'The close 'Other'. Hollanders in medieval Hanseatic sources and in historiography', German History...

German History Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 453–472

doi:10.1093/gerhis/ght064© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved.

The Close ‘Other’: Medieval and Modern Perspectives on Hollanders and the Hanse*

Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz

What if Hollanders had become incorporated into the Hanse in the fifteenth century, instead of drifting away from it? What if these late-born Hollanders, these blood relatives of staunch northern German traders, had helped to expand the medieval commercial empire of the Hanse instead of becoming its big-gest competitors? Never would the German domination of the sea have been lost . . . It was the spirit of the Hanse that drove German trade and German maritime power, during the middle ages and modern times . . . And the spirit of the Hanse lay in its opposition to foreigners. The Hanse was a coalition of relatives against the ‘Other’.1

When the German historian Karl Pagel wrote these words in his 1941 overview work, Die Hanse, German troops had been occupying the Netherlands for several months. His musings, scattered as passing remarks on various pages of the book, epitomize the image of Hollanders as the ‘Other’, the prime rivals to the Hanse in the middle ages and early modern period. This was an image that had been dominant in Hanseatic his-toriography since the nineteenth century.2 Pagel’s words also echoed Nazi propaganda in the Netherlands that promulgated closeness: shared ‘good’ Germanic blood, a shared past of being important in Europe and the ‘what if ’ of an envisaged shared future. In most of the historiographical studies underpinned by Nazi ideology, the ‘Other’ was the outright enemy, the negative counterpart of the positive image of Germany and its inhabitants. The focus was on the historical justification of the Drang nach Osten, and the background was Germany’s antagonistic relations with France and England.3 The attitude towards Hollanders / the Dutch was more complex. In Westforschung, they were a people who ‘should have been’ Germans, whose alienation was unfortunate.4

* I would like to thank the members of the group of medieval history at Leiden University, the Netherlands, Wim

Blockmans, Stuart Jenks, Carsten Jahnke and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and con-

structive criticism. The research for this article was funded by NWO (The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific

Research). The usual caveat applies.

1 Karl Pagel, Die Hanse (Oldenburg, 1942), pp. 7, 17, 166, 168–9, 311, 510, 525–6.

2 In the medieval sources, ‘Hollanders’ refers to inhabitants of the historical county of Holland (what are now

approximately the provinces of North Holland and South Holland). In German historiography, the term has often

also covered Zealanders and was used interchangeably with ‘Niederländer’.

3 Gerd Althoff, ‘Die Beurteiling der mittelalterlichen Ostpolitik als Paradigma für zeitgebundene Geschichtsbewertung’,

in Gerd Althoff, Die Deutschen und ihr Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 1992), pp. 145–64; Winfried Schulze and Otto

Gerhard Oexle (eds), Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt, 1999).

4 Peter Schöttler, ‘Von der rheinischen Landesgeschichte zur nazistischen Volksgeschichte oder Die “unhörbare

Stimme des Blutes”‘, in Schulze and Oexle, Nationalsozialismus; Michael Fahlbusch (ed.), Wissenschaft im Dienst

der nationalsozialistischen Politik? Die ‘Volksdeutschen Forschungsgemeinschaften’ von 1930–1945 (Baden-

Baden, 1999); Burkhard Dietz, Helmut Gabel and Ulrich Tiedau (eds), Griff nach dem Westen: Die ‘Westforschung’

der völkisch-nationalen Wissenschaften zum nordwesteuropäischen Raum (1919–1960) (Münster, 2003).

Westforschung is the term for the study of the history and culture of lands adjoining Germany’s western and

southern borders, conducted in the Weimar and Nazi period; Ostforschung studied the lands adjoining the eastern

borders, and the eastern Baltic.

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454 Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz

Pagel’s book reveals some of the paradoxes of the German attitude towards Hollanders as a close ‘Other’, and of Hanseatic historiography in general. First of all, the affinities Pagel underlined made this overview study a product of its time. Given this, it is striking that the book has been republished and quoted several times since the war as one of the standard overview works on the Hanse. Second, Pagel’s ‘what ifs’ were a comment on the Hanseatic historiography on which it built. In the sec-ond half of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century historians erected very clear boundaries around the concept of the Hanse, and placed Hollanders outside it. As will be discussed in more detail below, in this view the Hanse was an emphati-cally German, hierarchically organized town league (Städtebund) that dominated the economy of the Baltic and North Seas for almost 500 years. (The now rejected Bund perception gave rise to the English term ‘Hanseatic League’, which lives on as a lin-guistic fossil). This definition was primarily determined by the contemporary context, and not the medieval and early modern sources. It was only after the Second World War that this hierarchical view of the Hanse was challenged. And in the context of Hollanders, it was only in the 1990s that the place of Hollanders in this new definition of the Hanse was first discussed, and that a systematic analysis of the sources until c. 1450 was undertaken.

The first goal of this essay is to explore how the image of Hollanders developed in the historiography of the Hanse, and especially to trace how the line of division between Hansards and non-Hansards was drawn in historical scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5 The key issue for this study, namely the identification of a close ‘Other’, is particularly important for an understanding of the notion of the Hanse. From a historiographical point of view, this notion of a close ‘Other’ is interesting because it has appeared in all overviews of the Hanse, and has kept changing. As numerous alter-ity studies emphasize, external identification is closely linked to internal identification: it is a mirror concept because identifying an ‘Other’ is connected to a need to define the self.6 The studies cited here comprise all nineteenth- and twentieth-century works in which the position of Hollanders in the context of the Hanse was addressed extensively, and the analysis is restricted to German historical scholarship.7 The Hanse’s own inter-nal understanding of its identity is one of the most elusive issues in this research field, as Hansards themselves were reluctant to make statements on what they understood

5 On Hanseatic historiography in general: Volker Henn, ‘Wege und Irrwege der Hanseforschung und Hanserezeption

in Deutschland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, in Marlene Nikolay-Panter et al. (eds), Geschichtliche Landeskunde

der Rheinlande: Regionale Befunde und raumübergreifende Perspektiven (Cologne, 1994); Thomas Hill, ‘Vom

öffentlichen Gebrauch der Hansegeschichte und Hanseforschung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, in Antjekathrin

Graßmann (ed.), Ausklang und Nachklang der Hanse im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Trier, 2001).

6 Raymond Corbey and Joep Leerssen, ‘Studying Alterity: Backgrounds and Perspectives’ in Raymond Corbey and

Joep Leerssen (eds), Alterity, Identity, Image: Selves and Others in Society and Scholarship (Amsterdam, 1991);

Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris, 1988); Esther Peeren and Silke Horstskotte, ‘Introduction: The Shock

of the Other’, in Peeren and Horstskotte (eds), The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities (Amsterdam, 2007);

Joep Leerssen, ‘Identity/alterity/hybridity’, in Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (eds), Imagology: The Cultural

Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey (Amsterdam, 2007).

7 This means that not all Hanseatic historiography will be evaluated: this would be beyond the framework and the

scope of this article. For a general overview of major works on the Hanse, see Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘The

Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: An Introduction’, in Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz and Stuart Jenks (eds),

The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2012).

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Medieval and Modern Perspectives on Hollanders and the Hanse 455

the Hanse to be. Instead, they preferred to define what it was not: ‘not a society, not a guild, nor a legal body of any kind’.8 Changes in internal identifications of Hansards as a collectivity must therefore be traced through their external identifications, an analysis which until now has not been undertaken systematically. The burgeoning analysis of medieval sources on alterity has shown that the examination of external identifications can be a fruitful approach to capturing some aspects of otherwise vague medieval iden-tifications.9 It must be pointed out here, however, that in these analyses the ‘Other’ is generally a contrasted ‘Other’, an opposite to the self.10 The notion of Hollanders as the ‘Other’ to the Hanse is unusual in the context of medieval and early modern alter-ity studies partly because Hollanders constituted a close ‘Other’, and also because the boundary between the self and the ‘Other’ was vague for part of the period that can be analysed in the sources.

The second goal of this essay is to provide a systematic analysis of the image of Hollanders as the ‘Other’ in medieval Hanseatic sources. The sources used here cover the period from the 1360s to the 1560s and comprise accounts from Hanseatic meet-ings, correspondence on Hanseatic matters and rules of the Hanseatic settlement abroad, to a large extent published in the Hanserecesse/Hanserezesse (1870–1970).11 Recently, there has been criticism of this edition as a product of a nineteenth-century focus on politics and German mercantile and seafaring hegemony. The selections made by archivists and historians were, of course, conditioned by the interests and views of their time.12 This selection nonetheless serves its purpose here because many of the sources included deal with the attitude of more than one Hanseatic town towards out-siders. Municipal chronicles, town laws and ordinances, and correspondence entirely unrelated to Hanseatic matters, have a different focus. The terms Hanse, Hansard and thus non-Hansard hardly ever occur there: these documents were primarily concerned

8 Stuart Jenks, ‘A Capital Without a State: Lübeck caput tocius hanze’, Historical Research, 65 (1992); Thomas

Behrmann, ‘“Hansekaufmann”, “Hansestadt”, “Deutsche Hanse”? Über hansische Terminologie und hansisches

Selbstverständnis im späten Mittelalter’, in Thomas Scharff et al. (eds), Bene vivere in communitate: Beiträge zum

italienischen und deutschen Mittelalter (Münster, 1997).

