Hanse

From the 13th to the 15th century, German towns and merchant communities created a guild called the Hanseatic League (also known as Hanse or Hansa). The Hanseatic League was a trading organization. By early 13th century Germans "had a near-monopoly of long-distance trade in the Baltic". In the 2nd half of the 13th century, German merchants formed associations, or hanses, with each other for security against robbers and pirates. By 1265, all north German towns who had the "law of Lübeck" had agreed for the defense of merchants and their goods. In the 1270s a Lübeck-Hamburg hanse acquired trading "in Flanders and England united with its rival Rhenish counterpart ... In the 1280s this confederation of German merchants trading in the west was closely joined to the [hanse] trading in the Baltic" which created the Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic League built lighthouses and training pilots for safe navigation.  "The league b established permanent commercial enclaves (Kontore) in a number of foreign towns, notably Bruges in Flanders, Bergen in Norway, Novgorod in Russia, and the Steel Yard in London". Its main trade was of "grain, timbers, furs, tar, honey, and flax". These items were traded "from Russia and Poland to Flanders and England" who, in return, sent cloth and manufactured goods eastward to the Slavs. Copper and iron ore were traded from Sweden westward. From the southern tip of Sweden, herring was "traded throughout Germany southward to the Alps". Foreign merchants often opposed the Hanseatic League's aggressive trading. The league sent gifts and loans to those political leaders, but when that didn't work, the league threatened to "withdraw its trade and occasionally became involved in embargoes and blockades". The league engaged in warfare, but only in extreme situations, such as in the 1360s when Valdemar IV, the Danish king,  "was trying to master the southwestern Baltic and end the league's economic control there". The league defeated the Danes in 1368. The Hanseatic League had a membership of "about 100 towns, mostly German" in the 14th century. The league declined partially because it lacked "centralized power with which to withstand the new and more powerful nation-states forming [their] own borders". In 1386 Lithuania and Poland united. In 1397 Denmark, Norway, and Sweden united. And in 1494, "Ivan III of Moscow closed the Hanseatic trading settlement at Novgorod". In the 15th century,  the Dutch grew in "mercantile and industrial strength ... [and were] able to oust German traders from Dutch domestic markets and the North Sea region as a whole". Maritime connections between the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas, and the Old World and the Americas "caused a gradual diversion of trade westward to the great Atlantic ports". Dutch ships won control of "carrying trade from the Baltic to the west" in the mid-16th century. The Hanseatic League's last assembly was in 1669.

References
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/254543/Hanseatic-League