The ‘Golden Age’ of the Hanseatic League 69
and 1407, mostly meeting in Lübeck.20 The strategy agreed on by the assembly
of January 1358 was completely successful.
The Hanseatic League at War with Denmark (1361–1370)
In the 1330s Denmark suffered from a period of weakness and was dominated
by count Gerhard iii of Holstein. Efforts of the Hanseatic towns and Northern
German princes to restore internal peace were not successful,21 and as a result
the election of Waldemar iv ‘Atterdag’ as king after Gerhard’s death in 1340 was
widely welcomed. Waldemar concentrated on the restoration of royal power
at first by renouncing parts of his kingdom. He resigned Scania to Sweden in
1343 and sold Northern Estonia to the Teutonic Knights in 1346. But this did not
mean that he was satisfied with the situation. In 1350, he made clear that his
final goal was the restoration of the Baltic empire of his predecessors.22 In 1360,
Waldemar finally decided to reverse his policies and start an expansion.23 He
used the weakness of the Swedish King Magnus to re-conquer the formerly lost
territories in Southern Sweden, Scania, Halland, and Blekinge, though Magnus
had paid him a compensation for his losses before. In July 1361, he turned to
Gotland, defeated its peasant army and finally accepted the homage of Visby,
which had been absent from the fighting and now submitted itself to the vic-
torious king.24 Though Waldemar allowed Visby to continue its co-operation
within the Hanseatic League and renewed its privileges, the towns felt a threat
by the change of power in the Northern European kingdoms, especially since
the king had raised the taxes on Scania. Again the towns’ assemblies were
the institution to discuss and co-ordinate the towns’ activities and measures.
20 Henn, Tagfahrten, 4.
21 See e.g. the treaty of 1338, hub 2, 606.
22 See Niels Skyum-Nielsen, “König Waldemar von Atterdag von Dänemark: Persönlichkeit
und Politik,” Hansische Geschichtsblätter 102 (1984), 5–20, at 9; Anders Bøgh, Sejren i kvin-
dens hånd: kampen om magten i norden ca. 1365–1389 (Aarhus: Universitetsforl., 2003), 13.
23 In general cf. Bøgh, Sejren, 24–53, 292–93; Niels Bracke, Die Regierung Waldemars iv. Eine
Untersuchung zum Wandel von Herrschaftsstrukturen im spätmittelalterlichen Dänemark,
Kieler Werkstücke vol. 21 (Frankfurt am Main, 1999); Erich Hoffmann, “König Waldemar
iv: als Politiker und Feldherr,” in Akteure und Gegner der Hanse. Zur Prosopographie der
Hansezeit, ed. Detlef Kattinger, Horst Wernicke (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nf., 1998),
271–87.
24 Jochen Götze, “Von Greifswald nach Stralsund. Die Auseinandersetzungen der deutschen
Seestädte und ihrer Verbündeten mit König Valdemar von Dänemark 1361–1360,”
Hansische Geschichtsblätter 88 (1970), 83–122, at 83.