.
123 Contrary to Marian Biskup, “Handel Wiślany,” 180, Note 16, these numbers are calculated
at the basis of the grand Großhundert à 120 pieces, which are coharent to the division in
“sostich” and “quarter”. According to Biskups calculations with the minor Großhundert à
96 pieces the grand total is 954.787 pieces.