The politics of reciprocity: urban councils and intercity conflict management in Reval (Tallinn) and Lübeck, c. 1470–1570

Abstract

Ties of trade, credit and family provided the basis for trading networks between Hanseatic towns. They also, however, contained the seed for conflicts over fraud, debt and inheritance. Such disputes between burghers of different Hanseatic cities presented municipal governments with the particular challenge to balance their role as Hanseatic partners with an obligation of externally representing their own burghers. Focusing on relations between the cities of Lübeck and Reval, this article explores the variety of diplomatic strategies and tactics which city councils employed to preserve the political and economic benefits of intercity co-operation.

In the late medieval city, conflict management was among the most prominent duties of the municipal government.¹ Keeping the urban peace was considered crucial to promoting craft and trade, and thus legitimized claims to political authority.² However, while the jurisdiction of the council ended at the formal boundaries of the city, its burghers’ conflicts did not. On 22 December 1529, for instance, Dirick Scharhar, a merchant from Lübeck, wrote to his magistrates and demanded support in a conflict with his trading partner from Reval, Hinrick Helwich.³ In particular, he asked the municipality to grant him the arrest of Revalian goods in Lübeck or, otherwise, to release him from his oath as a burgher, so that ‘I can seek my justice in other places and by other means.’⁴ With this phrase, Scharhar was announcing his willingness to seek the help of territorial lords and mercenaries and to escalate the conflict by means of force, if necessary. He justified his requests with the partial and uncooperative stance of Reval’s council, which not only had dismissed his accusations of embezzlement without consulting any evidence, but also refused to force Helwich to settle the partnership’s accounts in Lübeck according to Hanseatic ordinances. On 1 January 1530, the magistrates of Lübeck copied Scharhar’s supplication (Supplicationschrifft) and attached it to a letter of their own in which they validated their burgher’s claims and requested the co-operation of their peers in Reval.⁵ To avoid a potential escalation of the conflict, they hoped for a written answer as soon as possible so that they and Scharhar would know how to proceed.

The dispute sketched out above is one of legal boundaries. Trade had produced close ties between the inhabitants of the Hanseatic towns of Lübeck and Reval and relations of family, credit and trade led to conflicts around inheritance, debt and fraud.⁶ And although the council of Reval administered justice according to the laws of Lübeck and accepted the latter city as its court of appeal, it possessed autonomous jurisdiction.⁷ Economic historians have long considered the competing legal orders of medieval Europe as a challenge to premodern long-distance merchants and, in two opposing ways, have tried to explain how traders solved their conflict abroad. One side considers merchants as a driving force behind state formation in an attempt to overcome the fragmentation of law through centralized, sovereign power.⁸ The other side ascribes to them a preference for extrajudicial settlements as a means of avoiding costly and slow court cases.⁹ Both positions, as Albrecht Cordes and Philipp Höhn have noted, view merchants through the lens of modern economic theory and place them outside of their contemporary cultural and social norms.¹⁰ Rather than settling for one legal forum, they argue, premodern disputants utilized the full scale of legal pluralism to direct the way of conflict in their favour.

Dirick Scharhar’s conflict illustrates how individuals employed such different legal forums but also points to another potential cause for frictions: how did urban councils reconcile their burghers’ choices with their own claims to managing conflict? Altercations between citizens of different Hanseatic towns, this article argues, presented a unique challenge to urban councils, as they exposed a discrepancy between the magistrates’ different political identities.¹¹ As urban governments, the councils of Lübeck and Reval legitimized their claims to authority through representing their burghers’ interests.¹² At the same time, they were members of the Hanse, and at the core of Hanseatic economic and political thought lay the safeguarding of trade and the preservation of the cities’ autonomy through inter-urban collaboration.¹³ Thus, while Lübeck’s council considered itself obligated to support the claims of its burgher Dirick Scharhar, his request for the confiscation of his opponent’s goods could strain relations with Reval. Even worse, his intention to seek help beyond the city’s walls threatened to endanger trade in the forms of reprisal and the involvement of princes and nobles.