9 Peter Hoppenbrouwers, ‘The Dynamics of National Identity in the Later Middle Ages’, in Robert Stein and Judith

Pollmann, Networks, Regions and Nations: Shaping Identities in the Low Countries, 1300–1650 (Leiden, 2010),

pp. 33–4.

10 Irene Erfen and Karl-Heinz Spiess (eds), Fremdheit und Reisen im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1997); Harry Kühnel, ‘Das

Fremde und das Eigene: Mittelalter’, in Peter Dinzelbacher (ed.), Europäische Mentalitätsgeschichte (Stuttgart,

1997); Wolfgang Harms and C. St. Jäger (eds), Fremdes wahrnehmen—fremdes Wahrnehmen: Studien zur

Geschichte der Wahrnehmung und zur Begegnung von Kulturen im Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Stuttgart,

1997); Akehurst, F.R.P. and S. Cain van d’Elden (eds), The Stranger in Medieval Society (Minneapolis, 1998);

Andreas Bihrer et al. (eds), Exil, Fremdheit und Ausgrenzung im Mittelalter in früher Neuzeit (Würzburg, 2000);

Marina Münkler, Erfahrung des Fremden: Die Beschreibung Ostasiens in den Augenzeugenberichten des 13. und

14. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2000); Mara R. Wade and Glenn Ehrstine, ‘Der, die, das Fremde: Alterity in Medieval and

Early Modern German Studies’, Daphnis, 33 (2004).

11 Also the Hansisches Urkundenbuch, Niederländische Akten und Urkunden, Kölner Inventar, and Danziger Inventar

are used (full references are to be found in specific footnotes).

12 Angela Huang and Ulla Kypta, ‘Ein neues Haus auf altem Fundament: Neue Trends in der Hanseforschung und

die Nutzbarkeit der Rezesseditionen’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 129 (2011), pp. 213–29; Joachim Deeters,

‘Hansische Rezesse: Eine quellenkundliche Untersuchung anhand der Überlieferung im Historischen Archiv der

Stadt Köln’, in Rolf Hammel-Kiesow and Michael Hundt (eds), Das Gedächtnis der Hansestadt Lübeck: Festschrift

für Antjekathrin Grassmann zum 65. Geburtstag (Lübeck, 2005), pp. 427–46.

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with the towns themselves.13 Also, these Hanserecesse are the very sources that were used in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical scholarship; re-reading them will enable us to analyse which parts of the image of Hollanders as the ‘Other’ were observed and used by German historians, and to understand why these choices were made.14

I: Hollanders, the Hanse and Historiography

In the earliest modern study of the Hanse, made at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Georg Friedrich Sartorius, Hollanders were presented explicitly as members of the Hanse during the fourteenth and at the beginning of the fifteenth century.15 This was part of the concept of the Hanse as a Bund that aimed to overcome the difficul-ties posed by the ‘anarchy of the German Empire’ for traders and urban centres. The Hanse was about the protection of trade abroad, mutual political support, and German law binding the Hanseatic towns: this was the basis for the identification and cohesion of the organization. The ‘Germanness’ of the medieval Hanse in Sartorius’ work was a heterogeneous concept, constituted by strong local elements such as the Low German dialects of the Hanse.16 According to Sartorius, the breach between Hollanders and the Hanse was connected to the political events of the 1438–1441 conflict between Hollandish and Wendish towns, with Lübeck in the lead. It was an ‘unfortunate feud’, after which both sides pursued their own interests and became rivals. Sartorius was the first in a long succession of historians to see this conflict, the breach with the Hollanders and the ensuing competition as the ultimate cause of the demise of the Hanse.17

In subsequent historical scholarship, key boundaries appeared between Hollanders and Hansards. In a seminal work on the origin and structure of the Hanse published in 1911, Walther Stein summed these views up, saying that Hollanders and Hansards had always been two separate groups.18 Stein even claimed ‘the Hanse would never ever (be able to) admit them’.19 The image of Hollanders as fundamentally ‘Other’

13 Jürgen Sarnowsky, ‘Der weite Horizont: “Hansisches” und “Ausserhansisches” in der Lübecker Ratschronik

des 15. Jahrhunderts’, in Jürgen Sarnowsky and Volker Henn (eds), Das Bild der Hanse in der städtischen

Geschichtsschreibung des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Trier, 2010).

14 Only German historiography is studied here; Dutch historiography on the Hanse has until recently followed the

views and trends of German historiography, see Job Weststrate, ‘Die Geschichtsschreibung über die Hanse in den

Niederlanden’, in Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 130 (2012), pp. 175–209.

15 Georg Friedrich Sartorius, Geschichte des Hanseatischen Bundes und Handels (1802–1908), vol. 1, p. 274.

Sartorius (1765–1828) was history professor in Göttingen. Earlier works on the Hanse two ‘chronicles’, published

in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They were respectively a laud (heavily criticized later for inaccuracies),

and a compilation of sources, see Henn, ‘Hanseforschung und Hanserezeption’, p. 393; see also Karl H. Schwebel,

‘Zur Historiographie der Hanse im Zeitalter der Aufklärung und der Romantik’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 82

(1964), pp. 1–20.

16 Sartorius, Geschichte III, p. 648.

17 Sartorius, Geschichte II, pp. 284–5.

18 Walther Stein, ‘Zur Entstehung und Bedeutung der Deutschen Hanse’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 17 (1911),

pp. 356–60, and Walther Stein, ‘Die Hansestädte’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 19–21 (1913–1915), p. 242. See

the discussion in Dieter Seifert, Kompagnons und Konkurrenten: Holland und die Hanse im späten Mittelalter

(Vienna, 1997), pp. 1–5. Before Stein, there had been earlier utterances where Hollanders were presented as non-

Hansards, but Stein was influential because of his explicit argumentation, and because he used it in the seminal

discussion on the origin and fundamental nature of the Hanse.

19 Stein, ‘Entstehung’, p. 360.

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to the Hanse was created. In Stein’s view, the Hanse meant for its contemporaries the German Hanse, which in turn coincided with German law and German language. By stressing that Hollanders never were part of the Hanse, nor could they ever have been, Stein did not have to account for any changes. This view on the boundaries of the Hanse was embedded in the notion of primordial German identifications, which set the tone in the German historiography, especially after the creation of the German Empire in 1871. Studies that highlighted old glory and continuities in German history, that legitimized actions taken under the banner of one nation, and that could be studied on the basis of archival sources, were widely applauded.20 The Hanse fitted these criteria marvellously. It was seen as an embodiment of timeless German entrepreneurship, geographical and cultural expansion, and mastery of the seas. This link made the study of the Hanse an important branch of the very popular field of maritime history, and a provider of a wealth of written sources for it.21 The Hanse was ‘Germany at sea’ in the middle ages, as one historian put it.22 The demise of this sea power was—in a refash-ioned thesis of Sartorius—attributed to a major external factor, namely the advance of Hollanders/the Dutch.23

In scholarship influenced by Nazi ideology, there was continuity from the nineteenth century in the representation of Hollanders as rivals. Yet at the same time, boundaries between Hansards and Hollanders became redefined in a peculiar combination of pri-mordial and constructed identifications. The key portrayal is in Pagel’s overview book, quoted at the start of this essay. While he defined Hollanders as non-Hansards, he pre-sented them as ‘Hansards manqué’. His arguments of shared Germanic blood ties and

20 Benedikt Stuchtey, ‘German Historical Writing’, in Stuart Macintyre et al., The Oxford History of Historical Writing,

vol. 4: 1800–1945 (Oxford, 2011); Stefan Berger, The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical

Consciousness in Germany Since 1800 (Providence, 1997); Georg G. Iggers, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft:

Eine Kritik der traditionellen Geschichtsauffassung von Herder bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna, 1997), pp. 120–62.

21 The foundation of the Hansischer Geschichtsverein in 1870/1871, as a central organ for research on the Hanse

and scholarly editions, has to be seen in the light of this development. In the following decennia, thick volumes

containing Hanseatic privileges, letters written by and to Hansards, minutes from Hanseatic meetings and (frag-

ments of) account books were published in the monumental Hansercesse, 26 vols in 4 series (henceforth HR;

Leipzig, 1870–1970) and Hansisches Urkundenbuch, 11 vols (henceforth HUB), ed. K. Höhlbaum et al. (Halle,

1876–1939), and the journal Hansische Geschichtsblätter became a forum for the latest research, including

through its extensive review section, see Heinrich Schmidt, ‘Über Geschichtsvereine und Geschichtsbewusstsein

in nordwest-deutschen Hansestädten’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 100 (1982) and Henn, ‘Hanseforschung und

Hanserezeption’, pp. 399–402.

22 Dietrich Schäfer, Die Hanse und ihre Handelspolitik: Vortrag (Jena, 1885), p. 4; Dietrich Schäfer, Die Hanse

(Bielefeld, 1903) and ‘Die Aufgaben der deutschen Seegeschichte’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 36 (1909); See

also Theodor Lindner, Die deutsche Hanse: Ihre Geschichte und Bedeutung. Für das deutsche Volk dargestellt

(Leipzig, 1899); Johannes Falke, Die Hansa als deutsche See- und Handelsmacht (Berlin, 1909).

