In 1878 workmen building the Speicherstadt, the magnificent city of warehouses in the harbour of Hamburg made a gruesome discovery. In the mud of the Grasbrook, an island at the entrance of the medieval harbour of Hamburg emerged two piles of wood connected by a wooden bar. An ancient beacon guiding ships. What made it so special was what was nailed on to the bar, human skulls. Whoever these men were, they had been decapitated and their heads displayed as a warning. One of these skulls was quickly identified as that of Klaus Störtebecker, the notorious pirate.

The skulls were brought to the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte, the Museum for the history of Hamburg. There they reconstructed the facial features of Klaus Störtebecker so that vistors can get a better picture of what Hamburg’s greatest nemesis looked like.

If you leave the museum and turn right you quickly get to Simon von Utrecht Strasse, named after the man who captured Störtebecker on his agile small cog, the Bunte Kuh, the painted Cow.

Störtebecker was brought to the Grasbrook 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.

Hundreds of books have been and will still be written about Störtebecker and Simon von Utrecht. Some of those I have devoured as a child and this is why it hurts so much to have to tell you – all a lot of nonsense. Störtebecker lived and robbed until 1413, 12 years after his execution, which is a long time for a headless corpse. And Simon von Utrecht was just a lad when he allegedly seized Hamburg’s greatest adversary.

The story may be a tall tale, but piracy and the Victual Brothers were real and they were a real threat to the Hanse, or at least I believe it was.

The music for the show is Flute Sonata in E-flat major, H.545 by Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach (or some claim it as BWV 1031 Johann Sebastian Bach) performed and arranged by Michel Rondeau under Common Creative Licence 3.0.

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Hello and welcome to the Hanseatic League, a podcast from the History of the Germans: Episode 10 – Pirates

The skulls were brought to the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte, the Museum for the history of Hamburg. There they reconstructed the facial features of Klaus Störtebecker so that visitors can get a better picture of what Hamburg’s greatest nemesis looked like.

If you leave the museum and turn right you quickly get to Simon von Utrecht Strasse, named after the man who captured Störtebecker on his agile small cog, the Bunte Kuh, the painted Cow.

Hundreds of books have been and will still be written about Störtebecker and Simon von Utrecht. Some of those I have devoured as a child and this is why it hurts so much to have to tell you – all a lot of nonsense. Störtebecker lived and robbed until 1413, 12 years after his execution, which is a long time for a headless corpse. And Simon von Utrecht was just a lad when he allegedly seized Hamburg’s greatest adversary.

The story may be a tall tale, but piracy and the Victual Brothers were real and they were a real threat to the Hanse, or at least I believe it was.

Now before we get going you will have to endure my 30 second plea for support to the show. The other day I encountered someone who has been very successful in the podcasting business who suggested to me that if I were to put advertising in, the number of Patreons would actually go up. The pain of listening to crypto nonsense on an infinity loop seems to be sufficiently painful for people to part with large amounts of cash, just to be able to get advertising-free content.

Now I promised not to do advertising and I stick to it. But I thought about what he said and realised that one way for me to achieve a similar reaction from you would be to sing. You should know that I am from a family that has been relieved from singing classes in the seventh generation and my in-laws have banned me from belting out Oh Tannenbaum at Christmas. So here we go: Oh Tannenbaum, oh Tannenbaum, wie gruen sind deine Blaetter…du bluehst nicht nur zur Sommerzeit, nein… Ok. I stop now. You get the gist of it.

So, if you want to protect your fellow listeners not just from the delights of Doge Coin but also from my singing voice, become a patron of the show at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or make a one-time donation at historyofthegermans.com/support. Let’s all thank Carl, Vivian R., Matthew and Niclas who have already signed up.

Ok – pirates. Pirates are as old as sea-borne trade. Julius Caesar was captured by pirates and Pompei cleared the Mediterranean from this menace in 66 B.C. and they are still around, though the Somali pirates seem to have been got under control these last few years.