This article examines how the councils of Lübeck and Reval provided support to burghers involved in conflicts that crossed the two towns’ legal boundaries while at the same time maintaining amicable relations with each other. Altercations between the inhabitants of Hanseatic cities, I argue, required magistrates to engage in a particular form of intercity diplomacy due to the shared notion of a Hanseatic common good. Since this undertaking requires analysing the process of conflicts, I will draw on the application of conflict management as a concept introduced to Hanseatic legal and economic history by Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz. Rather than uniquely focusing on how and whether conflicts were resolved, she suggests, it is also fruitful to pay attention to tactics of prevention, escalation, de-escalation or the maintenance of the status quo.¹⁴ This approach corresponds well with the findings of several recent studies of late medieval urban conflict in England, the Low Countries and Italy which have demonstrated that peace as understood by municipalities and citizens did not imply the absence of conflict, but rather its containment to avoid a major disruption of the political order.¹⁵ As the article will show, Hanseatic city councils were indeed much more concerned with preventing, containing and de-escalating conflict than in finding quick resolutions. To bridge legal boundaries, they employed practices of intercity diplomacy which were based on common political thought, specifically the notion of reciprocity.

As a first step, I will explain how practices of arrest and reprisal in the Baltic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries influenced the decision-making of urban councils, as these posed a constant danger not only to the security of trade but also to the autonomy of urban jurisdiction.¹⁶ Therefore, as the second section will demonstrate, councils developed different tactics of conflict management, mainly aimed at limiting or at least controlling altercations between their burghers. To reconcile their responsibilities as an urban government with their duties towards their Hanseatic peers, the magistrates of Lübeck and Reval employed measures of law and intercity diplomacy. In the final section, I will suggest that these measures rested on a common ideological basis. Concentrating on a specific form of diplomatic correspondence – intercessions and supplications (vorbede/vorsprake and supplication) – I argue that the councils’ conflict management was based on a common Hanseatic notion of political reciprocity. Due to the significance of intercity diplomacy in crossing legal boundaries, the main source base for this article is not provided by legal records but by the correspondence between the councils of Reval and Lübeck, mainly in the form of the collected incoming letters in the City Archive of Tallinn for the years c. 1470–1570.¹⁷ The number of letters preserved in this collection is unusually high in comparison to other urban archives in the Baltic and can thus provide insight into a broader urban culture of writing and conflict management.

The dynamics of conflict

For medieval merchants, options of conflict management included seizures and the – often carefully dosed – use of violence. Conflicting parties in Hanseatic cities thus requested that their town council arrest their opponent’s goods or enforce their interests on their own by means of reprisal.¹⁸ Both options entailed a considerable risk of collateral damage and larger-scale escalation. The council’s permission to arrest the goods of one of the disputants could, in an act of collective liability, lead to the indiscriminate confiscation of merchandise from the opponent’s town.¹⁹ Furthermore, the confiscation of each party’s wares might only amplify the mutual contempt as, for instance, in the dispute around the inheritance of Reval’s burgher Jasper Bomhower in 1536.²⁰ While such measures strained intercity relations, they at least to some extent took place under the control of the council. However, when parties announced their intention to ‘seek justice in other places and by other means’, they threatened to obviate this control and find allies outside the city walls.²¹ Burghers turned to kings, princes and local gentry who provided support in the form of letters of reprisal and allowed them to recruit mercenaries and sell prizes in their harbours.²² As the ships captured in these conflicts usually carried the goods of multiple merchants and towns, collateral damage was a common occurrence. ‘Hostile ship shall make hostile goods’, a privateering order from Bremen in 1446 declared, and the phrase was still referred to as ‘maritime law of old custom’ in Lübeck as late as 1539.²³ Especially when the burghers’ disputes became intertwined with large-scale conflicts, the fallout could seriously disrupt trade in the Baltic. In the 1480s, for example, the political ambitions of the bailiff of Gotland made him a popular enforcer of private interests in conflicts between Hanseatic burghers. Not only did he capture several merchant ships, but the constant threat caused traders in Lübeck and Reval to hire expensive security for their merchandise and ships.²⁴

