200 Jahnke
Stettin, which was situated at the Oder River, was the entrepôt to Silesia,
Saxony and Brandenburg, and the surrounding areas. The hinterland of
Greifswald, Stralsund, Rostock and Wismar was much smaller, including
Pomerania, the Brandenburg Mark, the Altmark and the mining areas at the
Harz. The same small hinterland had the towns in Holstein, Schleswig and
Denmark/Scania, whereas Stockholm and Söderköping where the main ports
of disembarkation for Swedish iron and copper.
The city of Lübeck possessed an extraordinary role in the whole system.14
Conceived as a Baltic Sea harbor for Westphalian merchants, this city at the
river Trave grew after 1188 into a key position in the Baltic trade when the city
of Hamburg expended to the River Elbe and thus became Lübeck’s “west-
ern port”15 (see chapter 1 in this volume). The Lübeckian/Hamburger hinter-
land extended from the Brandenburg Mark and Altmark south to Frankfurt,
Westphalia and Lower Saxony, but the major task of this town and its mer-
chants was the transfer of goods from the Baltic to the North Sea and not to
expand the market for its own products.
Products from the Baltic General Region
The starting point of this development was the fact that the nearer Baltic area,
in the geographical sense of the word, was only able to offer a few goods of inter-
est to Western Europe. The oldest of these goods was certainly amber, known
and used throughout the whole European world since Roman times.16 Since the
end of the eleventh century, and increasingly in the Hanseatic period, western
Baltic herring was the next important trading good to central European people,
as was iron and copper from the big Swedish mines in Falun and Norraskog. The
export of grain from Prussia and Livonia is a phenomenon of the late fifteenth
14 Carsten Jahnke, “Der Aufstieg Lübecks und die Neuordnung des südlichen Ostseeraumes
im 13. Jahrhundert,” in Roman Czaja and Carsten Jahnke, eds., Städtelandschaften im
Ostseeraum im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, Towarzystwo Naukowe w Toruniu,
Wyd. 1. Ark. wyd. 12, (Torun: Towarzystwo Naukowe w Toruniu 2009), 29–72.
15 Carsten Jahnke, “... und er verwandelte die blühende Handelsstadt in ein unbedeutendes
Dorf,” “Die Rolle Schleswigs im internationalen Handel des 13. Jahrhunderts.” In Von
Menschen, Ländern Meeren, Festschrift für Thomas Riis zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Gerhard
Fouquet et al. (Tönning: Der andere Verlag, 2006), 251–268; C. Jahnke, Handelsstrukturen.
16 Audronė Bliujienė, The Northern Gold. Amber in Lithuania (c. 100 to c. 1200), (Leiden:
Brill, 2011).