The Early Hanses 45
stood as a form of pay-off in those cases in which there were different deposits.
Meanwhile, there was no uniform practice for the division of the losses. In the
mid-twelfth century, merchants were already used to taking the goods or the
money of a colleague on a trading excursion (the colleague did not take part in
the excursion), but whether they took these as a form of company trade or in
connection with a commission business cannot be conclusively demonstrated
from the city charter of Medebach.93
Staring in 1230, trading companies of Lübeck citizens and foreign merchants
are finally, although indirectly, mentioned in the oldest customs registry for
the City of Lübeck.94 A similar form of joint trading, in which one partner
functioned exclusively as a ‘silent partner’ so to speak, is found in old Nordic
sources dating from the tenth century. The pooling of goods, known as felag,
was a very common institution and is documented in runic inscriptions as well
as in the literature of the sagas. In one type of felag, fellow traders embarked
on trading excursions together, while in the other, only one of the partners
traveled and then conducted the business alone. In Scandinavia, the intensive
development of merchants’ law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries gives
one reason to believe that these forms of trading and incorporation were the
result of an independent development and were not adopted by the North
from Mediterranean practices.95
The economic success of the early Hanse merchants was therefore achieved
with decidedly and legally basic forms of trade as well as with the trade of
unions, company trade in the form of refutation, and commission and pri-
vate trade (proper trade). These forms were common in Northern Europe and,
therefore, cannot have been the reason for the shear impact of early merchants
from the (later) Hanse. The actual key to success probably had more to do with
the exclusion of internal competition and unified action in the targeted areas
located within their trading territory. The most important effects of this uni-
fied action were three. First, the merchants were able, jointly and without
competition, to purchase sizable amounts of goods to meet large demands
93 Albrecht Cordes, Spätmittelalterlicher Gesellschaftshandel im Hanseraum, Quellen und
Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte, N.F., vol. 45 (Cologne: Böhlau-Verlag, 1998),
58–64.
94 UBStL 1, No. 32, p. 38.
95 Carsten Müller-Boysen “félagi, mötunautr, háseti und gildbrothær. Die Spuren genos-
senschaftlicher Organisationsformen unter Kaufleuten im frühmittelalterlichen
Skandinavien,” in Nils Jörn, Detlef Kattinger and Horst Wernicke, ed., Genossenschaftliche
Strukturen in der Hanse, Quellen und Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte, N.F.,
vol. 48 (Cologne.: Böhlau-Verlag, 1999), 13–26, 15–19.