own marketplace in the Baltic Sea region. Built on the back of the Northern
Crusades, the Hanseatic League was created by German merchants, who, following
in the wake of Christian knights, hoped to prosper in cities such as Danzig (today
Gdansk, in Poland), Riga, and Reval (today Tallinn, in Estonia). Lübeck, founded by
the duke of Saxony, formed the Hansa’s center. Formalized through legislation, the
association of cities agreed that
Each city shall... keep the sea clear of pirates.... Whoever is expelled
from one city because of a crime shall not be received in another... If a
lord besieges a city, no one shall aid him in any way to the detriment of
the besieged city.^1
There were no mercantile rivalries here, unlike the competition between Genoa and
Pisa in the south. But there was also little glamor. Pitch, tar, lumber, furs, herring:
these were the stuff of northern commerce.
The opening of the Atlantic and the commercial uniting of the Baltic were
dramatic developments. Elsewhere the pace of commercial life quickened more
subtly. By 1200 almost all the cities of pre-industrial Europe were in existence. By
1300 they were connected by a spider’s web of roads that brought even small towns
of a few thousand inhabitants into wider networks of trade. To be sure, some old
trading centers declined: the towns of Champagne, for example, had been centers of
major fairs—periodic but intense commercial activity. By the mid-thirteenth century
the fairs’ chief functions were as financial markets and clearing houses. On the
whole, however, urban centers grew and prospered. As the burgeoning population of
the countryside fed the cities with immigrants, the population of many cities reached
their medieval maximum: in 1300 Venice and London each had perhaps 100,000
inhabitants, Paris an extraordinary 200,000. Many of these people became part of the
urban labor force, working as apprentices or servants; but others could not find jobs
or became disabled and could not keep them. The indigent and sick posed new
challenges for urban communities. To be sure, rich townspeople and princes alike
supported the building of new charitable institutions: hospices for the poor, hospitals
for the sick, orphanages, refuges for penitent prostitutes. But in big cities the numbers
that these could serve were woefully inadequate. Beggars (there were perhaps 20,000
in Paris alone) became a familiar sight, and not all prostitutes could afford to be
penitent.