23 The thesis on the connection between the Baltic trade, Hollanders and the demise of the Hanse was brought to

light by Ernst Daenell, Die Blütezeit der deutschen Hanse (Berlin, 1905), and it had significant impact on later

researchers; see also E. Daenell, ‘Holland und die Hanse im 15. Jahrhundert’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 11

(1903), pp. 3–41. It must be noted that Daenell’s writing on Hollanders as rivals was much more adjective-free

than that of his fellow historians. See further Kurt Stahr, Die Hanse und Holland bis zum Utrechter Frieden 1474

(Marburg, 1907); Ludwig Lahaine, ‘Die Hanse und Holland von 1474–1525’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 23/24

(1917/1918); Rudolf Häpke, Der deutsche Kaufmann in den Niederlanden (Leipzig, 1911) and ‘Der Untergang der

hansischen Vormachtstellung in der Ostsee (1531–1544), Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 39 (1912); Walther Vogel,

Kurze Geschichte der Deutschen Hanse (Munich, 1915); Friedel Vollbehr, Die Holländer und die deutsche Hanse

(Lübeck, 1930).

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a kindred spirit of entrepreneurship were entirely in line with the propaganda broad-cast in the occupied Netherlands.24 Pagel depicted conflicts between Hansards and Hollanders as ‘brotherly rivalry’ (Bruderfeindschaft), the implication being that these con-flicts are unnecessary, troubling, yet not without hope of reconciliation.25 Hollanders were clearly a special type of close ‘Other’ in Pagel’s concept of the Hanse: all other non-Hansards were described as distant and in opposition to German Hansards. This close ‘Other’ also stands out in the context of other works on the Hanse of that period, where the focus was on relations with an antagonistic ‘Other’ in the Baltic, France and England. There, the boundary was regarded as stable and fundamental.26 These enemy images of the distant ‘Other’ and the Hanse were embedded in the larger his-torical research fields of Ost- and Westforschung. This research fed the Lebensraum ideology, and some historians actively joined the regime to promote these views, the most notable example from the Hanse perspective being Franz Petri, a prominent Westforscher.27 The earlier points of reference and self-identification of the Hanse, such as long traditions and economic supremacy, were now supplemented by a discourse on blood ties con-necting the North Sea and Baltic regions.28 Pagel’s example shows that the history of the Hanse and the portrayal of the ‘Other’ was no longer about ‘how it had been’ (wie es gewesen), but ‘what might have happened’ (was geschehen wäre); about expansion, integra-tion and not letting the ‘Other’ become a rival. This expansive concept of the Hanse as a paragon of German virtues had a long-lasting effect on the public image of the Hanse in Germany.29

24 The speeches of Seyss-Inquart, Reichskommissar in the Netherlands in the period 1940–1945, started with refer-

ences to Germanic blood and shared achievements in the Baltic, but from 1943 became depictions of an Other

who failed to cooperate in the manner expected of them. The context was that from 1943, the German grip

on the occupied Netherlands tightened further and there were massive strikes in the Netherlands, see Arthur

Seyss-Inquart (Vier Jahre in den Niederlanden: Gesammelte Reden (Amsterdam, 1944) especially speeches of

29 May 1940, 26 July 1940, 12 March 1941). Compare J.C.H. Blom, Crisis, bezetting en herstel: tien studies

over Nederland 1930–1950 (The Hague, 1989) and Lou de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede

Wereldoorlog, 14 vols. (The Hague, 1969–1991) vol. 4, p. 58, vol. 6, pp. 515–44, 799–862.

25 Pagel, Hanse, p. 510 (header). A similar language of complicated family ties, oscillating between common roots

and alienation, was present in W. Reese’s study on long-term Dutch–German history, Die Niederlande und das

deutsche Reich, vol. 1: Die Niederlande im Reich von den Anfängen bis ins 14. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1942).

26 Hans Muchow, Die Hanse als Wille und Tat aus nordisch-germanischen Geist (Hamburg, 1939); Fritz Rörig, Vom

Werden und Wesen der Hanse (Leipzig, 1940); Heinrich Hunke (ed.), Hanse, Downing Street und Deutschlands

Lebensraum (Berlin, 1940) and Heinrich Hunke (ed.), Hanse, Rhein und Reich (Berlin, 1942); Ernst Hering, Die deutsche

Hanse (Leipzig,1940); Pagel, Hanse. See discussion in Henn, ‘Hanseforschung und Hanserezeption’, pp. 409–12.

27 More general for instance: Althoff, ‘Ostpolitik’, pp. 145–64; Karl Ferdinand Werner, Das NS-Geschichtsbild und die

deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1967); Karen Schönwälder, Historiker und Politik: Geschischtswissenschaft

im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt/Main, 1992). Apparently, even the top echelons of Nazi politics browsed the historical

works on the Hanse. The Hanse was one of the sources of inspiration of Adolf Rosenberg. He became actively involved

in the Nordische Gesellschaft, an association that aimed to strengthen and nourish German–Nordic cultural and politi-

cal bonds, Birgitta Almgren, Jan Hecker-Stampehl and Ernst Piper, ‘Alfred Rosenberg und die Nordische Gesellschaft:

Der “nordische Gedanke” in Theorie und Praxis’, NORDEUOPAforum, 2 (2008), pp. 14–5; Hill, ‘Hanseforschung’,

pp. 82–3; Frank-Rutger Hausmann, ‘Der “Kriegseinsatz” der Deutsche Geisteswissenschaften im Zweiten Weltkrieg

(1940–1945)’, in Schulze and Oexle, Nationalsozialismus; Karl Ditt, ‘Die Kulturraumforschung zwischen Wissenschaft

und Politik: Das Beispiel Franz Petri (1903–1993)’, Westfälische Forschungen, 46 (1996), pp. 73–176.

28 Siegfried Bork, Mißbrauch der Sprache: Tendenzen nationalsozialistischer Sprachreglung (Bern, 1970), pp. 40–66.

29 Rolf Hammel-Kiesow and Rudolf Holbach (eds), Geschichtsbewusstsein in der Gesellschaft: Konstrukte der Hanse

in den Medie und in der Öffentlichkeit (Trier, 2010).

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The complexity of German postwar historiography has recently received much attention in research.30 After the war and until the 1990s, the portrayal of Hollanders in Hanseatic historiography went back to the common denominator of ‘non-Hanseatic competitors’, though through various routes. First of all, there was a turn away from high politics and towards regional, urban and Europe-wide his-tory, often based on socio-economic analyses.31 In the context of Hollanders and the Dutch in general, the explicit switch is exemplified by the figure of Franz Petri, who returned to academic life in the early 1950s and focused on regional history.32 Petri wrote about the need for a sober (nüchtern) attitude towards the past and the need for a new beginning in the relations between Germany and the Netherlands, a need to forgive but not forget.33 He drew a clear line between the two nations, and presented it as a historical division framed by mutual admiration, inspiration and competition.34 Since there was no longer any question about Dutch sover-eignty, the natural step was to present Hollanders as non-Hansards, as happened in several general Hanse studies. The image of opposition and competition bridged the gap between Hanseatic historiography in western and eastern Germany. It must be noted that there were different notions of the structure of the Hanse. In the west, the Hanse was seen as a loose, non-hierarchical community of interest (Gemeinschaft).35 GDR scholars, on the other hand, held on to the older notion of the Hanse as a hierarchical Bund.36 The topics and methods of the study were, however, similar.

The second route to a neutralized image of Hollanders in Hanseatic postwar his-toriography took place gradually and silently. Let us return to Pagel’s Hanse and the history of its continued presence as an overview work. When the book was republished in 1952, the text was unchanged. All the passages on Hollanders, paraphrased in the introduction, were still intact, and utterances about the eastern Baltic (Ostzug) were not removed. Pagel declared in the preface that he was proud that no changes had to be made, suggesting that he had not succumbed to Nazi influences in the past.

30 Berger, Historical Consciousness; Althoff, ‘Beurteilung’ and Gerd Althoff, ‘Sinnstiftung und Instrumentalisierung:

Zugriffe auf das Mittelalter. Eine Einleitung’, in Althoff, Mittelalter.

31 Heinrich Sproemberg, ‘Die Hanse in europäischer Sicht’, in Jappe Alberts (ed.), Dancwerc (Groningen, 1959).

32 Schöttler, ‘Landesgeschichte’, pp. 93–100; Hill, ‘Hanseforschung’, pp. 86–7.

33 Franz Petri, ‘Deutschland und die Niederlande: Wege und Wandlungen im Verhältnis zweier Nachbarvölker’,

Westfälische Forschungen, 13 (1960), pp. 34–5, and ‘Vom deutschen Niederlandebild und seinen Wandlungen’,

Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter, 33 (1969), pp. 190–1.