Councils were highly aware of the potential fallout of confiscations and reprisal. ‘Thus, it usually happens that when your goods are confiscated…those of our [burghers] not long after go missing’, Lübeck’s council complained about arrests between their burghers in a letter to Reval in 1492.²⁵ Magistrates could refuse to approve confiscations but, as Dirick Scharhar’s letter has shown, in doing so they risked conflicting parties seeking support outside the city, undermining their authority and escalating the conflict beyond their control.²⁶ To limit their burghers’ choices, Hanseatic town councils sought to criminalize reprisal as piracy – an approach shared with political authorities all over late medieval Europe.²⁷ Thus, the library of Lübeck’s council contained a copy of Bartolus de Saxoferrato’s De Represaliis which designed clear conditions for the legitimacy of reprisal. Only when plaintiffs had suffered protraction or denial of justice (justitia denegata) and had exhausted the full course of appeal, might they request reprisal from the proper authority.²⁸ In the sixteenth century, burghers of Lübeck and Reval appear to have been familiar with this concept to some degree since they justified the involvement of outside forces with claims of refused justice.²⁹ In practice, however, the legitimacy of reprisal remained something to be negotiated in each individual case. Claims to have suffered denial of justice were difficult to disprove and rulers like Swedish King Gustav Vasa (1523–60) considered it a limitation of their sovereign power when an urban council contested their right to intervene on behalf of a petitioner.³⁰ Moreover, urban magistrates themselves acted far from consistently, branding opponents as pirates while granting their own burghers arrests and reprisals. Still in 1539, for instance, Lübeck’s syndic Johan Rudel defended the legitimacy of prize-taking based on customary practice against a legal opinion by Leipzig’s faculty of law.³¹ We have to keep in mind that councillors themselves were merchants and were thus probably not too keen to limit their own options of conflict management. In 1544, for example, Bodt Schroder was burgomaster of Reval when he threatened to give his case ‘into other people’s hands’, exemplifying the potential conflict between self-interest and common good faced by the members of the municipal government.³²

To the council, inter-urban disputes remained a regular threat to the judicial autonomy of the city but also to trade and shipping far into the sixteenth century. Even if only a small number of conflicts actually escalated to the extent of a transregional crisis, each individual dispute contained the possibility of such an escalation and councils thus reminded each other of the ‘further hinderance, work and unnecessary costs’ that could arise from them if left disregarded.³³ Since law alone did not provide a reliable prevention of escalation, councils instead focused on prevention, de-escalation and protraction of conflicts through other means.

Managing conflicts

One way of preventing the spread of conflict was to confine it to a single city. It speaks to the shared awareness of this issue that urban municipalities addressed it on a Hanseatic level. When an influential diet of towns in 1447 collected ordinances to design a set of common rules for the Hanse, the list included paragraphs on inter-urban conflicts.³⁴ These articles stated that debts should only be claimed before urban courts, and debtors were prohibited from resettling in another city.³⁵ If a merchant died abroad, the respective city council was to collect the deceased’s possessions and safeguard them in order to first hear and verify all claims and thus avoid later demands and lawsuits.³⁶ Finally, the ordinances instructed merchants to dissolve their partnerships in the same city in which they had begun them.³⁷ Since Hanseatic trading partnerships were intended to last over months and years, the rekenschop, the settlement of accounts in which partners were supposed to compare ledgers, provided a common cause for conflict.³⁸ The fact that this paragraph proved to be one of the very few Hanseatic regulations referred to by individual merchants in practice attests to the centrality of the issue.³⁹ In sum, the diet’s rulings addressed the inter-urban character of conflicts: disputes should be made the responsibility of a single council or at least be contained to a single location. Hanseatic norm and merchant practice, however, could differ substantially, as Ester Zoomer in this issue also demonstrates for conflicts in non-Hanseatic cities. The legislative and executive powers of Hanseatic diets were limited and decisions about appliance and enforcement rested with the individual city.⁴⁰

