Peruse any German or Scandinavian cookbook and you will find recipes filled with exotic spices such as saffron, cloves, coriander, cardamom and ginger. Many of these dishes date make to the Middle Ages, when the spice trade reached Northern Europe, thanks to a group of German merchants who formed the Hanseatic League.
Salt is King in the Middle Ages
The Hanseatic League formed around 1158-1159 as a way to protect trade routes in Northern Europe from pirates and bandits. Merchants in the German towns of Lübeck and Hamburg first established a partnership to protect the shipments of salt. Merchants created a canal between Lübeck and Hamburg to replace the original Salt Road, which was hard to keep safe during the turbulent times of medieval law. Salt was a highly prized commodity in the Middle Ages and is one of the oldest traded bulk items in the world. Not only was salt used for flavoring, it was the only way of preserving foods for long distance travel.
Crusades Bring More Spices to Northern Europe
The First Crusade (1096-1097) brought many Europeans into contact with spices from the Middle East for the first time. Spices soon became a social status as a way to show off ones wealth and pedigree. However, there was no regular way of obtaining spices, especially in more remote areas of Northern Germany and Scandinavia. Merchant groups from different cities in Northern Europe began banding together, to create safer shipping routes for spices. Soon trade was flowing east, west, north and south.
The Hanseatic League is Born
German merchants began establishing trading posts north, throughout the Baltic region and beyond. Trade moved south as well, to Cologne (Köln) and Flanders. By 1270, the merchants of Lübeck and Hamburg joined with their southern counterparts and the Hanseatic League was established. The name Hanseatic League comes from Hanse, German for guild or association. By the 1200s, major port cities of the Hanseatic League included:
· Bergen
· Danzig(Gdansk)
· Dorpat (Tartu)
· London
· Revel (Tallin)
· Riga
· Visby
The main goal of the Hanseatic League was to foster economic growth. They built lighthouses and training pilots in many towns. Goods exported included everything from textiles, furs, fish, amber, honey and spices to copper and iron ore.
Competition and Decline
The Hanseatic League maintained its power by bribing local political leaders with gifts to maintain their commercial monopoly. When bribes didn’t work, the league used embargos and blockades to keep trade in or out. Members of the league met at periodic assemblies (diets), but because there was no one ruler to keep order, the Hanseatic League was not able to effectively cope with increasing competition.
By the 1400s, the Dutch and English had taken over the trade routes in the North Sea. Thanks to the Union of Kalmar, Sweden maintained a monopoly in the Baltic Sea. Newly formed nation-states, such as Lithuania and Poland began their own trading alliances, as did Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Increasing competition from goods found in the Americas as part of the Columbian Exchange also helped hasten the demise of the Hanseatic League, which slowly faded away through the 1500s. The last Diet met in 1669.
Sources:
Dyer, Christopher. Making A Living in the Middle Ages. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. Near a Thousand Tables. New York: The Free Press, 2002.
Patent, Greg. A Baker’s Odyssey. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2007.
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