8
HANDEL:
The Polish Grain Trade
The rise of the Vistula trade can be clearly dated to the middle of the fifteenth
century. At the moment when the entire Vistula basin, from source to seaboard,
was united under one political rule, external demand for Polish corn was nicely
matched by favourable prospects of increased internal supply. Rising prices in
Western Europe sent merchants far afield, not least to the Hansa port of Danzig.
At the same time, Polish cereal production was approaching the crucial point at
which surpluses could be regularly obtained. The influx of the merchants,
largely Dutchmen, buying in large quantities coincided with the new-found
capacity of Polish landowners to sell. Henceforward, Danzig's trade was to mul-
tiply far beyond the modest business established during the century and a half
since its capture in 1308 by the Teutonic Order. In 1454 it renounced its alle-
giance to the Teutonic state, and at the head of the Prussian League, appealed
for the protection of Kazimierz Jagiellonczyk, King of Poland. The Prussian del-
egation arrived in Cracow during celebrations of the King's marriage to
Elizabeth of Austria, daughter of the Emperor. Among their complaints against
the Teutonic Knights, as recorded in the act of incorporation, was one to the
effect that a Pomeranian merchant had been condemned to death for sending
goods to Cracow in his ships on the Vistula. At the end of the Thirteen Years
War in 1466, Danzig became the chief city of the new Polish province of Royal
Prussia. From then on, for more than three centuries, it never looked back. It
was the natural outlet of a vast Polish hinterland, the natural junction of sea-
going traffic with the river-borne trade. Although it never lost its German char-
acter, its hostility to Hohenzollern Prussia, and its loyalty to its Polish
protectors, rarely wavered. Danzig was a German jewel in the Polish Crown, the
chief emporium and shop-window of the multinational Republic.
The shift in Polish commercial life, which occurred in the 1450s, is well illus-
trated by the career of the Kopernik family. Until this time, Mikolaj Kopernik
had been a burgher of Cracow, the capital in the south. As his name also sug-
gests, he was engaged in the metal trade, having originated from a settlement
called Koperniki in Silesia, and worked as a broker in Slovakian copper which
passed through Cracow on its way north. In August 1454 he visited Danzig on
business and four years later, with the Teutonic War still in progress, decided to
settle permanently in nearby Thorn (Torun), an important entrepot on the