Efforts aimed at prevention and containment, therefore, also marked the co-operation between the magistrates of Reval and Lübeck independently of Hanseatic institutions. Councils provided burghers with letters of procuration which verified their claims to inheritances and debts and invested their carriers with the right to collect the respective goods and money abroad.⁴¹ Furthermore, in so-called toversichtsbrefen (letters of expectation), councils gave guarantees to not support any rivalling or additional demands to their burghers’ claims.⁴² This guarantee was particularly significant as contesting claims of families, trading partners and creditors were a source of intricate conflict, especially when merchants died abroad.⁴³ On the one hand, the significance of these documents can be inferred from the council’s decision not only to record them in town books but also to preserve the original letters in their archives, even after matters had apparently been settled.⁴⁴ On the other hand, individual cases can give us insight into the importance councils attached to these guarantees. For example, after the death of Jacob Vrese, a wealthy merchant and councillor of Reval, in 1455, the city’s council safeguarded his inheritance and led a 55-year-long conflict against the different heirs in the cities of Stockholm and Åbo (Turku) over the lack of ‘guarantees against additional claims’.⁴⁵ This conflict was an extreme case, but it illustrates the lengths a city’s governing body was willing to go to secure themselves against dangerous precedents and the contingency of future claims.

While these measures show an attempt by councils to monopolize the conflict management of their burghers, in practice parties attempted to resolve their disagreements on their own before turning to official institutions. In their reports to the council, burghers explained having attempted to resolve disputes ‘orally through my friends but also by way of my letters sent’, or having sent their apprentices and trading partners to negotiate a resolution.⁴⁶ Councils accepted these practices, but over the course of the fifteenth century they began to institutionalize and control mediation and arbitration as well. In Lübeck and Reval, magistrates assigned their members as arbiters and mediators, and the cities’ courts urged conflicting parties to agree to an amicable settlement before filing a suit.⁴⁷ These provisions strengthened the council as an institution of conflict management and decreased the potential for escalation. Ultimately, however, they did not solve the issues of jurisdiction and enforcement. Like court cases, mediation and arbitration required both parties to be present in the same location – in person or represented by a procurator – as well as willing to make concessions.⁴⁸ However, burghers like Hinrick Helwich refused to make the long journey between Lübeck and Reval because of the costs and dangers, sickness or simply because they did not consider themselves accountable.⁴⁹

When conflicts stalled and communication between parties stopped or became deadlocked, burghers finally requested their council’s intervention in their opponent’s city. In March 1526, Hans Wegener, a merchant from Lübeck, complained that his former apprentice had become a burgher of Reval and after repeated requests over a period of three years still had not paid him out according to their contract.⁵⁰ Similarly, Laurens Isermann in 1538 lamented that his partner Herman Boleman had stalled his representative in Reval for nearly a year, while Boleman’s own ‘servant who daily walks the streets of Lübeck in the open, does not bother at all to finally give me notice from his master’ as regards his open debts.⁵¹ Around 1500, the councils of Lübeck and Reval developed a particular form of correspondence to address such demands for intervention in other towns. As a first step, a party in dispute handed in a written supplication to his or her own council which usually encompassed a request for support and intervention as well as an account of the conflict’s history. At times, conflicting parties also directed their accusations against their opponent’s council itself, when they considered it acting in a biased way or denying them justice in favour of its own burghers.⁵² Supplications were not meant for internal use but to be copied and forwarded to the opponent’s municipality, attached to a letter of intercession (vorbede/vorsprake).⁵³ These missives usually did not aim to immediately resolve disputes but to break the deadlock between parties by renewing a dialogue, or to facilitate a solution mediated by their council. The stress lay on swift communication so that the conflict would not cause further damage or escalation and, thus, in their letters councillors and burgomasters urged their peers to ‘answer us on behalf of our [burghers]…with the first [ships]’ or admonish their respective burgher earnestly to appear before the court to settle accounts as quickly as possible.⁵⁴

The terminology of intercessions and supplications evokes associations with the petitions of the same name, in which subjects requested mercy from authorities all over Europe.⁵⁵ Other than these bottom-up pleas, however, the cities’ practice did not imply a hierarchy but remained a communication between equals. And although intercessions could refer to the legal grounds for the supplicants’ claims, they were themselves neither based on law nor did they solve the aforementioned issues of conflicting jurisdiction.⁵⁶ Still, supplicants like Lübeck’s burgher Magnus Bruns asked explicitly to forward their writings and in the council’s ‘attached letter amicably request [Reval’s councillors] to act accordingly in this matter as they undoubtedly will do’.⁵⁷ Burghers consciously made use of supplications and – aware of the procedure – invested trust in the intervention of their magistrates. This use of intercessions and supplications, I will argue in the following section, relied on urban political thought and a shared notion of Hanseatic reciprocity.

