Hanseatic

Hanseatic culture is that of the Hansa's merchants: Low German traders from north German towns, above all Lübeck, in self-governing colonies around the North and Baltic Seas. Refounded in 1159 and a free imperial city from 1226, Lübeck led a 1241 Hamburg alliance into a league of nearly two hundred settlements.

Middle Low German was the lingua franca; cog ships carried eastern timber and grain and western cloth and salt. The league's four great kontors were London's Steelyard, Bruges, Novgorod's Peterhof and Bergen's Bryggen, where merchants controlled the stockfish trade.

At its zenith the Hansa waged war, sacking Copenhagen and forcing the 1370 Treaty of Stralsund on Denmark. Novgorod's kontor closed in 1494, London's Steelyard was lost in 1598, and the Thirty Years' War broke its power. The last Hanseatic diet met in 1669, leaving Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen free cities; Bergen's kontor survived until 1754.