The Hanseatic League in the Early Modern Period 107
December briefed a legation to the Emperor, which was supposed to use the
monopolistic endeavors of the English company as an argument in the Imperial
proceedings against Count Edzard of East Frisia. Peradventure an English del-
egation should appear before the Emperor at the same time, the envoys were
to approach the Emperor with a memorandum composed by the Hanseatic
legal counsel, Heinrich Sudermann, in which the contradiction between the
monopolistic trade of the English and the simultaneous loss of privileges of
the Hanseatic League in England was made apparent. In addition, the position
of Count Edzard, who correctly pointed out that the loss of Hanseatic privilege
in England lay thirty years in the past and that the Hanseatic League sought
to achieve “under the appearance of monopolistic action [.. .] that the Holy
Roman Empire should take up the cause and help the Hanseatic cities regain
their privileges,” had to be refuted.11
In order to influence the Emperor, the content of the Sudermann
Memorandum, from January 1581, was compiled one more time in the same
month for the Imperial Chamberlain, Hans Trautson. In the Memorandum,
the important role of the Hanseatic League for defense and its privileges as
well as the important role of its land and waterways against enemy powers was
emphasized:
The ancient Holy Roman Hanseatic League, a commendable body, or
commune seen from many advantages, and furthermore the unifier of
the cities of the Holy Roman Empire, has for more than three hundred
years been a beneficial curtain-wall against all potential enemy poten-
tates, for the maintenance of free country roads and access to water and
land, to the bettering and growth of honest commerce and the renuncia-
tion of unbearable tolls, exactions, and burdens, whereby the German
nation, by foreign un-Germans, to unbearable burdens and hardships
may become [subject].12In addition to this, Sudermann put together a variety of questions for the coun-
cil of Frankfurt (Frankfurter Rat), which, through an interrogation of English
merchants at the Frankfurt trade fair (Frankfurter Messe), was supposed to
have provided the information about monopolistic practices.
Reichstag 1486–1613: Kommunikation—Wahrnehmung—Öffentlichkeit (Göttingen 2006),
221–236.
11 Kölner Inventarband, Zweiter Band: 1572–1591, ed. Konstantin Höhlbaum, Nr. 146 (Leipzig,
1903), 644.
12 Ibid., Nr. 147, 667.