The Early Hanses 55
Hermann Hoyer, who was later joined by in the negotiations by Jordan
Boizenburg of Hamburg. Both were nuncii speciales and endowed with char-
ters from several cities (Cologne, Dortmund, Soest, Munster, Aachen [which
did not become a member of the eventual Hanseatic League]) authorizing
the use of full executive powers for the negotiations. However, they eventually
obtained privileges, which applied to all merchants within the Empire (merca-
tores imperii). Therefore it was, about the middle of the thirteenth century, that
the cities in the developed portions of Western Europe had taken the place of
merchant unions with special emissaries, who were accredited by the city to
negotiate contracts with the Princes of the East (i.e. Novgorod). These emissar-
ies would operate for approximately another 100 years.
However, the privileges of Flanders were ultimately the result of a defeat in
trade politics on the part of the early Hanse’s town emissaries. Their original
objective had been to found a Low German merchant town, which they would
call New-Damme, near Bruges. This was planned in order to expand the policy
of city founding, which was so successful in the Baltic Region and, simultane-
ously, so dependent upon the demands of long distance trade, to the West.
New-Damme was to serve as an emporium in the West with the transit trade
being forbidden to residents. In this way, its function would be similar to Lübeck
(East-West transshipment) and Visby (transshipment to the east of the Baltic)
and adhere to a similar agenda for the practice of transshipment.114 But, the
project failed about the same time that an additional attempt to jointly found
a city in Sambia with the aid of the German Order had failed. That city was to
have been established in accordance with the Law of Riga, which was, more or
less, akin to being established in accordance with merchant law. Presumably,
the elite of the early Hanse concluded from the two cases, that the founda-
tion of cities in accordance with general merchant laws would not have been
any more feasible particularly in territorially well-organized areas. Moreover,
around the middle of the thirteenth century, all of the potential localities avail-
able for the development of new cities had already been taken: Konigsberg was
founded in 1255 as the last of more significant (later) Hanse cities.
Simultaneous to the era of gaining shared privileges abroad by means of the
above-mentioned initiators, the Low German cities concluded numerous trea-
ties that primarily constituted agreements between cities. On the one hand, this
was done in order to ensure the greatest possible safety for merchants engaged
114 Klaus Friedland, Die Hanse, Urban-Taschenbücher, vol. 409 (Stuttgart et al.: Kohlhammer,
1991), 123f.; Klaus Friedland, “Die Kaufmannsstadt,” in Eckhard Müller-Mertens and
Heidelore Böcker, ed., Konzeptionelle Ansätze der Hanse-Historiographie, Hansische
Studien xiv (Trier: Porta Alba Verlag, 2003), 141–154.