We all know what pirate is, right. Jack Sparrow throwing the grappling hook on to the unsuspecting Spanish Galleon whilst the cannons roar, the snipers shoot from the crow’s nest and a parrot shouts pieces of eight, pieces of eight.

Well, a pirate in the late 14th century was quite different. First up, no cannons, no snipers, no parrots and no pieces of eight. All of that did not yet exist.

By the time of John Sparrow marine technology was dominated by cannon. Ships meant for combat not only carried cannon but were also built to sustain being shot at by cannon. That in turn meant these ships were a lot heavier, needing more sail and deeper draft, which in turn meant more crew. Basically, a merchantman was a very different construction to a warship.

In the Baltic of the 14th and 15th century there was no major difference between warships and merchant vessels. Any vessel could be turned into a naval vessel, all that needed to happen was to replace goods storage with bunk beds for armed men.

And that meant that the ship’s crew too could easily be repurposed from peaceful trader in furs and wax to sailors in the navy of their hometown or to pirate.

Many an honourable merchant found himself through circumstance forced to make up losses through piracy. All it took was to tell the crew that instead of going to load up with stockfish in Bergen, they were to do that on the high seas at the expense of some passing Dutchman.

The way these encounters took place was only half as bloody as it is shown in the Pirates of the Caribbean. Because there were no distance weapons apart from bows and crossbows, the main task was to get close enough to the quarry to place a grappling hook to reel in the other ship and then it was a simple question of numbers. If the attackers were 30 men and the prise had a crew of only 10, why would anyone risk a fight that results in loss of life or limb. In particular not if this was essentially a commercial transaction, admittedly a rather one-sided transaction, but a transaction nonetheless.

And if the numbers were even, the attacker is likely to give up the chase before he loses some of his own precious crew. When we hear about seriously bloody encounters it usually happened because something in the mutual assessment of relative forces went wrong or other, non-commercial motives played a role.

All this sits in the general context of the Middle Ages. There was no monopoly on violence held by the state. It was understood and legitimate that anyone who could not gain redress in the courts was perfectly in his rights to seek satisfaction by means of violence. If that happened between landowners, it was called a feud and it was exceedingly common. In previous seasons we heard about the attempts of medieval monarchs and the church to restrain or regulate feuds and how that regularly failed.

Controlling violence on the Baltic and the North Sea was even more difficult. One reason is quite simple, a merchant vessel travelling alone is a lot more vulnerable than a caravan travelling along a busy road. A maritime attacker can disappear much quicker and if need be witnesses can be sent to the bottom of the sea never to be seen again. Things are likely to have gotten a lot worse since the middle of the 13th century. The two great powers, the Holy Roman Empire and the kingdom of Denmark were no longer able to control their subjects. The smaller entities were even less able to exercise power over the knights and cities nominally under their rule, except maybe for the Teutonic knights and the king of England.

You remember that merchant from Danzig we heard about last week who failed to get compensation for his goods stolen by baron Dispenser in the English court? Well, he had one last option left. He could set upon a ship owned by the Baron Dispenser or one of his relatives and get his compensation at the point of a sword. And if he did that, nobody would describe him as a pirate, well, nobody except for Dispenser, his relatives and his king, obviously.

In other words, the borders between merchant, navy captain and pirate were very, very fluid. One man’s pirate is another man’s naval hero.

It basically says that protection from violence on land and at sea was one of the two main purposes of the Hansa. And if you look at the early stages of the Hanse, that is exactly what the association provided. The merchants would travel together in a convoy to Novgorod, having sworn to protect each other against any attack along the way. The more merchants joined the convoy the safer it became, which I turn attracted more shippers to join, even if that meant they would all arrive together and achieve a lower price for their wares than if they arrived earlier or left later.

Though piracy is quite obviously a major problem right from the very beginning, we hear very little about pirates in the records before the late 14th century.

Who were the Victual Brothers? For that we have to go back to Danish history in the late 14th century.

