The ‘Golden Age’ of the Hanseatic League 95
even against merchants or peasants; to suppress internal unrest by force, if nec-
essary; and to prefer the tohopesate in case of conflicting agreements. Rather
indirectly it becomes clear that the partners in the alliance had been divided
in three, with Lübeck, Hamburg, and Magdeburg being the heads of the thirds.
They were allowed to admit other towns interested in cooperation.99 When the
tohopesate of 38 Wendish, Saxon, Brandenburg, and Pomeranian towns was
concluded for three years on 30 August 1443 in Lübeck,100 it was only the three
heads that signed the contract. For the first time after the dissolution of the
‘Confederation of Cologne’ in 1385, there was a closer alliance of the towns,
though limited to Northern Germany.
In 1444 Kolberg came into conflict with Duke Bogislaw ix of Pomerania, and
Soest renounced fealty to Archbishop Dietrich of Cologne, while Braunschweig
suffered from another internal riot in 1445. Though the tohopesate did not inter-
vene in all these conflicts, it was clear that the towns needed mutual support.
Thus it was Braunschweig and the other Saxon towns that pressed the other
towns to renew the alliance. In May 1447, the three thirds of 1443 were joined by
a fourth group formed by the towns of Westphalia and at the Zuiderzee, led by
Münster, Nijmegen, Deventer, Wesel, and Paderborn. The older thirds became
fourths, and the now 62 towns allied themselves for ten years—though it is
not clear if the contract was in fact ratified. But the situation remained criti-
cal, especially since in August 1449, Mecklenburg and Pomerania allied against
their towns, and Frederick of Brandenburg co-operated with them. The towns
reacted with the renewal of the tohopesate of 1447. After some discussions,
finally, in September 1450 at an assembly in Lübeck, the towns’ representa-
tives agreed on a new tohopesate without the Brandenburg towns and thus
only with three thirds, the Hamburg third which had included the cities of the
margravate united with that of Lübeck. In case of an attack by the princes, all
towns had to send their troops; otherwise they were threatened by exclusion
from the tohopesate and the Hanseatic League. The alliance was put into force
for six years in Lübeck in April 1451.
This was the peak of the urban alliances. In fact, all tohopesaten concluded
later were much more limited. Their real impact is uncertain. The alliances
were only agreed upon temporarily and were never intended to become part of
the overall structures of the Hanseatic League. Thus it seems anachronistic to
ask if a chance was missed for further development and intensification of the
99 hr ii 3, 60.
100 Cf. the map in Horst Wernicke, “Die sächsischen Städte in der Hanse,” in Matthias Puhle,
ed., Hanse-Städte-Bünde. Die sächsischen Städte zwischen Elbe und Weser um 1500, Bd. 1
(Magdeburg: Stadt Magdeburg Museen 1996), 29–35, at 33.