The Hanseatic League: Explained (Short Animated History Documentary)

The Hanseatic League was a consortium of trading towns which all-but monopolised trade in the north and baltic seas between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. But how did they manage to achieve this and what led to their decline? To find out watch this short and simple animated history documentary.

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[TheMrFabian]

Hamburg still officially calls itself the "Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg". It's still a big part of their folklore there.

[namenamename]

Side note, the Hanseatic Leauge lives on in name. Many cities in Germany, most notably Hamburg, still proudly carry "Hansestadt" (Hanseatic city) in their name.

[Stoneworks]

I was just wondering how I could dominate the trade of the northern seas and inland rivers. Thank you for the tips and tricks!!

[hans-rudi-der-letzte]

There is actually a "New Hansa" nowadays with cities like Hamburg, Lübeck, Bremen, Rostock, Gdansk, Riga and Tallinn closely working together. There are even the "Hanseatic Days of New Time" a big festival that is every year in another Hanseatic town. :)

[Finlandiaperkele]

One of the most impactful things the League did was the standardization of city design. In any city the basic layout was similar, a central market square with town hall/rathaus and a church. This meant that no matter which city you went to, you always found what you were looking for. This would also spread to non-Hanseatic cities due to its popularity and easing of the trade.

Also why Hanseatic League was so popular was the network of rathauses, which meant that if you got scammed or asked to pay too much for a product, you could file a complaint with your rathaus and the council would be in contact with the council of the rathaus in question and resolve the matter.

[cva]

Fun fact - "Hansa" basically means "group" or "league". So, Hanseatic League essentially means "Leagish League" or "Groupish Group"

The word survives in Lufthansa, which you can see as meaning Air League or Air Group or perhaps, at a stretch, United Air.

[skudrinskis]

A lot of this is taught in Latvian history classes and I always found Hanseatic league interesting

[northwestpassage]

Fun fact the administration and trade language used by the Hansa was Saxon (called today Low Saxon or low German and is a separate but related language to German and Dutch) and due to the Hansa’s influence in the Baltic modern Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian vocabulary have somewhere over 20% Low Saxon loan words. Today it’s a dying language but revitalization attempts are slowly gaining popularity and a unified spelling system has been developed to bridge dialects from the Netherlands and Germany.

[zartesnilpferd]

As someone originating from a very small Hanseatic city (Salzwedel) and now living in one of the most important members of the league (Rostock),
I have to deeply thank you for covering this. :)

[patrickhaeusler]

The old Hanseatic League may no longer exist, but some of it's former members still officially call themselves "Hanseatic Cities", are often using Hanseatic symbolism like red and white flags and coats of arms, share a common dialect called Hanseatic Lower German (although it has it's regional differences) and have a special relationship with each other. This mostly applies to Hamburg, my home town of Bremen, and Lübeck, who all managed to keep their independence up to the Unification of Germany (borrowing the short period of French occupation during the Napoleonic Wars), and are, in case of Hamburg and Bremen, even nowadays self-governing city-states within Germany's federal system. After German Reunification, they were joined by several former East German cities at the Baltic coast such as Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund or Greifswald, and if you take a look at the buildings from the time of the Hanseatic League, it's wealth still becomes evident (in fact, Hamburg is still the wealthiest city and most important harbor in Germany).

[Kameeho]

Funfact: My town of Bergen our beer brand is called Hansa. Also the Unesco world heritage site which is pretty much the core identity of our town is remnants of the Hanseatic league. The Hanseatic league is also partly responsible for our unique dialect and the fact that despite being in a area is geographically surrounded and populated by the second language of Norway (Nynorsk), Bergen is stuck with Bokmål like the eastern part and general majority of norway speaks.

[Yora]

Born in Hamburg, lived in Lübeck most of my life.
All the major cities in northern Germany, and I think also northern Poland, still have red and white as their colors.

[genericyoutubeaccount]

The Hanseatic League was crucial to waging war on piracy (and Denmark whenever the Danes charged the Germans a toll for using the Danish Straits). The most famous pirate of the era was Klaus Stortebecker

Klaus Störtebecker was brought to the Grasbrook in Hamburg where he and his 72 companions were beheaded on October 20, 1401. As his last wish, Störtebecker asked that all the men he could walk past after his head had fallen should be freed. That wish was granted, but when the headless pirate had passed 11 of his shipmates, one of the members of the city council tripped him up and in the end all of his men were killed, including those he had walked past.

[tobio.]

Fun fact: Many former hanseatic cities still carry the name "Hansestadt" in their official name like the "Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg". They also put it on their licence plate abbreviations. Thus Hamburg despite being the biggest cities starting with an H does not have H on their plates but HH for Hansestadt Hamburg.

[MUG-Authors]

This is probably my absolute favorite among your videos. I had never learned about this Hanseatic League before and it's so intriguing how they managed to have power and influence against kingdoms and other more centralized political forces. Thank you for showing us a fascinating and under-appreciated part of history!

[NelsonDiscovery]

Awesome! There are far too few videos about the Hanseatic League.

[ansgarhugle]

One thing that wasn‘t mentioned is language: Most of the Hanse spoke Low German dialects, which are collectivly classivied as their own language distinct from the High German dialects to their south. Because of the Hanse, Low German became a lingua franka of northern trade and had a big impact on the development of Scandinavian languages. However, after the decline of the Hanse, North Germany was conquered by Prussia, and Low German mostly died out. Ironiclly, North Germany thous speaks the „cleanest“ High German as it lacks local dialects. Recently though, there has been a revival movement for Low German dialects like Hamburgian.

[Theology.]

You can tell its german because its name is Hans

[JanwillemJ]

Nice vid, I was born and raised in the Dutch ‘Hanzestad’ Zutphen. They have a cultural podium called the Hanzehof and a sporthal called the Hanzehal…and many more things called Hanze-something…so yeah, the Hansaetic League lives on 🤗

[davidhouseman]

I think this one needs at least a 10 minute history version.