When Margaret took over the kingdom it was still in a fragile state. The great fortresses on the Oresund were managed by the Hansards meaning that only 1/3 of the now much reduced tolls for transitioning the strait came to the crown. Equally the Hanse blocked Dutch and English merchants from getting to the herring markets in Skanoer and Falsterbo which reduced this once great fair where all kinds of product was traded to just a place to load up on fish. This plus the privileges of the Hanse traders meant that revenue from there also shrunk considerably.

Ok, that was a bit of a diversion. The other territory Margaret acquired was Norway. Oh, sorry, she did not acquire it, her son, still a minor at the time did. Margaret’s husband, king Haakon had died in 1380, at which point the crowns of Norway and Denmark were united. It will take until 1991 before Norway will get a king again who was not also king of either Denmark or Sweden and who was born in Norway.

Being Olaf II of Denmark and Olaf IV of Norway sounds quite impressive, but little Olaf had the trifecta of claims to Scandinavian crowns. His grandfather had been king Magnus IV of Sweden. If Magnus had remained on his throne, little Olaf would have smoothly picked up this crown as well. But Magnus had not held on to his crown.

The project was supported by a number of German princes and some of the Hanseatic cities. They showed up in Sweden in 1364 and a civil war began between Albrecht and Magnus. In 1365 Magnus is captured and the conduct of the war is now left to Magnus’ son Haakon, who was married to that self-same Margaret and is also the father of little Olaf, soon king of Denmark. Haakon could therefore count on support from the Danes.

Are you still following?

Stockholm comes under siege in 1371 and Albrecht relies on Hanseatic ships to keep the city supplied with food and weapons. For that he turns to his Mecklenburg subjects including the cities of Rostock and Wismar. They are happy to help but it raises the question of how they should be paid. Neither the harassed king of Sweden nor his dad, the duke of Mecklenburg had the funds to pay.

If we were in the 18th century the way to deal with this would have been to give the captains of these ships a letter of marque. That is what Francis Drake had, a letter from the king authorising him to capture vessels of the enemy on his own account. These letters of marque made him a privateer, i.e., a pirate who could take refuge in the harbours of the king of England.

Being able to seek refuge in a major trading city was crucial. Think about what is on these ships they capture: Furs, beeswax, grain, herring, cloth. If you want to turn this into cash to pay the crew, to repair damage to the ship and to ultimately retire, you needed a fence, a fence who can offload a couple of tons of grain or 50 barrels of herring. That is no fence, that is a merchant.

That is the big difference between Baltic piracy and Captain Blackbeard. In the Caribbean they went after the ships full of gold and silver. That requires no fence at all. What they needed were safe places to make repairs and maybe a place to get a barrel of rum and some entertainment, but they did not need a full-service trading city that could move stolen goods into major export markets.

Baltic pirates needed full-service trading cities. Rostock and Wismar were full-service trading cities.

Which gets us to the next question, who were the enemies these sea captains were permitted to attack? Well, naturally that would be Albrecht’s enemies, Norway and Denmark as well as the Swedish nobles.

But here is the rub. Neither Norway nor Denmark had many ships. We have just gone past the Peace of Stralsund and trading in the Baltic is pretty much a monopoly of the Hanse. There was some disagreement between the Mecklenburger duke and say Lübeck and Stralsund because they had signed the peace deal of Stralsund without asking him. But that was not really enough to call an outright war. And Rostock and Wismar were Hanse cities, so obliged not to attack other Hansards. And finally his main supporters in Sweden were the German merchants of Stockholm and Kalmar who had close connections to the Hanse.

So, thinks stayed in limbo for a while. The privateers went after the rare Danish and Norwegian vessels. They even did take the occasional Hanseatic vessel and sold its content in Rostock or Wismar. The owner protested and the other Hanseatic cities demanded that they stopped fencing stolen goods. But Rostock and Wismar said that their hands were tied. As loyal subjects of their overlord, the duke of Mecklenburg there was nothing they could do. Ah, and it also made them rich, so they did not really want to stop.

That went on until 1389 when the war between Margaret of Denmark and duke Albrecht of Mecklenburg entered its final phase. Albrecht of Sweden was captured, and his father grew desperate to get him back. In that situation he went from a more informal approach to a declaration of all-out war at sea. He proclaimed that he would open all the harbours in his duchy of Mecklenburg to quote “anyone who was prepared to go to sea to harm the kingdom of Denmark”.

