The Early Hanses 37
the mid-thirteenth century.72 Supposedly, these Baltic merchants were suc-
cessful in preventing the Flemish merchants from purchasing Baltic goods dur-
ing the latter half of the century and subsequently forced the Flemish to return
home without any freight. As a result, only the early Hanse merchants are sup-
posed to have garnered the revenue available from the lucrative Eastern trade
with Flanders. After 1270, Flemish merchants had also lost their hegemony
over the trade with England.73 And to make matters worse, Low German mer-
chants now muscled their way into the business of exporting the English wool
to Flanders as well. However, even their stake in the export of English wool was
relatively small when compared to that of the Italian merchants. Finally, in
1294, the mercatores Romani imperii officially denied passage to Flemish ships
attempting to sail in the Baltic Sea.74 Therefore, from the fourteenth century
on, Flemish merchants, and especially those from Bruges, concentrated on the
intermediary functions of commerce, working as both brokers and hosteliers.
However, this retreat from the active pursuit of trading abroad, turned out to
be anything but a backward step into passivity. On the contrary, it eventually
allowed Bruges to become the ‘cradle of capitalism’.75
Thus it was that by approximately the middle of the thirteenth century,
the early Hanseatic trading system had taken shape. Merchants from the cit-
ies between the Lower Rhine and the Elbe moved their long distance trading
operations both to the East and to the West. In the East, this was especially
true of trading ventures in Visby, in Novgorod and, by way of the Duna, in
Smolensk. In the West, England and Flanders was the key. The merchants, in
turn, sold the goods they purchased in these and other respective target coun-
tries in their hometowns or at trade fairs on the Lower Rhine. Merchants from
the new Baltic cities moved directly into their Western target countries. Trade
routes in the Baltic were primarily sea routes, however the land route that ran
from Lübeck to the West via Westphalia was the most heavily traveled due
to the strong domestic trade amongst the merchants from the Lower Rhine
and Westphalia; nevertheless, from Hamburg on, the sea route was utilized as
well. One must also be cautious not to underestimate the volume of traffic
that arrived in the southern cities of Brandenburg, Altmark and Lower Saxony.
72 Carsten Jahnke, “Homines imperii,” 24–29.
73 Nicholas, Flanders, 177f.
74 Hansisches Urkundenbuch, ed. Hansischer Geschichtsverein, vol. 1, revised by Konstantin
Höhlbaum (Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1876) [abbreviated hub 1],
No. 1154, 1155.
75 James M. Murray, Bruges, Cradle of Capitalism, 1280–1390 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 189f.