The Early Hanses 61
necessary, to Erich Menved. This pledge stood in total contradiction to
Lübeck’s status as a free imperial city and the privileges of the Empire, which
had been obtained in 1226. In 1311, Wismar was conquered by its sovereign;
in 1313 Rostock fell to the Prince of Mecklenburg due to the treachery of cer-
tain urban elites; and in 1314, Stralsund, in a newly negotiated treaty with the
Prince of Rugen, was forced to make heavy payments and to disclaim certain
privileges and the unlimited right to form alliances. A turn around began in
1316 when Stralsund triumphantly survived a siege lasting several months and
supposedly used the ransom obtained for the captured Duke Erik of Saxony,
to erect the splendid display located on the wall of the town hall.133 The finan-
cial resources held by the coalition of princes were exhausted; and when Erich
Menved and his rival, the Margrave Waldemar of Brandenburg, died in 1319, the
cities were once again able to pursue their own political agendas, which had
been interrupted for about 15 years.
The Development of the Kontor Association
From the turn of the thirteenth and until the fourteenth century, there were
numerous groups of Low German merchants located within the countries tar-
geted by the Hanse trade; these were primarily in the form of individual town
guilds. Permanent offices did not yet exist, with the exception of the gildhalla
in London. This was either because the stay of the merchants in certain areas
was still temporally limited, as in Novgorod where there were ‘summer-seaters’
and ‘winter-seaters’ using the facilities for about four to six months at a time,
or because the Low German merchants still maintained no right to assemble,
as was the case in Flanders and Norway. At times, the ‘governments’ of the host
countries comprehensively designated the individual groups as an “entity of
merchants from the Empire”. On the one hand, this designation would have
corresponded to their de jure, outdated status as royal merchants. On the other
hand, the designation would have corresponded to their constitutional form
of organization as a free union of numerous associations for individual towns
and regions.
Joint privileges for all local Low German merchants only existed in
Novgorod (where the Gutnish merchants were also included) and were subject
133 Rolf Hammel-Kiesow, “Hansestädte im Städtelob der frühen Neuzeit,” in Roman
Czaja, ed., Das Bild und die Wahrnehmung der Stadt und der städtischen Gesellschaft im
Hanseraum im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu
Mikołaja Kopernika, 2004), 19–55, 45.