34 Petri, ‘Deutschland’ and ‘Niederlandebild’. In the Hanse context, he differentiated between the Zuiderzee/

Overijssel towns (towns in the east of the Netherlands) which were members of the Hanse (and which were the

main focus of his attention), and Hollanders, who in his view were categorically non-Hansards. Franz Petri, ‘Die

Stellung der Südersee- und Ijsselstädte im flandrisch-hansischen Raum’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 79 (1961).

35 Ahasver von Brandt, ‘Die Hanse als mittelalterliche Wirtschaftsorganization—Entstehung, Daseinsformen,

Aufgaben’, in Ahasver von Brandt et al. (eds), Die deutsche Hanse als Mittler zwischen Ost und West (Cologne,

1963), pp. 9–37; V. Henn, ‘Die Hanse: Interessengemeinschaft oder Städtebund’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter 102

(1984), pp. 119–26; Klaus Friedland, ‘Kaufleute und Städte als Glieder der Hanse’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter,

76 (1958).

36 Horst Wernicke, Die Städtehanse 1280–1418: Genesis—Strukturen—Funktionen (Weimar, 1983); Johannes

Schildhauer, Die Hanse: Geschichte und Kultur (Stuttgart, 1984); Fritze and Krause, Seekriege; Klaus Spading,

Holland und die Hanse im 15. Jahrhundert: zur Problematik des Übergangs vom Feudalismus zum Kapitalismus

(Weimar, 1973).

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No reaction to this followed in the major scholarly review of the book.37 More than a decade later, in the 1963 edition, some factual mistakes were removed, but the tone was largely left unaltered, this time to the bewilderment of the reviewer.38 A change, in fact quite a surprising one, came with the 1983 edition. The book was entirely rewrit-ten by a different author, Friedrich Naab, but it was still published under Pagel’s name. The major reviewer of the edition expressed satisfaction that the German nationalistic layer, which had irritated other Hanse scholars from the very start, had finally been removed.39 This quiet neutralization may be the reason why Pagel’s book is still quoted as one of the major overview works, and it was republished in Naab’s edition as late as 1991.40

The reunification of Germany in 1989/1990 set in motion countless changes in German society, not least in the field of historical studies. National identity returned to the agenda of historical writing, revealing differing attitudes towards the subject among German historians.41 Boundaries and borders became a matter of analysis and nego-tiation. Apart from explicit discussions on national identity and the role historiography has to play in it, the topic of identities came in through the side door of alterity studies. There has been a very remarkable boom in studies of the ‘Other’ in Germany.42 In par-allel, reflections on what constituted the Hanse resurfaced.43 In particular, the existence of the Hanse as an aspect of urban identity, and the fluidity of its boundaries, came into focus. Dieter Seifert’s study, Kompagnons und Konkurrenten, published in 1997, argued that there was no ‘primordial’ competition between ‘Holland’ and the ‘Hanse’, and that in the fourteenth century Hollanders should be seen as Hansards if one applies criteria such as the use of Hanseatic rights abroad, the fact that Hollanders were ‘traders of the emperor’, and—perhaps most convincingly—the fact until then overlooked that Hollanders took part in the decision-making of the Hanse. Seifert’s study seems to have

37 The reviewer of the 1952 re-edition, the prominent Hanse historian Ahasver von Brandt, focused only on the many

factual mistakes in Pagel’s book, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 72 (1954), pp. 95–100. Hill, ‘Hanseforschung’,

pp. 86–7 and note 108 discussed von Brandt’s overview of Hanse research (‘Hundert Jahre Hansischer

Geschichtsverein’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter 88, 1970) and his adamant claim that it had not been influenced

by Nazi organization, as an example of denial.

38 Heinrich Schmidt, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 83 (1965), pp. 109–18 juxtaposed it to the sober, ‘non-nation-

alistic’ rendition of Hanseatic history by the Strasbourg professor Philippe Dollinger, Die Hanse (Stuttgart, 1966,

translation of the 1964 French edition), which has become a standard work on the Hanse.

39 Herbert Schwarzwälder, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 102 (1984). In the preface, it was stated that the book had

been ‘tightened up’ by Naab. It is clear that the changes reached much further than that.

40 Mostly, the 1963 and 1983 editions are then quoted; the change of image has even led to presenting the 1942

edition as an example of wartime scholarship which had withstood Nazi propaganda, see Henn, ‘Hanseforschung

und Hanserezeption’, pp. 411–12.

41 Berger, Historical Consciousness, and Stefan Berger ‘Historians and Nation-Building in Germany after Reunification’,

Past and Present, 148 (1995).

42 To quote but a handful of the German studies of medieval alterity: Erfen and Spiess, Fremdheit; Kühnel, Fremde;

Harms and Jäger, Fremdes; Bihrer, Fremdheit; Münkler, Erfahrung; Felicitas Schmieder, ‘Various Ethnic and Religious

Groups in Medieval German Towns? Some Evidence and Reflections’, in Derek Keene et al. (eds), Segregation—

Integration—Assimilation: Religious and Ethnic Groups in Medieval Towns of Central and Eastern Europe

(Farnham, 2009); Jürgen Sarnowsky, ‘Das Bild der “Anderen” in der frühen Chronistik des Deutschordenslandes

Preussen’, in Steffen Patzold et al. (eds), Geschichtsvorstellungen: Bilder, Texte und Begriffe aus dem Mittelalter.

Festschrift für Hans-Werner Goetz zum 65. Geburtstag (Vienna, 2012).

43 Behrmann, ‘Hansekaufmann’; Henn, ‘Hanse’.

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gained much wider acceptance and influence in the Netherlands than in Germany.44 For instance, in the most recent history of Amsterdam it is acknowledged that the town was a member of the Hanse, while the topic is largely left unmentioned in the most recent German works, and Seifert’s dissertation itself met with criticism in Germany.45 In other words, this change of external identification became internalized in the Netherlands, but (at least until now) not in Germany.

Seifert penned his book in a very sober style, and clearly and consciously eschewed words such as ‘German’ or ‘national’. It is a token of its own time: in general terms, the book is rooted in the discussions in the 1980s and 1990s on primordial and constructed identities; and in terms of Hanseatic historiography, Seifert’s portrayal of Hollandish-Hanseatic relations reflects the notion of the Hanse that has been generally accepted since the last decades of the twentieth century. What is this current definition of the Hanse? It is seen as a loose, non-hierarchical medieval and early modern Gemeinschaft, as an organization of traders (specifically, traders speaking Low German and engaged in foreign trade) and an organization of towns (70 large and 100–130 smaller towns) in which these traders were burghers. The boundaries of this organization were change-able, and often vague. The Hanse was primarily about trade and trade rights, but it was also a political power in medieval Europe.46 It emerged as an organization under one name because this was the most effective manner to operate.47 Unfortunately, Seifert’s book only covers the period until c. 1450, thus it does not address the issue of rivalry in the second half of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth century, a recurrent topic in earlier historiography. I will show that it was primarily the utterances in the sixteenth-century sources that fed the paradigm of competition and negativity in historiography. In this respect, the present paper complements Seifert’s study both when it comes to its chronological framework, and its specific focus on terminology and imagery.

II: The Close ‘Other’ in the Sources

The point of departure for this discussion of the medieval sources is the Cologne Confederation (1367–1385), a political alliance of traders and towns against

44 See Job Weststrate, ‘Abgrenzung durch Aufnahme: Zur Eingliederung der süderseeischen Städte in die Hanse,

ca. 1360–1450’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 121 (2003), pp. 13–40, and his overview of recent research in the

Netherlands, ‘Geschichtsschreibung’, pp. 197–9.

45 Herman Kaptein, ‘Poort van Holland: De economische ontwikkelling, 1200–1578’, in M. Carasso-Kok (ed.),

Geschiedenis van Amsterdam tot 1578: Een stad uit het niets (Amsterdam, 2004), pp. 121–31; compare the work

of the Dutch historian Weststrate, ‘Abgrenzung’, who also integrates Seifert’s theses in his analysis of the posi-

tion of the Zuiderzee/Overijssel towns in the Hanse; Selzer, Hanse, p. 67. See for instance the review by Gerhard

Fouquet in Historische Zeitschrift, 268 (1999), pp. 755–6, who referred to lively discussions and stated ‘Man darf

auch die Reaktion insbesondere der niederländischen Forschung gespannt sein’.

46 Volker Henn, ‘Was war die Hanse?’, in Jürgen Bracker et al. (eds), Die Hanse: Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos (3rd

edn, Lübeck, 1999); Rolf Hammel-Kiesow, Die Hanse (2nd edn, Munich, 2002), p. 10; Stephan Selzer, Die mittel-

alterliche Hanse (Darmstadt, 2010); Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe:

An Introduction’, in Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz and Stuart Jenks (eds), The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern

Europe (Leiden, 2012).

47 Carsten Jahnke, ‘“Homines imperii” und “osterlinge”: Selbst- und Fremdbezeichnungen hansischer Kaufleute

im Ausland am Beispiel Englands, Flanderns und des Ostseeraumes im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert’, Hansische

Geschichtsblätter, 129 (2011).

