The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (36 page)

Money certainly was not just one more
merchandise, to be sold and bought like cows or grain or stone; a man could not be rich
only in money terms, like old King Midas who could turn everything to gold. It was a
test of what things were worth in general, not just some cartload or bargeful. Metal
could be melted down, bought and sold, but when it became money it was the measure of
things. That is why Oresme reckoned it was fraud and crime, almost sin, to tamper with
it; and only a tyrant like the Emperor Nero would dare. Fake the money, make it bad, and
trade will fail because nobody wants bad money and everyone will be less truly rich.

This is money as the moral measure of all
human needs, so Oresme said. He looked for the same kind of measure in making his
scientific investigations, the same kind of abstract ideas about objects as solid as
spheres or planets, about facts as fundamental as death and life. He wanted to examine
and calculate those ideas, as a trader might work out a price. He wanted a way to
express what was just, and to do it in numbers.

Science and theology were not far apart.
What connected them was the great issue of the times all around the North Sea: price and
value and above all money.

Those threatening ships were not pirates
after all; they were police. They were heavy vessels, trading ‘cogs’ built
of thick oak planks, one tall spruce tree for a mast, caulked shut with tow and tar,
their sides rubbed with resin and linseed oil: solid and boxy as safes. As the tide fell
they could come to rest on their flat bottoms without rolling over, just like the
Frisian boats before them; they had ungainly bows and sterns at sharp angles to their
hulls, a big box for goods or soldiers.
¹
They also had hinged rudders at the
stern, which was new, and decks over their whole length, and down below there were
gratings to hold the freight out of the sea water.
²
Whatever business they were doing,
they were built to do it right.

Their business this day was to stop other
ships doing business. They challenged and stopped ships in the narrow water of the
Øresund between Sweden and Denmark, they were armed and insistent, and they were ready
to confiscate anything the ships were carrying and demand a ransom or a fine; but they
didn’t empty every ship that passed. They were interested only in the ships that
were sailing to stop Norway starving.

It was 1284, the weather was turning colder,
the summers were not certain any more and there was pack ice drifting south around
Iceland: the times felt tough. The Norwegian ports, Bergen in particular, were waiting
for the last shipments of the things they needed for the winter: grain for bread and
beer, peas, beans, malt and flour. They had come to depend on these shipments; their
year was measured out by the ships from Lübeck that took away their butter and dried
cod,
their furs and their good axes, and
brought back basics from around the Baltic – where there was land to grow things, not
like their own narrow fields between mountains and fjords and forests. They had once
done business with the English as well, but now they depended on the Lübeck merchants of
the Hansa.

This Hansa had no flag, no seal and no king
of its own: it was a loose arrangement between trader towns, a sort of economic
community. It was nothing like a nation or a kingdom because it had no responsibilities
and no territory to defend, and sometimes it seemed downright allergic to either. All it
had was power.

A hundred years earlier King Sverre of
Norway had complained that the Hansa towns brought in far too much wine, which could
only do harm to his country. He had to put up with them. Another king in 1248 had to
write to Lübeck to ask for grain, malt, flour, because Norway was miserably short of all
those things. Merchants from Lübeck and the other Hansa towns now began to spend the
whole year in Bergen, not just the sailing season in summer. They had their own office
there, although it was so small at first that the heat of one man’s body could
keep it warm in winter.
³
They rented houses by the waterfront,
settled down, enjoyed the right to do business on the streets, in the docks, on board
boats, to be exempt from guard duty and from the arduous business of hauling ships up
onto the beaches. This mattered because Bergen sits on a calm fjord where the water
hardly moves, no tide and no river current, and ships had to be manhandled off the flat,
muddy beach.
⁴

It was too much for the Norwegians at times.
Bergen was the king’s town, a port kept open by the warmer Gulf Stream waters and
sheltered behind islands, a rich town where ‘a very great number of people
live … ships and men arrive from every land; there are Icelanders,
Greenlanders, Englishmen, Germans, Danes, Swedes, Gothlanders and other nations too
numerous to mention’; at least that is what a band of crusaders found in 1191. A
century later the English had gone, there had been a trade war with Iceland and the
Germans were installed. German craftsmen, shoemakers and tailors, were setting up
business and their own associations; they were joined by barbers, bakers, goldsmiths and
fur dealers. The town spoke two
languages,
Norwegian but also German. The merchants seemed to do business just as they liked, and
they liked to bring in beer and bits and pieces, not the grain that Norway needed. Their
power was all too obvious.

Norway made a new rule: either bring in
grain or get out during the winter. The Hansa merchants objected, and they complained
furiously about the ‘injustices’ they were suffering. The Norwegians
commissioned Alv Erlingsson, a local noble, diplomat and thug, to go out and do serious
injustice to them in a small pirate war; at least one ship was wrecked.

So the Hansa decided to correct the
Norwegians’ attitude. It banned the sale of grain, flour, vegetables and beer to
Norway, the winter essentials. They policed the Øresund, and of all their town allies on
the Baltic and the North Sea only Bremen declined to help. It was as though the whole
trading world was putting Bergen under siege. And they waited, knowing that their
actions meant hunger for a whole nation of civilians, until the merchants got what they
wanted.

Hansa members reckoned on support from other
merchants in other countries: the business community of the time. The town of Rostock on
the Baltic wrote to Edward I of England to ask him to ban the sale of grain and legumes
from England to Norway; Wismar, just to the east of Rostock, wrote a few days later;
Emperor Rudolf I and his imperial city of Lübeck asked for help ‘against the
ravages of the Norwegians’, so Germans could once more freely visit English ports
for business. England had only just renewed its treaty of friendship with Norway, so
England helpfully did nothing at all.