According to Philipp Dollinger this opened the floodgates and knights, burghers, peasants and common thieves joined the banners of Mecklenburg noblemen who fitted out ships for war. Rostock and Wismar became the headquarters of the piracy operation where raids all along the coasts of Scandinavia were planned.

This all out war at sea turned the tide for Albrecht, at least a little bit. The privateers attacked shipping all across the Baltic, but particularly in and out of the herring market in Scania. No longer did they spare ships from Lübeck, Stralsund or Gdansk.

These privateers came to be known as the Victual Brothers. The word is usually linked to the French word vitailleur or viteller in English. These were the detachments of soldiers sent out to procure food and drink for the army on the march. In the chaos of the Hundred-Years war these vitailleurs turned into outright robbers. The term came up from France and was then attributed to the privateers. Some modern historians claim that the addition of the word brother was given to them by their enemies to create the impression they were an organised, coherent army rather than a loose confederation of independent military entrepreneurs.

Another term used for them was Likedeeler, referring to crews who shared the loot equally.

The response of the other Hanseatic cities to the Victual Brothers was twofold. One was obvious, they raised fleet after fleet to fight the pirates. The other was a lot more effective. They agreed with Queen Margaret of Denmark to shut down the herring market in Scania. This was an event of European significance. In Danzig, the prices for fish tripled and further inland, say Frankfurt, the price went up factor 10, making it hard, if not impossible for the lower classes to stick to their fast days.

Margaret of Denmark took over Sweden and brought the three Scandinavian kingdoms which also included Finland, Iceland, Greenland Fraoer etc. under the rule of one man in an agreement known as the Klamar Union. This is the 14th century, so it had to be a man. Little Olaf, who had never gained any power alongside his mother had died unexpectedly. Margaret therefore replaced him with a young cousin, Eric of Pomerania, a dashing and foolish man. The three kingdoms were now ruled by the wise and energetic Margaret, and she did rule well. On this eternal back and forth between world domination and raging impotence that Denmark was now famous for, this was the brief moment in the sun. Eric would have to wait until Margaret’s death in 1412 before he could make a right royal mess of things.

The capitulation of Albrecht of Mecklenburg left the remaining privateers in a bit of a pickle. The harbours of Rostock and Wismar were now closed. They had acquired Gotland and with it the city of Visby. Visby had suffered a lot in the last decades being constantly fought over by Danes and Swedes. But there were still some merchants there and they could still fence some of the goods the sea captains brought up. The privateers were now no longer restrained by their agreement with Albrecht to attack only Denmark and its allies. They went out to attack anyone irrespective of where they were from.

The cities of Lübeck and Stralsund who had taken the lead role in the military operations against the privateers so far did not have the capacity to take Gotland on their own. Visby’s famous walls, 3.6km long and protected by 51 towers were beyond their siege capabilities. They needed help from a major land-based military power. The Teutonic Knights who had been largely neutral so far could be convinced to get involved. Not for the lofty goal of creating safe shipping lanes, but because they were interested in taking Gotland for themselves.

With hundredweight they weighed their gold,

They played With precious stones,

Their women used golden distaffs,

And pigs ate out of silver troughs.

Who else is gone from the Baltic were the privateers. Without a base where to offload and sell their loot, piracy on the scale they had operated until now was no longer feasible. Most I guess just went home to live out their last years as honoured members of the city council. Some relocated to the North Sea. There they found a new base amongst the chieftains of Ostfriesland.

Yes, chieftains. In German they are called Häuptling, the same word we use for the leaders of the native Americans. These guys were another leftover of the days when Germanic tribes scaled the walls of Roman forts. Originally these weren’t aristocrats in the classic feudal sense but elected leaders of free men. They settled in East Frisia, the land roughly between Bremen and Groningen on the North Sea coast. They operated somewhat outside the general structures of the Holy Roman empire, being neither subjects of a territorial prince nor of the emperor.