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Scandinavian rulers, which has been mentioned in every book on the medieval Hanse. The Treaty of Stralsund (1370), which resulted from the victory of the Confederation, has been seen as the highpoint of Hanseatic political power.48 The troublesome issue for historians, however, was that Hollanders and Zealanders were part of this Confederation. How could their presence be explained? Early nineteenth-century interpretations took Hollanders and Zealanders along in their definitions of the Hanse at that time, while from the second half of the nineteenth century until the 1990s his-torians stipulated that this Confederation was a coalition between Hansards and non-Hansards. The latest interpretation (by Dieter Seifert) is that it was an alliance which partly overlapped with the Hanse, but was in fact not primarily a Hanseatic affair.49

How are Hollanders depicted in the sources relating to the inception of the Cologne Confederation? At the foundation of the Confederation, member towns, among them Amsterdam, were listed in a neutral way.50 They were presented as ‘sea towns’, mean-ing in this case towns involved in sea trade rather than located close to the sea shore.51 Hollandish and Zealandish towns were also seen as towns of the ‘Zuiderzee’ region, a vague term which became more specific in the fifteenth century.52 When the mem-bers of this Confederation, including Hollanders and Zealanders, had their privileges confirmed, they did so as part of the political alliance, not as Hansards.53 Moreover, in 1385, the Confederation ended, but the Hanse continued to thrive. The disparity between the Confederation as a time-bound political alliance, and the Hanse as a long-lived economic and political organization, confirms that the Confederation is not par-ticularly helpful in defining Hansards and non-Hansards.54 What it does show, however, is that Hollanders and Zealanders were among the groups of merchants cooperating within this framework; others included, for example, groups of traders from Wendish or Prussian towns. As long as the Confederation lasted, the portrayal of Hollanders was determined by their listing as members of the Confederation, allies, and attenders at Hanse meetings. These references were predominantly adjective-free and neutral, just as when other groups were described.

The dissolution of the Confederation did not constitute a turning-point in this portrayal. When Hollanders and Zealanders came into conflict with traders from the

48 Karl H. Schwebel, Der Stralsunder Friede (1370) im Spiegel der historischen Literatur (Bremen, 1970); Nils Jörn

et al. (eds), Der Stralsunder Frieden von 1370: Prosopographische Studien, Quellen und Darstellungen zur han-

sischen Geschichte NF 46 (Cologne, 1998); Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘Rules of Inclusion, Rules of Exclusion: The

Hanseatic Kontor in Bergen in the Late Middle Ages and its Normative Boundaries’, German History, 29 (2011),

p. 6.

49 Seifert, Kompagnons, pp. 54, 60–81.

50 Hanserecesse: Erster Abtheliung. 1256–1430, 8 vol. (Leipzig 1870–1897; henceforth HR I) HR I, vol. 1, no. 413; the

representatives of towns gathered in Cologne: Lübeck, Rostock, Stralsund, Wismar, Kulm, Thorn (Toruń), Elbing

(Elbląg), Kampen, Harderwijk, Elburg, Amsterdam, Brielle (then under Zealand).

51 Because some of them, such as Thorn/Toruń, were located at a considerable distance from the sea. HR I, vol. 1,

no. 413, 414, 415. Many of the inland members of the Hanse did not take part in the Confederation because their

involvement in the Scania trade was either small or non-existent, so that they were not affected by the conflict

with Valdemar.

52 Weststrate, ‘Abgrenzung’, pp. 17–21, 38–40; Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, Traders, Ties and Tensions: The Interaction

of Lübeckers, Overijsslers and Hollanders in Late Medieval Bergen (Hilversum, 2008), p. 15, especially note 15.

53 1368, see Seifert, Kompagnons, pp. 66–8, 76–7; 1376, HR I, vol. 2, no. 124 and Wubs-Mrozewicz, Traders,

pp. 47, 64–6.

54 Seifert Kompagnons, pp. 54, 60–81; Wubs-Mrozewicz, Traders, pp. 64–6.

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neighbouring Kampen in 1389, Hanseatic mediators described both parties in neu-tral terms. They conducted talks with ‘good people on both sides’ to prevent further unrest.55 In the 1390s, Hollanders and Zealanders were listed or addressed as allies in the fight against piracy, ‘friends’ (vrunde).56 When did the change occur, then? Seifert has pointed to the withdrawal of Hollanders and Zealanders from the last phase of the suc-cession conflict in Scandinavia in 1394/5, and their commitments in a political conflict between the Count of Holland and Zealand on the one hand, and Frisia on the other at the end of the fourteenth century.57 Privateering was one of the consequences of this latter conflict, and it affected various Hanse traders. Eventually, Hamburg burghers and the Count of Holland and Zealand became enemies over the issue of privateers.58 These political controversies were primarily between the Count and other Hanseatic towns, not between the Hollanders/Zealanders and the rest. However, political and eco-nomic ties between the territorial lords and Hollandish and Zealandish towns became stronger during this period. These ties became fixed when Holland and Zealand came under the rule of Burgundy (annexation in 1428/1433). This development, rather than economic competition, gave rise to the differentiation between Hansards on the one hand and Hollanders on the other.59

Can this gradual change be seen when the image of Hollanders and Zealanders is analysed? Indeed, things started to change during the first three decades of the fifteenth century. The change was heralded by the emergence of a new general term, non-Han-sard or literally someone ‘outside the Hanse’ (buten der hense), at the turn of the century.60 This ‘mirror-term’ term started to be used in letters and minutes from Hanseatic meet-ings, thus in the sources which most closely documented the common denominators of the Hanse.61 It was eagerly adopted in various contexts. In 1405, for example, the Hanseatic settlement or Kontor in Bruges filed a request at the Hanseatic diet that the Flemish and other non-Hansards (anderen buten der hense; de nicht in der hense sint) should not be allowed to become business partners with Hansards.62 Those ‘Others’ are not specified further in the text.63 In 1410, the Flemish, Hollanders and Zealanders were

55 The conflict was in Scania, HR I, vol. 3, no. 436.

56 HR I, vol. 4, no. 205 (1394); HR I 4 no. 308 § 3 (1395); HR I, vol. 4, no. 311 (1395). In 1408, when Hamburg was

attacked by pirates, Kampen and Amsterdam came to rescue, see HR I, vol. 5, no. 527.

57 Seifert, Kompagnons, pp. 137–44; Ibid., pp. 144–58; Antheun Janse, Grenzen aan de macht: De Friese oorlog van

de graven van Holland omstreeks 1400 (The Hague, 1993), pp. 195–241.

58 Seifert, Kompagnons, pp. 159–64.

59 Ibid., pp. 171–2. On the transition under Burgundy see Wim Blockmans and Walter Prevenier, The Promised Lands:

The Low Countries under Burgundian Rule, 1369–1530 (Philadelphia, 1999) especially pp. 91–3.

60 1399, HR I, vol. 4, no. 541 § 11 ‘neman, de in der henze is, hanteren schal yenigerleye gud up des copmans vri-

heyt, dat jenigem buten der hense to behoret’. It referred to the decision in 1366 (HR I, vol. 1, no. 376 §§ 11–12),

where the focus was on who was in the Hanse, and concerned the Kontore (compare no. 384 and 385). It must be

noted that the wording ‘buten der hense’ did not appear for the very first time in 1399: for instance, it was used

in 1361 in a source on trade in Denmark and Scania (thus also abroad), see HR I, vol. 1, no. 259 § 4. However, it

hardly ever occurs in the sources expressed in this wording until the end of the fourteenth century.

61 Of course, there were earlier sources and regulations on contact with people who were not defined as Hansards,

for instance Russians, the Flemish and Englishmen, as well as Hollanders and Zealanders. They could be referred

to specifically as a group (‘the English’), or more generally as ‘guests’ (‘gast’) or ‘foreign people’ (‘vremder lute’).

62 There were four main Kontore (in London, Bruges, Bergen and Novgorod), and several smaller settlements, see

Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘Rules’.

63 HR I, vol. 5, no. 225 §§ 8–9.

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presented as groups in opposition to ‘the merchants’ (that is, Hanseatic merchants) in Flanders.64 In 1417, Hollanders and Zealanders, along with traders from Kampen, were referred to explicitly as merchants buten der henze who traded in Livonia and learned the local language to the detriment of Hansards. The Kontor in Bruges expressed astonish-ment that Livonian towns would allow such behaviour. Only those who were members of the Hanse and who were born in Hanseatic towns were to be allowed to trade and become fluent in the local tongue.65 The matter of birth in a Hanseatic town (which was to become one of the crucial criteria of identification in the sixteenth century), made one of its first appearances here.66 Confusingly, in the same year, burghers from Kampen—flagged above as non-Hansards—were explicitly listed in another source as Hansards.67 The image of the non-Hansard was thus still blurred, but from the 1420s the distinction became clearer, especially when it began to be used in enforcing a ban on shared ownership of trading vessels by Hansards and non-Hansards, and on any joint loading of ships.68 This ban, and thus the specification of non-Hansard, became explicitly connected to Hollanders and Zealanders.69 Another example is from 1434, when it was forbidden in Livonia to borrow money from Hollanders or Zealanders, or to receive goods from non-Hansards and sell them as Hanseatic. The Livonian traders hoped thereby to control the involvement of Hollanders and Zealanders in their market.70 More and more often, the term ‘non-Hansard’ appeared in connection with Hollanders and Zealanders, and they became emblematic: ‘non-Hansards, i.e. Hollanders and others’, became a recurring phrase. All in all, issues in the Hanseatic versus non-Hanseatic discussions referred to rights that traders should enjoy abroad, and in Hanseatic towns.71 This overview of terminology shows that the alterity per-spective emerged gradually, as part of a larger process.

