192 Ewert and Selzer
In the late fifteenth century, this pattern itself turned into a hindrance to both
the expansion and competitiveness of the Hanse.74 The Hanse was in a sense
a “small world,” but only for Hansards. To strangers it must have appeared as a
closed society, nearly impossible to reach, and in fact it was. The negative effect
of self-containment is quite typical for networks based on cultural identity.
The Florentine banker Gherardo Bueri is one of the rare exceptions to this rule
because he managed to settle with his business in Lübeck. Only after he had
married into a rich family from Lübeck he could join a Hanseatic network.75
Since Hanseatic merchants very strictly held on to the privileges of the Hanse
in London, Bruges, Bergen, and Novgorod, and since the multilateral reputation
mechanism only worked to perfection in smaller or medium-size networks, it
was difficult to expand beyond the borders of a settled network-based trading
system, which had been working for so many generations with great success.
Additionally, the Hanseatic capital market was underdeveloped, according
to the standards of the time. This again was a result of networking because the
normal reciprocal trade through networks had allowed Hanseatic businesses
to remain small and to operate with little capital. Networks became a safety
net; something to make merchants independent of the high interest rates
that were usually paid in the Baltic. Yet, this protective function of networks
prevented Hanseatic merchants from engaging in ventures that would have
needed risk capital. It also prevented the capital market from developing into
a powerful financial institution by which the merchants could have been pro-
vided with this risk capital.76 The Hanse’s inability to expand and its decreas-
ing competitiveness at the turn of the fifteenth century were, in part, triggered
by a trading system that predominantly relied on networks.
74 Ulf Christian Ewert and Stephan Selzer, “Netzwerkorganisation im Fernhandel des
Mittelalters: Wettbewerbsvorteil oder Wachstumshemmnis?,” in Hartmut Berghoff and
Jörg Sydow, eds., Unternehmerische Netzwerke: Eine historische Organisationsform mit
Zukunft? (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007), 45–70.
75 Gerhard Fouquet, “Ein Italiener in Lübeck: Der Florentiner Gherardo Bueri (gest. 1449),”
Zeitschrift des Vereins für Lübeckische Geschichte und Altertumskunde 78 (1998), 187–220.
76 For more detail, see Mark Schonewille, Hanse Theutonicorum (Groningen, 1997); Id., “Risk,
Institutions and Trade: New Approaches to Hanse History,” (Working Paper, Nijmwegen,
1998).