These guys gave refuge to the remaining Victual Brothers who now harassed the ships travelling along the coast from Hamburg and Bremen to Flanders. And this is where the famous Klaus Störtebecker appears for the first time. There is no record of him when the Victual brothers were riding high in Rostock, Wismar or Visby at all.

Ah, no. piracy did not stop. Simon von Utrecht, the Hamburg naval hero who allegedly defeated Störtebecker at the age of maybe 15 fought pirates well into the 1430s. The Victual brothers keep popping up in Hanse documents until about 1470. And after 1470, Lübeck issued a detailed ordinance about how to run a legitimate privateer operation.

Whilst cruising off the shore of Zeeland, not far from Sluis, the Peter von Danzig comes upon a galley leaving Bruges. This galley was ostensibly owned by Tommaso Portinari, the manager of the Medici bank branch in Bruges and flew the flag of neutral Burgundy. Still Beneke approaches and demands to know whether any English goods are on board. The captain of the galleys laughs out loud and points at the large Burgundian banner. An altercation ensues, shots are fired. Beneke and his men capture the galley. Later they will say they found English merchandise on board and proof it was owned by king Edward IV. We do not know whether that is true. What is certain though is that they found something very valuable on board. The Last Judgement an enormous triptych by the Flemish painter Hans Memling. It had been commissioned by another Medici agent in Bruges, Andrea Tani. Beneke takes that painting and puts it into the church of St. Mary in his hometown where it stayed until it became the star exhibit in the Gdansk National Maritime Museum.

The Medici mobilised the pope to demand the return of the painting to its rightful owner, but the city council of Danzig refused, claiming it to be a legitimate prize. In the 19th century Beneke became a national hero, not of the Poles, but of the Germans residing in Danzig. The Nazis built a memorial shrine for Beneke complete with statue and mural, Gunther Grass makes up a grandiose tall tale about the figurehead of the galleon. One man’s pirate is another man’s naval hero.

So, pirates existed before the Victual Brothers and Klaus Störtebecker and they existed long afterwards, assuming the latter existed at all. Which leaves the question why this story has become such an icon of Hanseatic history.

To get to the bottom of it would require a full review of the perception history of the Hanseatic League, which we will do at the end of this series, as we always do. But there is also the question why the Victual brothers kept getting discussed on the contemporaneous Hansetage as a huge threat to the association.

One reason may have been that these pirates needed to be portrayed as a huge danger to each individual city in order to justify the raising of taxes to fight them. But I believe there is something more profound at work here.

And that is why the Victual Brothers were a major shock to the system. Before 1370 any form of piracy or privateering was directed against explicit opponents, usually not against members of the Hanse. When Rostock and Wismar took part in this large scale operation and were trading the stolen goods through other Hansards, the system of mutual trust was at risk of collapse.

Networks like the ones that dominate the internet today can take some proportion of dishonest players. For instance, Tripadvisor still has some credibility despite a lot of fake reviews. But once a network is overrun by dishonest actors, it loses validity and collapses.

The leaders of the Hanse must have seen this danger and that is why they reacted so strongly and that is also why they kept the memory of the Victual Brothers alive. The story of the Victual brothers is therefore much less of a story about pirates, but a story about the Hanseatic League itself and its ability to heal. Violence at sea continued well after Störtebecker was allegedly beheaded, but no city would harbour privateers attacking other Hanse members as openly as Rostock and Wismar have done. As for the former fences in Rostock and Wismar, they returned to be honest merchants and their descendants proudly display their HR and HW numberplates.

Next week we will talk a bit more about what the Hansa actually was, how it operated and why the English described it as a crocodile, a dangerous animal, the body and strength of which was always hidden below the surface. I hope you will join us again.

Now instead of the usual closing speech referencing patreon.com/historyofthegermans and historyofhgermans.com/support, as promised, here is the section in the Tin drum by Gunter Grass talking about the national maritime museum in Gdansk:

The Tin Drum a book by Gunter Grass and Breon Mitchell. (bookshop.org)