In Hanseatic research literature up until the 1990s, the interpretation of these sources from the first three decades of the fourteenth century suggested that they bore witness to a growing awareness of Hanseatic boundaries, and to a permanent defini-tion of Hollanders and Zealanders as competitors to the Hanse. Yet as Stuart Jenks has shown, the situation was complex. These and later measures, formulated during Hanseatic meetings and for the Hanseatic towns, were mostly instigated by specific parties, often by the Bruges Kontor, and they were used as a means of exerting pres-sure in specific contexts of crises and negotiations with non-Hansards. Moreover, by no means all Hanseatic towns adhered to these rules, and it appears that once a crisis was over, breaches of the bans were common, and there was even a silent understanding

64 HR I, vol. 5, no. 674 § 14.

65 HR I, vol. 6, no. 400 § 13. The language issue kept resurfacing in the context of traders from Holland, Zealand and

Kampen, see for instance 1434, HR II, vol. 1, no. 226 § 8.

66 Wubs-Mrozewicz, Traders, p. 130.

67 HR I, vol. 6, no. 397 A § 30. This is the core of the lively and long-lasting debate on the membership of Kampen

in the Hanse, and its (re)admission in 1441, see Weststrate, ‘Abgrenzung’, pp. 22, 30–3.

68 The first one in 1418, HR I, vol. 6, no. 556 A § 70; HR I, vol. 6, no. 557 § 32; 1421, HR I, vol. 7, no. 355 § 11;

1421, HR I, vol. 7, no. 363; Stuart Jenks, ‘Zum hansischen Gästerecht’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 114 (1996),

p. 14.

69 HR I, vol. 7, no. 576.

70 HR II, vol. 1, no. 226 §§ 7–9, 11; Jenks, ‘Gästerecht’, 14–6.

71 Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘Hansards and the “Other”: Perceptions and Strategies in Late Medieval Bergen’, in

Wubs-Mrozewicz and Jenks, Hanse.

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that the bans were no longer binding.72 In Hanse outposts abroad, the Kontore, on the other hand, the policy was intended as continuous.73 What is most salient, however, is the neutral tone of all these prohibitions and references to Hollanders and Zealanders as non-Hansards. There was no explicit, lasting negative image. This stands in stark contrast to the perspective in older historiography. In fact, positive perceptions of the interaction can be found in the sources. They highlight regional differences within the Hanse in attitudes towards Hollanders and Zealanders. In 1435, when Lübeck decided that trade with Flanders, Holland, Brabant and Zealand was to be stopped due to the murder of Hansards in Flanders, the Prussian towns (among them Danzig) raised their voices in protest. They stressed that they did not wish to endanger their relations with Hollanders and Zealanders because this would result in economic losses.74 While seeing Hollanders as non-Hansards, Danzigers perceived them as a welcome ‘Other’. Zealanders and Hollanders, and especially the latter, were the main group ‘from the outside’ that settled in Danzig in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they enjoyed a far better status there than, for instance, the English.75

The first time an explicitly negative tone was struck in the portrayal of Hollanders (and Zealanders) in Hanseatic sources was in the context of an armed conflict. In 1438, councillors of Lübeck wrote to Danzigers to remind them that Hollanders were declared enemies of all Hanseatic towns (‘aller stede van der Dutschen henze entzechte vyende syn’), thus not only of Lübeckers and Wends.76 The background was the 1438–1441 war between Hollanders/Zealanders and the Wendish towns. In older research, this war was repeatedly portrayed as a violent rupture in relations, caused by the Hollandish advance in the Baltic. It was even wrongfully called a Hollandish-Hanseatic war, imply-ing that all Hansards participated in it or backed it. The meticulous analysis done by Seifert has shown, however, that the conflict with the Wendish towns erupted as a consequence of a dispute about the payment of damages, specifically damages done by privateers during the war with the Danish king (1426–1435).77 If we focus on the imagery, we see that Lübeckers wanted to call other Hanseatic towns to action. One way to achieve this was to construct a negative image of Hollanders and Zealanders that would be juxtaposed to that of all Hansards, and would thus push regional dif-ferences within the Hanse into the background. Lübeck developed the war rhetoric by expressing fear that the Hanseatic settlement in Bergen, largely in the hands of Lübeckers, would fall prey to Hollandish expansion (‘de nedderlage in der Hollandere macht queme’).78 It must be stressed here that towards the end of this conflict, the focus in Hanseatic sources turned to Hollanders. They appeared less frequently in

72 Jenks, ‘Gästerecht’.

73 Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘Rules’. But there could be local adaptations of the policy, for instance the use of Hollandish

ships in Bergen, Wubs-Mrozewicz, Traders, pp. 160–3.

74 HR II, vol. 2, no. 11, as a reply to no. 8.

75 Marie-Louise Pelus-Kaplan, ‘Merchants and Immigrants in Hanseatic cities, c. 1500–1700’, in Donatella Calabi and

Stephen Turk Christensen (eds), Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, vol. 2: Cities and Cultural Exchange in

Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge, 2007).

76 HR II, vol. 2, no. 200.

77 Seifert, Kompagnons, pp. 421–2.

78 HR II, vol. 2, no. 397 (1440).The cloth trade of Hollanders in Bergen had already earlier been described as very

harmful to the interests of the Kontor, HR II, vol. 7, no. 464 (1437).

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combination with Zealanders, as part of a double image.79 In addressing the king of Denmark, the Wends tried to present the conflict as an all-Hanseatic matter. Moreover, they reminded their Danish allies that Hollanders were an enemy ‘Other’ not only to Hansards, but also to Danes (‘dat de Hollandere jwe vyende sint like so se unse sint’).80 In the historiographical interpretations the fact that other members of the Hanse had different interests or approaches to Hollanders during this conflict was downplayed or left unmentioned. For instance the Prussian towns, with Danzig in the lead, were not prone to wage war, nor did they use any wartime rhetoric, even though they insisted on the repayment of damages. Their portrayal of Hollanders in this conflict situation was neutral.81 In a letter to the Duke of Burgundy, Danzigers stressed that the war was a Wendish affair, and that Danzig had nothing to do with it and did not wish to be drawn into the conflict (‘wii mit dem vorscreven orloge und krige mit alle nichtes nicht heb-ben to donde’). If their ships and goods were returned, Hollanders would be welcomed according to old custom.82 Also Overijsslers made agreements with Hollandish towns that they would withhold from the conflict.83 The ‘enemy’ image in this war was thus a Wendish, not an all-Hanseatic creation.

What happened after the war? Did the ‘enemy image’ continue in the rhetoric of the Wends? In nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpretations, the term ‘enemy’ had a gravely long-term, ideological and all-encompassing ring: is this actually supported by the medieval sources? Remarkably, the extant sources indicate that a more neutral tone was resumed, in writings from the Wendish towns also.84 This indicates that, contrary to historiographical interpretations, the concept of an enemy was a temporary one. For instance, when Hollandish shippers (very politely) asked Lübeckers in 1443 for help in recovering goods taken by privateers from Bremen, Lübeckers sent letters around and were apparently eager to resolve the matter.85 The past war was presented in Hanseatic writings in the pragmatic context of the damages that the Hollanders were slow in repaying (‘de Hollanders noch nycht hastych darup to betalende’).86 Hollanders were no longer portrayed as outright enemies, but they were clearly and repeatedly presented as non-Hansards. Contacts with them were to be regulated in order to safeguard the interests of all Hanseatic traders. The (re) admission of Kampen to the Hanse serves as an illustration: in 1442, the envoys of the Hanseatic towns voiced concerns that Kampen traders would send Hollanders to Livonia as burghers of Kampen. Therefore they impressed on the Kampen councillor that the town’s policy would have to prove to the other Hanseatic towns that the concerns were unfounded. In case of doubt, Livonian towns were allowed to arrest a person and his goods if they suspected him to be a Hollander.87 The admission of Kampen (and other towns) was a clear way

79 HR II, vol. 2, no. 488 (esp. pp. 413ff), 489, 490. This was connected to the general economic development of the

two counties, see most recently Arno Neele, ‘De economie van de stad en de stedelingen’, in Paul Brusse and Peter

Henderikx (eds), Geschiedenis van Zeeland (Zwolle, 2012), pp. 277–94.

80 HR II, vol. 2, no. 488 §§ 21, 22, 26.

81 HR II, vol. 2, no. 434.

82 HR II, vol. 2, no. 264 (1438).

83 Hansisches Urkundenbuch, 11 vol., Halle, 1876–1939 [henceforth HUB], vol. 7, no. 574.

84 HR II, vol. 2, no. 530; HR II, vol. 2, no. 557; HR II, vol. 2, no. 574; HR II, vol. 2, no. 695.

85 HR II, vol. 3, no. 51 and 52.

86 HR II, vol. 2, no. 622.

87 HR II, vol. 2, no. 608 § 30.

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to demarcate the boundary between Hansards and Hollanders. It was an important part of the process of making the Hanse more tightly organized.88 In this period, the procedures surrounding the admission of new members of the Hanse were sharpened: among other things, the Hanseatic towns decided that all towns were to be given the opportunity to reflect on the question of whether a new member would be valuable to the whole community or not.89 Here, the Hanse showed itself explicitly as a community of interest with institutional boundaries that were marked more pronouncedly.

