The Hanseatic League: everything you wanted to know

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. The Hanseatic League was often compared to a crocodile, because it was a shadowy, somewhat sinister entity that kept its true intentions concealed. But here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Professor Sheila Ogilvy answers your questions on this medieval trading federation. She considers whether it was a precursor to the European Union, what tactics it employed to intimidate nation states, and how it helped King Edward III secure the English throne. I'm going to start with a question that was submitted by someone called Angus Fraser on X.

A pretty straightforward one, but pretty important question. And that is, what was the Hanseatic League? I wonder if you could just spend a few minutes giving us kind of a an overview of this medieval trading federation. So that's a really good question, and it's one that medieval and economic historians keep asking themselves, and they seem to have been asking themselves that for at least 100 years. So I'm going to give you my answer.

What we call the Hanseatic League in English, or the German Hansa, as people called it at the time, what it was was It was a network, a very loose, informal, amorphous, and sometimes very mysterious network of long-distance traders, so merchants who traded internationally. They were mainly merchants across northern Germany and the Baltic, but as we'll see a bit later, they actually came from what are now probably eight or nine different European countries. And it survived for 500 years from the 12th century to the 17th century. So it emerged around 1150 when merchants from various but a small number of North German cities started trading abroad and agreed to work together to try to get special privileges from the rulers of the places where they wanted to trade.

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