Listening Section 4: Note & Table Completion: Question 2

Transcript-based practice (no audio).

Lecturer: This morning we're going to look at one of medieval Europe's most unusual political creations: the Hanseatic League. The League wasn't really a state in the way we'd recognise one today. It was a confederation of merchant guilds and market towns that banded together, from roughly the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, to protect their shared trading interests along the coasts of the Baltic and North Seas.

Although the League had no single ruler, one city functioned as its de facto capital: Lübeck, on the German Baltic coast, where merchants from allied towns coordinated policy and pooled resources. Trade itself was organised around a network of overseas outposts the League established in major foreign ports; these outposts were known as kontors, and each one operated almost as a self-contained merchant colony, with its own warehouses, living quarters and legal privileges granted by the host city. The kontor in London, for instance, became known as the Steelyard, and it sat on the north bank of the Thames for several centuries, handling wool, cloth and metal goods moving between England and the continent.

Because there was no permanent bureaucracy holding the League together, major decisions were made at an occasional gathering of delegates from member towns called the Hanseatic Diet, which usually convened in Lübeck whenever a serious dispute or opportunity required a coordinated response. And because the League had no standing army either, its preferred tool for disciplining a rival city or a difficult foreign ruler wasn't warfare. It was a trade embargo. Simply cutting a port off from Hanseatic shipping could cripple its economy within months, which made the threat of an embargo remarkably effective diplomatic leverage.

The ships themselves typically carried a fairly predictable cargo: timber, furs, wax and grain moved west and south from the Baltic hinterland, while finished cloth and manufactured goods moved the other way. One of the most lucrative trades, though, was herring. Vast quantities were salted and shipped from fishing grounds off the southern Baltic coast. That trade eventually collapsed for reasons that had nothing to do with politics: sometime in the fifteenth century, the herring shoals themselves shifted their migration pattern away from the Baltic and into the North Sea, and Hanseatic merchants simply couldn't relocate their fishing operations fast enough to compete with rivals already established there.

Combined with the rise of centralised, tax-collecting nation-states and growing competition from Dutch and English merchants, this slow erosion of the League's economic base eventually proved fatal. The Hanseatic League never formally dissolved itself; it simply faded away, and historians usually mark 1669, the date of its last full Diet, as the effective end of nearly four centuries of Hanseatic dominance.

Complete the notes below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.

The Hanseatic League. Lecture Notes

Overview

• Type of organisation: a confederation of merchant guilds and market towns
• Region of activity: the Baltic and North Sea coasts
• De facto capital city: (1) ______________

Trading network

• Term for the League's overseas trading posts: (2) ______________
• London's trading post was known as the (3) ______________

Governance

• Central policy-making assembly: the Hanseatic (4) ______________
• Main economic weapon used against rival cities: a trade (5) ______________

Trade and decline

• Typical cargo carried west and south from the Baltic: timber, furs, wax and (6) ______________
• Cause of the herring trade's decline: fish shifted from the Baltic to the (7) ______________
• Year of the League's final full assembly: (8) ______________