From the 1460s onwards, concerns started to be heard more often that Hollanders could provide a source of discord between Hanseatic towns. The reason was that the interests of some Hanseatic traders overlapped with Hollandish ones, and in turn the interests of other Hansards could be harmed. For instance, the Bruges Kontor, Lübeck and other Wendish towns kept a watchful eye on contacts between Hollanders and their Hanseatic neighbours, the merchants from the Overijssel towns (Kampen, Deventer and Zwolle). Alarm bells were rung if the suspicion was awakened that Hollanders were getting excessively favourable treatment, for example being allowed to bring their cloth to Overijssel instead of bringing it to Bruges, enjoying protection in the Hanseatic set-tlement in Scania, or being given the opportunity to trade in Bergen, Norway, under the cover of rights of Kampen traders (‘under erem vordexel’).90 Overijssel traders rejected some of the charges, stating that it was not their habit to protect Hollanders.91 In the 1460s and 1470s, there was increasing concern and annoyance that Hollanders were crossing the virtual boundary of the Hanse. News spread that Hollanders had started to pretend that they were Hansards in order to sell cloth in the Baltic (‘seggen, se zin koplude van der hanse, darmede men denne de lakene lidet’).92 In the west, the case of a craftsman from Cologne, who was of Hollandish origin and made use of Hanseatic rights in London, led to a heated discussion at a Hanseatic meeting in 1465. Despite the fact that the craftsman was the burgher of a Hanseatic town, the Kontor in London was against letting him enjoy Hanseatic rights. The argument was that it could harm the interests of all Hansards in the long run.93 The issue of cloth trade in Bruges, or rights in London reveals that the matter of Hollanders was particularly urgent in settlements abroad. The distinction between Hansards and non-Hansards was more important in the Kontore than in the Hanseatic towns. In the Kontore, both mercantile and social contacts could be more strictly regulated than in the towns. The matter of preserving the Kontor’s privileges, as opposed to the privileges of Hollanders and others, was of greatest urgency.94 A negative image of Hollanders there was instrumental, i.e. used as an argument to convince fellow Hansards or the ruler of a territory of the necessity of

88 Weststrate, ‘Abgrenzung’ (2003).

89 HR II, vol. 3, no. 288 § 69.

90 HR II, vol. 6, no. 465 § 5; HR II, vol. 5, no. 259 (1462); HR II, vol. 7, no. 338 § 160 (1470).

91 HR II, vol. 5, no. 259 (1462).

92 HR II, vol. 6, no. 470 § 8 (1471).

93 HR II, vol. 5, no. 712 § 29 (1465). It was argued that the problem was not only that he was born a Hollander, but

also that he was a craftsman, and craftsmen were not to enjoy trade rights. Yet in the end, it was decided that

craftsmen were allowed to trade in London, so it was not the vocational issue which was decisive here, but the

fact that he was not born in a Hanseatic town.

94 In Bergen, severe punishment was meted out to Hansards who engaged in mercantile and social contacts with

Hollanders that were deemed too close by the Kontor administrators, HR II, vol. 6, no. 186; HR II, vol. 7, no. 342,

343 and 388; Wubs-Mrozewicz, Traders, pp. 11–2, 224–36 and Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘Rules’.

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protecting the Kontore. In Bergen, for example, Hollanders were depicted as harmful to Hanseatic business each time they managed to have their privileges confirmed.95 Yet in other, ‘ordinary’ and less eventful times Hollanders and Hansards co-existed in Bergen, and in some respects even cooperated, as in the use of ships. Politics and trade created different arguments.96

In the sixteenth century, several violent conflicts erupted and enemy images resur-faced, but it was not a perspective shared by all Hansards. In 1510–14, a Wendish-Hollandish war broke out (which was rooted in a conflict between Lübeck and Denmark concerning dynastic strife in Scandinavia).97 A telling source from 1512 gives an (indi-rect) presentation of a Wendish image of Hollanders. The story starts with an attack at sea during which traders from Kampen fell prey to privateers from the Wendish towns Lübeck, Stralsund and Hamburg. The Kampen burghers complained that the priva-teers ‘hurled demeaning insults at them, calling them hare-brained and Hollanders, enemies, traitors, thieves and accusing them of having (forbidden) business associa-tions with Hollanders’.98 Again, the war was hardly an all-Hanseatic matter. Traders from Kampen and other Overijssel towns firmly declined any involvement in the war because Hollanders were their direct neighbours, and they did not wish to give up the close relations they had established.99 Also towns which lay geographically further away (such as Danzig and the Livonian towns) but which had long traditions of direct and intensive connections with Hollandish traders were eager to maintain good relations, even if it at times this meant going against the policy of Lübeck.100

What is striking in the sixteenth-century wartime sources, is that a historical layer was added to the discourse. In 1514, when Hollanders and Wends resumed negotia-tions in order to end the war, Lübeckers commenced their account of Hollandish-Wendish relations going back to a conflict that was part of the Danish-Hanseatic war of 1426–35. Hollanders then lent their support to the Danish king Erik, who in turn attacked Hanseatic ships, which as mentioned above, resulted in damages claims and the 1438–41 war with Wends. Since then, the burgomaster of Lübeck claimed, Hollanders, Zealanders, Westfrieslanders and Antwerp had acted as enemies to Hansards. They

95 HR II, vol. 4, no. 585 and 586 (1458); HR II, vol. 6, no. 356 § 14 (1470). Hansards in Bergen not only complained,

but sometimes also took action: Hollanders repeatedly complained about bad treatment in the 1480s, HUB 10

no. 1143 (1484); HR III, vol. 5, no. 5 § 9 (1504).

96 Wubs-Mrozewicz, Traders, pp. 160–3.

97 Hanno Brand, ‘Habsburg Diplomacy during the Holland-Wend Trade Conflict of 1510–1514’, in Hanno Brand

(ed.), Trade, Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange: Continuity and Change in the North Sea Area and the Baltic

c. 1350–1750 (Hilversum, 2005); James P. Ward, The Cities and States of Holland (1506–1515): A Participative

System of Government Under Strain (unpublished PhD thesis Leiden University, 2001).

98 HR III, vol. 6, no. 474 § 1 (1512).

99 HR III, vol. 7, no. 154 (1519). The ‘neighbourly’ argument was used earlier, also in the context of shipment of

goods from Bergen to Overijssel and Holland, see Wubs-Mrozewicz, Traders, p. 162; HUB 10 no. 382 (1475).

100 HR III, vol. 8, no. 812 § 72 (1524); HR IV, vol. 1, no. 111 (1532); Brand, ‘Diplomacy’, p. 125. Danzigers were

intent on cooperation with Hollanders in the grain trade. Thanks to close links with the rising economy of Holland

and later the Dutch Republic, the town experienced its golden age in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth

century. In turn, the access to Baltic grain gave Hollanders the economic foundation for their own Golden Age

in the seventeenth century, see Pelus-Kaplan, ‘Merchants’; Maria Bogucka, Baltic Commerce and Urban Society,

1500–1700: Gdansk/Danzig and its Polish Context (Aldershot, 2003); Mijla van Tielhof, De Hollandse graanhan-

del, 1470–1570: koren op de Amsterdamse molen (The Hague, 1995) and The ‘Mother of all Trades’: The Baltic

Grain Trade in Amsterdam from the Late 16th to the Early 19th Century (Leiden, 2002).

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were directly responsible for the crises in the Hanseatic relations with Scandinavian rulers, and had treated badly Hanseatic traders in the Low Countries.101 When conflict between Wends and Hollanders erupted anew in 1522–4 and 1532–4 as a result of political and commercial tensions, Wendish (and in particular Lübeckish) diplomats were using this negative image of Hollanders to persuade other Hansards to participate in the conflict or at least to give protection to Wendish ships. In 1524, they impressed upon others that common action had to be taken in order to prevent Hansards from being ‘sailed flat from the surface of the [Baltic] sea’ (‘uns andere de Hollandere so plat van der sehe segeln solen’).102 The Wends renewed the calls for support and pointed to the enemy ‘Other’ several times in the 1530s.103 They expressed alarm that Hollanders were more powerful than ever.104 In an exasperated tone, they asked whether ‘one should sit still and see Hollanders take over the whole Baltic?’105 This Wendish attempt to mobilize other Hansards shows an increased Hanseatic self-identification during conflicts with non-Hansards; it was thus an instrument for a specific purpose. This runs parallel to manifestations of such internal identifications when shared rights and privileges abroad were endangered. In other cases, Hanseatic internal identification is far more difficult to detect in the medieval and early modern sources: traders were primarily burghers of their towns, and only in second place Hansards.106

These wartime images of Hollanders from the first decades of the sixteenth century proved highly influential on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German historians, and reverberated in countless publications on the Hanse and Hanseatic-Hollandish rela-tions. The historical perspective in these images was both enticing and convincing. It provided ready answers, answers that fitted with the contemporary view of the Hanse and overall German-Dutch relations. The enemy images were passed on as representa-tive for the whole Hanse (even though they were primarily about Wends), and for both the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Repeatedly, they were linked to the advance of Hollanders in the Baltic. In this version, the relations turned from bad to worse during the course of the sixteenth century.