As for what happened in Norway, the Lübeck
chronicler Detmar wrote with some satisfaction: ‘there broke out a famine so great
that they were forced to make atonement’. Within a year, the Norwegians begged for
Swedish help to reach a settlement. They paid a price – two thousand marks in silver,
although probably they paid up in fish – and they gave the Hansa extraordinary
privileges, even including the right to go out and salvage its own cargo from wrecked
ships.

Everything the Norwegians did after that
seemed only to make them more dependent on the Hansa. Bergen’s great export was
stockfish, the dried cod from the waters off the northern coast: hard
boards, almost indestructible, cut with saws, and cheaper
for very good reason than salted cod or smoked fish. Before it could be soaked, let
alone cooked, it had to be thoroughly beaten with a hammer; the Earl of Derby’s
kitchen accounts for 1390–91 show a man paid eight pence for giving the fish at least
two hundred blows.
⁵
Still, it was a universal protein with ten years or more of shelf
life and the Hansa had the whole valuable trade locked. It had good things from Lübeck,
and the fishermen wanted them and had them on credit; the fish was somehow never quite
enough to settle the debt. The whole coast of Norway could hardly think of selling their
fish anywhere else. Fifty years later King Magnus Eriksson meant to do something about
the situation, but he could do nothing because he needed credit from the Hansa to keep
his economy moving.
⁶

The merchants followed the logic of their
trade all the way. They flourished in a time when nations were struggling to find their
shapes and frontiers, when kings were trying to create a rule which was only as absolute
as a well-fed army and an insistent faith could make it. The Hansa stood outside all
that. It was a cartel of towns in the north, mostly on the Baltic, all more or less
German-speaking, which banded together to keep their ships safe, make sure they were
well treated in foreign ports, and get as close as they could to the perfect state of
traders: monopoly. They acquired power without the ceremony and pretence of kings, and
without any of the occasional royal sense of responsibility, or moments of weakness.
Kings and chancellors and politicians might have to concede things under pressure,
liberties or land; they owned so much, ruled so much that they were always vulnerable.
They might even change their minds about what was most important. The Hansa was
townspeople with only two things in mind: trade and the profit to be made from it, and
for most of the time everyone around them agreed; as long as ships were sailing on the
Hansa’s terms, there was no need for talk.

Kingdoms needed the philosophic kind of
foundations: God or heredity or precedent or else God’s favour as shown by battle
victories. The power of a Hansa town like Lübeck rested on the fact of where it stood,
at the head of the slow canal and river that cut across the neck of Denmark, where ships
could be pulled across the inland
route from
the Baltic to the North Sea and avoid the challenging seas around Jutland. Controlling
that route was enough to launch a group which made its first treaty with a foreign
prince in the twelfth century and was still around almost five hundred years later to
join the talks in 1648 that ended the wretchedly persistent war that had ruined Germany
for thirty years.

Hansa towns lived from the water: sea ports
like Bremen, Hamburg and especially Lübeck, and river ports like Cologne. Almost
everywhere else power and title and position depended on land: estates or kingdoms, the
income from rents, the service of serfs. In the water towns, on the edge of things,
there was only one source of wealth: trading outwards. Their world was offshore. Even
when they did choose to expand and set up new towns, they worked their way along the
coasts: from Lübeck along to Gotland in Sweden and then all the way to Novgorod in
Russia.
⁷
These new towns were also all about trading, hardly connected with the
land powers around them. No feudal lord had the ships to interfere with business at
sea.

Something is beginning on the edge of the
world: the kind of multinational power that does not depend on where it is based, which
flirts or fights in the modern world with the obvious kinds of political and state
power, which usually gets its own way.

This is money at the start of its great war
with nations.

The merchants who traded with Bergen were
not the grandest men back home; they were known as country toughs, boys who went out to
brutal initiations in Norway and came back self-made men, never quite as perfectly
urbane as the stay-at-home merchants thought themselves. In Lübeck they bought houses
alongside the grandest citizens, in the broad streets leading west down to the harbour,
and for a while they joined the religious guilds, which combined the roles of
intelligence service and gentlemen’s clubs. They got respect just as long as their
trading connections were intact, especially since they dominated the trade to and from
England so much that the English hesitated to compete; when English ships went sailing
again, their social standing collapsed. Then they had to be happy with the second-rate
clubs, and they were no longer in the running for town office.
⁸

Their boys served a tough apprenticeship, oddly like the
kind that turned out the servants of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Boys
didn’t learn languages at school, even though the Hansa merchants were famous for
speaking English, Russian, French and even Estonian; they tried to stop outsiders,
especially their Dutch rivals, learning the languages of the Baltic. Language was their
advantage, but they did not teach it. Nor did they teach mathematics, which might
account for the slowness with which the Hansa adopted sophisticated Mediterranean ideas
like maritime insurance. Instead the teacher carried a cane, and the boys fooled around:
authority that hurt, high spirits that meant trouble.

The boys went off on voyages which their
fathers no longer needed to do – they had sons, or other men to do that for them – and
they carried an almost imperial spirit: domineering, slightly anxious, away from the
daily respectability of home.
⁹
They were meant to make good in
Bergen, to make the money to buy their own business; and then to go home and hire
someone else to run things for them.