A politics of reciprocity

When the Hanse over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had turned into a political association of towns, the urban elites who constituted its formal political echelon had transferred elements of urban political thought to the Hanse as a whole. At its centre stood the shared notion of a Hanseatic common good (ghemene beste), which encompassed the maintenance of the cities’ privileges abroad, the safety of the travelling merchant and the autonomy of the cities.⁵⁸ Just like the common good of the city, the common good of the Hanse was an object of constant negotiation, as in practice the interests of individual towns proved hardly compatible.⁵⁹ Nevertheless, as an overarching ideal, it provided Hanseatic city councils with a familiar common language of diplomacy and a constant reminder of the need to co-operate if they wanted to compete with kings, princes and states. Even though intercessions hardly included any direct references to the Hanse, they were infused with this idea of intercity co-operation.

When Lübeck’s councillors forwarded supplications, they expected their peers’ co-operation since they, in return, ‘would be willingly indebted to you’.⁶⁰ Though varying in length and content, nearly all letters of intercession and tovorsicht that arrived in Reval ended with this promise of debt (boschulden) and reciprocity. In a missive from 1528, Lübeck’s council made the reciprocal relation even clearer: Reval’s councillors might act the same ‘as you would like us to act and proceed’.⁶¹ While their frequent use makes it tempting to frame the promise of indebtedness as rhetorical ornamentation, Michael Jucker has suggested that we should avoid passing over elements like forms of address in letters as ‘empty formulas’. In the diplomatic relations between Swiss cities, he argued, ‘the reciprocal offer of service in interstate relationships worked to reduce conflict and to build trust’.⁶² Likewise, Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz has pointed out that constant affirmation of mutual trust in the language of Hanseatic communication was a condition for managing conflict between members of the Hanse, be it economic, political or juridical.⁶³ The language of debt used in the letters of intercession made clear that this was no unconditional trust built on common properties and interests alone but the result of constant practice and fostering.⁶⁴ Considering the many conflicts between their burghers, the addressed council had to expect facing a similar situation in the near future.

The mutual assurance of political values or the exchange of intercessions alone, however, could not provide an easy solution to conflicts, as reciprocity also affected the relation between urban governments and their burghers. The former declared that they could not refuse their citizens’ requests to intervene in disputes and the latter promised that they were ‘obligated, willing and tireless to earn’ and repay the intercession on their behalf.⁶⁵ In conflicts between burghers of different cities, this obligation applied to both councils which, therefore, could not just force their subjects to comply with the wishes of the respective opponent. Instead, they answered the incoming supplications and intercessions with counter-intercessions and counter-supplications.⁶⁶ While not all of these answers were constructive – some parties used supplication to accuse each other of lies and insults – a dialogue mediated by the magistrates took place.⁶⁷ The exchange of intercessions did not resolve the conflicts immediately but maintained the peace and provoked a break of the deadlocked state of non-communication, allowing the council to fulfil the duties of inter-urban co-operation and still represent its own burghers’ interests.

If revivified communication failed to resolve the conflict and rather extended it, intercessions provided magistrates with an indirect option of enforcement. By choosing to forward supplications which contained threats like that of Dirick Scharhar, a council invested them with an implied institutional backing and took responsibility for their content. To legitimate this provocation and violation of inter-urban solidarity, the councils of Lübeck and Reval accused one another of failing to co-operate or respond to intercession, and thus, of a breach of reciprocity. In 1531 and 1542, for example, the council of Lübeck sent urgent reminders to answer their letters in order to avoid an escalation.⁶⁸ The intercession accompanying Dirick Scharhar’s supplication in 1530 warned that Reval’s council would have to ‘consider that it is not on us or in our power to guarantee safety and Your Honourables will, therefore, see to it that such and other troubles in this matter will be prevented’.⁶⁹ Similarly, in 1538, the councillors of Lübeck asked their peers in Reval to finally pressure Herman Bolemann to appear before them in order ‘to not give our burgher a reason’ to make true threats of arrests or reprisal.⁷⁰ Only co-operation according to custom would prevent merchants ‘to act in other places and with other means to claim their damages from you…hoping Your Honourables will not let it come that far’.⁷¹ Responsibility, according to these intercessions, lay exclusively with Reval’s council, which had failed to act according to reciprocity, violating the Hanseatic common good.

