Dollinger Philippe. The German Hansa

Stanford University Press, 1970. — 497 p.There are few, if any, sources in English that provide as comprehensive a few of the Hansa. (This book is an English translation of the original French version.) This book gave me a much better picture of the what the Hansa did, where it did it and included a vast array of specifics. The Hansa remains a great source of pride in Germany and lends it's name to the country's national airline. What I personally find appealing about the Hansa is this network of trading city-states stood as independent entities presided over by councils and focused on generating wealth, rather than subjugated territories presided over by monarchs and focused on war (which most of Europe was at the time). Even now, the cities of Bremen and Hamburg are titled "Free and Hanseatic" and the cities alone each make up a federal state of Germany. The Hansa cut a different path at a time when the two greatest medieval preoccupations were 1) the church and 2) acquisition of territory. This is, however, not to say that the Hansa were not obsessed by pilgrimage or averse to conflict. Such is the nature of free trade: one profits whilst another suffers a loss. The Hansa was prone to stimulating German immigration into Danish, Dutch and Slavic towns (both invited and uninvited) for their own economic and political needs and had a habit of imposing unbalanced trade conditions, blockading towns and choking trade whenever it didn't get it's way.