Yet did the enemy image indeed live on in the actual sixteenth-century sources? Hardly, not even in Wendish writings. In a vein similar to that which followed ear-lier conflicts, the rhetoric went back to a far more neutral image of Hollanders as the ‘Other’. They could still be depicted as competitors, for instance in the negotia-tions with the Danish king concerning the privileges of Hollanders in Bergen, or in

101 HR III, vol. 6, no. 626 § 49.

102 Hanno Brand, ‘Habsburg and Hanseatic Diplomacy During the Sound Controversy of 1532’, in Hanno Brand,

Leos Müller and Poul Holm (eds), The Dynamics of Economic Culture in the North Sea and Baltic Region (c.

1250–1700) (Hilversum, 2007), p. 102; Louis Sicking, Neptune and the Netherlands: State, Economy and War

at Sea in the Renaissance (Leiden, 2004), pp. 231, 240; Konrad Fritze and Günter Krause, Seekriege der Hanse

(Berlin, 1989); HR III, vol. 8, no. 812 § 72 (1524).

103 HR IV, vol. 1, no. 54 (1532); HR IV, vol. 1, no. 69 (1532); HR IV, vol. 1, no. 121 § 6 (1532); HR IV, vol. 1, no. 122 §

5 (1532); Niederländische Akten und Urkunden, 2 vols. [henceforth NAU] ed. Rudolf Häpke (Munich and Lübeck,

1913–1923) vol. I, no. 125 (1533).

104 HR IV, vol. 1, no. 166 § 3 (1533).

105 HR IV, vol. 1, no. 173 § 15 (1533).

106 See most recently the extensive treatment in Volker Henn and Jürgen Sarnowsky (eds), Das Bild der Hanse in der

städtischen Geschichtsschreibung des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Trier, 2010).

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matters of passage through the Sound.107 But the negativity evaporated once a conflict expired, which means that the concept of the enemy was clearly time- and context-bound. This also emerges in plans for closer cooperation between Hollanders and Hansards. Here, an entirely different image of Hollanders is captured. In 1557, Philip II of Spain (and lord of the counties of Holland and Zealand) sent an alliance pro-posal to the Hanse. The context was the difficulties experienced by both Hollandish and Hanseatic traders with the export of cloth from England. This plan was put on hold, but the assurance of ‘neighbourly friendship’ in the Hanseatic reaction strikes quite a different tone from the image of enmity projected by nineteenth- and twen-tieth-century historians onto this period.108 In 1565, it was the syndic (official) of the Hanse, Heinrich Suderman, who came back to the idea of closer relations between the Hanse and their neighbours (benachparten) in a letter to William of Orange, the governor of Holland and Zealand.109 The common theme in both exchanges was thus the image of neighbourhood. Also in the internal Hanseatic discourse on this issue, the idea of close ‘neighbours’ permeated the arguments.110 William replied that he was willing to reflect on the matter and hoped that such a confederation would be advantageous for both parties.111 Soon after, William of Orange became preoccupied with other pressing matters, subsequently known as the Dutch Revolt (1566–1609). No formal alliance between the Hanse and the Netherlands was formed, so this episode rarely makes it into historical analyses. Yet it shows clearly that the image of steadily escalating mercantile and political competition and enmity between Hollanders and Hansards in the sixteenth century is misleading.

III: Conclusion

This paper has shown how German historians channelled their own historical con-text into their writings about the Hanse. From the nineteenth century until the 1940s, there was a linear evolution towards more clear-cut boundaries of the image of the Hanse, and of the German nation. In order to strengthen and clarify the positive image of the Hanse, an antagonistic image of Hollanders (and to a lesser degree Zealanders) as non-Hansards, as ‘Other’, was introduced in German historiogra-phy. Hollanders were presented as eternal competitors and enemies in the economic and political struggle for supremacy in the Baltic and North Sea in the middle ages and early modern period. The colouring of this image was repeatedly adapted to the particular needs of popular discourse and even propaganda: Hollanders as fatal challengers of the Hanse and Germany at sea, or as ‘Hansards manqué’. After the Second World War, this image became more neutral, but the maintenance of a clear boundary remained evident. It was only in the 1990s that the separate roots of Hanseatic and Hollandish trade were contested: an alternative view now is that until

107 Wubs-Mrozewicz, Traders, pp. 76–80; NAU, vol. I, no. 457 (1543).

108 Kölner Inventar (henceforth KI) ed. Konstantin Höhlbaum (Leipzig, 1896–1903), vol. I no. 1333 and NAU, vol. I,

no. 803 and 804.

109 KI, vol I, no. 2595 (2 May 1565).

110 KI no. 80, compare no. 81 (30 Nov. 1565).

111 KI, p. 556, note 1, 30 May 1565.

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the first decades of the fifteenth century, Hollanders and Zealanders can be seen as members of the Hanse. Moreover, even after a clear boundary was erected between Hansards on the one hand and Hollanders and Zealanders on the other, competi-tion went hand in hand with cooperation in the fifteenth century. The analysis in this paper complements these insights by showing that this image of Hollanders as an antagonistic ‘Other’ in older historiography was based on selected (negative and conflict-related) sources, which were put forward as representative of the whole body of historical evidence. In particular, it appears that sixteenth-century sources con-taining elements of historical overview and statements on primordial antagonisms were favoured by historians.

A systematic and meticulous analysis of the image of Hollanders in the sources up to the 1560s reveals an inner logic which has until now gone unnoticed in research. This logic was a cyclical one: in conflict situations the image became negative (though only from the point of view of those Hansards who were directly involved in the conflict), and this was then presented as a perennial image of relations. These pri-mary sources thus developed a particular historical perspective. After the conflict the image became more neutral or even positive. So it appears that the enemy image of Hollanders as the ‘Other’ in the primary sources was instrumental, and unlike in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography, it had a clear expiry date. The only significant turning-point was the introduction and expansion of the distinction between Hanseatic and non-Hanseatic in the first three decades of the fifteenth cen-tury, when Hollanders and Zealanders were placed outside of this boundary. While internal identifications of the Hanse are rare, this external identification appears as one of the few consistent and major identifications in the Hanse. However, the analysis here shows that what this identification actually meant was context-bound. The dis-tinction was most pronounced in conflict situations.

The key to tracing the changes in identifications is the concept of the close ‘Other’. It is evident that it reveals even subtle changes—or a telling lack of change, for that matter—both in the medieval and early modern case, and in the nineteenth- and twen-tieth-century case. In the primary sources, the special importance of the close ‘Other’ emerges from the gradual process of differentiation in the first decades of the fifteenth century. As a result of this process, Hollanders (and Zealanders) were no longer part of a broad, inclusive and vague definition of the Hanse. It is no coincidence that Hollanders became emblematic non-Hansards: the tag was necessary because it was not self-evi-dent, as it would have been, for instance, in reference to the English or to Russians. After the concept ‘non-Hansards’ was introduced, the economic ties with some of the Hanseatic towns and traders were still very intense. This shows again that external identifications were far from uniform in the Hanse. In historiography, Hollanders were repeatedly on the agenda because the process of defining their relations within and with the Hanse was connected to the idea of the Hanse, and to Germany. The step-by-step analysis of the historiography reveals that these identifications were in con-stant movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A distant ‘Other’ would not have triggered such regular discussions concerning the boundaries of the Hanse and of Germany: it would not have brought them in question. The concept of the ‘Other’ may be aptly described as a mirror, yet its effect depends on where it is placed. Hollanders as the ‘Other’ were a mirror that was close at hand.

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Abstract

This paper combines a historiographical analysis and a systematic examination of medieval and early mod-ern primary sources. It demonstrates how German historians channelled their own historical context into their writings about the Hanse, specifically into their view on relations between Hansards and Hollanders. It explains why and when these two groups were perceived by historians as distinct, and Hollanders were portrayed as the ‘Other’, often in negative terms. The historiographical image of Hollanders as the antago-nistic ‘Other’ to Hansards was conveyed as a constant image of their relations, and it was employed in contemporary propaganda. These views are juxtaposed with an analysis of the depiction of Hollanders in sources related to the Hanse. This analysis shows how the distinction between Hansards and Hollanders came into being in the first decades of the fifteenth century. It also reveals an inner logic connected to negative images: it was a temporary connotation, related to conflict situations and waning after conflicts were resolved. The concept of the close ‘Other’ is a tool in tracking the changes of these identifications, and explaining their underpinning both in the primary sources and in historiography.

Keywords: Hanse, alterity, medieval identities, historiography, conflict resolution

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'The close 'Other'. Hollanders in medieval Hanseatic sources and in historiography', German History...

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