Still, choosing the frame of supplication and intercession left open the continuation of communication and lowered the risk of an immediate and irrevocable escalation. Forwarding confrontational supplications at least left the councils some control over the conflict, while burghers who left the city to seek the support of nobles and mercenaries on their own would have presented a potential threat to all trade. Intercessions always contained another offer of dialogue but the accompanying threats signalled the need for urgency, and made clear that the council considered the supplicant’s threats as legitimate. Parties who attempted to bypass the council’s conflict management therefore risked punishment. In 1545, for instance, Lübeck’s burgher Hermann Sonnenschein boasted of having 60 men under his command, as well as the backing of the Danish king and the duke of Mecklenburg, to reclaim a debt from a Revalian merchant.⁷² After Reval’s council had sent copies of his announcements to Lübeck, the city’s magistrates threatened Sonnenschein with banishment, hoping that their peers in Reval ‘in others and such cases against us will remember this and act accordingly’.⁷³

Reciprocity constituted an important factor in the attempts of the magistrates to balance the common good of the Hanse with that of the city, by allowing individual conflicting parties to pursue their interest while at the same time reducing the risk of escalation. It speaks to the significance of practices of reciprocity that they even outlasted major political crises. From the 1530s on, economic conflicts strained the relations between Reval and Lübeck, until, finally, the two towns ended up on different sides in the Northern Seven Years’ War (1563–70). Furthermore, in the long run, Reval’s subjection to the Swedish king in 1561 severed the city’s connection to the Hanse.⁷⁴ Still, not only did Lübeck’s council intervene in the case of Sonnenschein despite major disagreements about the treatment of Hanseatic merchants in Reval, but preliminary samples of later correspondence also suggest that the two councils took up the exchange of intercessions again in the 1570s.⁷⁵

Conclusions

In January 1531, a full year after his last letter in his conflict with Hinrick Helwich, Dirick Scharhar wrote another supplication. He thanked the council of Lübeck for having shown him his opponent’s answer and the intercession attached by Reval’s magistrate. The letters’ content, however, deeply dissatisfied him. When comparing the two parties’ supplications, Scharhar complained, one might notice that Helwich had not answered a single accusation and that his words were nothing but ‘clouds without rain through which the matter is obscured but never washed clean’.⁷⁶ He therefore renewed his accusations and threats of the previous year. Again, the council of Reval answered and continued to defend Helwich’s position, claiming that Scharhar’s threats went against the association of the common Hanseatic cities (gemeyne Anse stede voreyniginge) and he should be punished for disregarding the council’s offers of settling the conflict.⁷⁷ Despite these mutual threats, in 1533, the council of Lübeck announced they had convinced Scharhar ‘under great difficulties’ to bring his case before the magistrate of Reval again.⁷⁸ Here, the case fades from the councils’ correspondence. While it thus remains unclear if the two merchants ever found a solution, their magistrates had avoided an escalation of the conflict.

For the councils of Reval and Lübeck, crossing legal boundaries was part and parcel of their work. The disputes between their subjects around inheritance, debt and trade added complexity to urban conflict management, but the councillors did not perceive them as a fundamental breach of order. While the two towns’ magistrates made some attempts at streamlining conflicts along the principles of learned law, most prominently by criminalizing reprisal as piracy, these efforts mainly served as a tactic to avert interventions by kings and princes rather than aspiring to a monopoly on violence. Instead, councils tried to make themselves the central forum of conflict management through intercity diplomacy and co-operation. The shared concept of reciprocity – expressed in terms of indebtment – allowed them to balance their political identities as urban governments and as members of the Hanse when bridging legal boundaries on behalf of their burghers. The exchange of intercessions and supplications helped to avoid dangerously deadlocked conflicts because ignoring them would have meant the violation of common norms. This also explains why councils could forward their burghers’ threats without defying Hanseatic ideas of inter-urban solidarity. Although the council thus succeeded in extending its control over its subjects’ conflicts, cases like that of Dirick Scharhar show that conflict management across legal boundaries remained a negotiation between magistrates, their burghers and their peers in other Hanseatic towns.