The Free Confederate Republics of the Hanseatic League
Total Population: 18,300,000 (including colonial subjects)
Capital: None, seat of government is Rostock
Government: Corporate Republic
Head of State: His Excellency Karl Pfefferkorn
Currency: Thaler, with 100
Languages: German (official), Swedish, Lithuanian, Lingala (in the Congo) and Bahasa Melayu (in Malaysia and Bangka)
History
The Hanseatic League is a both a worldwide system of corporations and a country. Founded in the 14th century, it began as an alliance between several merchant houses in northeastern Europe, centered around Lübeck, Schwerin, Rostock, Hamburg, Danzig (Gdansk) and Königsberg (Kaliningrad). Traders from these cities were growing disconcerted about several attempts by regional lords to regulate trade and curb merchants' right, and thus began cooperating to increase their political clout. The small circle expanded quickly as more and more influential merchants joined a unified front against interloping nobles around the Baltic Sea. Migration of peasants into Hanse-controlled cities and decline of trade in non-Hanse cities caused the nobility significant losses.
The conflict came to a head in the early 17th century when in March 1603 Gottlieb IV., King of Pomerania, arrested a Hanseatic delegation from the Free City of Rostock during negotiations about shipping rights on the Oder river, which had been hampered by royal toll stations. When the League did not pay the significant ransom Gottlieb demanded, the king marched towards Rostock and laid siege to the city, taking it soon after and ransacking it.
Enraged and afraid of similar repressions, the other Hanse cities signed the Agreement of Lübeck in June 1603. The Agreement obligated Hanse member cities to come to another's aid in times of strife and created a loose political union with a duration three years, headed by a council of five elected merchants as the Hanse prepared for war.
King Gottlieb, too, was not idle and contacted other nobles to finally put the uppity merchants in their place. The Küstrin Accords of August 1603 were signed by Gottlieb, his cousin Archduke Arvind of Gotland-Kalmar, Jarl Varik of Jutland, the King of Spain and most importantly Siegfried „the Bull“ of Saxony, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order and Lord of Livland. [i]A Papal Legate gave his blessing to the endeavour and in the name of the Pope urged the nobles to „crush those who seek to destroy the God-given Order of Things“.
The League cities were faced with a difficult situation: While their financial situation was very good and they possessed a large fleet of merchants and escorts, their military power was rather small. The nobles' massed levies, led by the well-trained warrior-monks of the Teutonic Order, razed Riga, Kiel and Stettin and laid siege to the citadel of Königsberg. The League, meanwhile, was looking desperately for allies and found them in the tribes of the Baltic. The Lithuanians had been fighting a guerilla war against the Teutonic Order for two hundred years and their High Duke Gediminas IX. was willing to send his troops against the nobles' alliance in exchange for large amounts of money.
With a Lithuanian army marching to the relief of Königsberg, burning as they went, the Teutonic Order withdrew his troops from the western theatre of the war in early 1604.
With their most powerful foe away, the League fleet landed an army of Valendian and Tulgarian mercenaries equipped with the most powerful artillery the forges of Vlisingen could produce near Frankfurt on the Oder river and took the city without a fight. The League fleet controlled the whole length of the Oder and marched into the hinterland. Local knights and peasants joined the League army for bribes and the promise of a lighter rule. When word of this spread, peasants and citizens of small towns in all of Pomerania and Saxony rose up against what they perceived an unjust rule, urged on by radical protestant preachers.
In the Battle of Wismar on July 16th, 1604, an army of 10,000, with only 2,000 of them League mercenaries, decisively beat the army of King Gottlieb IV. who was killed leading a charge against League artillery and Valendian pikemen.
In the east, the Lithuanians fought the Teutonic Order's army under the walls of the Königsberg citadel in autumn 1605. During the siege, the League had brought reinforcements and supplies into the city by sea and river after the Pomeranian fleet had been beaten by superior Hanseatic ships.
The Order's troops were beaten off and the joined League-Lithuanian army marched against the Order's stronghold, the Marienburg.
In the following two years, the nobles were beaten off successfully, their undersupplied and lackluster armies often breaking in front of Europe's best mercenaries. While the coastal League cities were well-supplied and protected, the warring armies ravaged the hinterland. Disease, war and starvation caused tens of thousands of deaths. Finally, in 1607, the League's artillery broke the mighty walls of the Marienburg and the castle was sacked. With both Pomerania in League hands and the Teutonic Order destroyed in the remains of its citadel, the few remaining nobles sought peace. The League, with its coffers near empty and the lack of goods from the mainland showing, was happy to oblige. On the 3rd of October, 1607, the League War ended with the Treaty of Blekinge. The Hanseatic League annexed Pomerania and Zealand and abolished the nobility there, and the Jarl of Gotland-Kalmar was forced to allow the Hanse to open contors in most of his ports. The Lithuanians recreated their Kingdom, with Gediminas IX. its first king.
In the decades following the war, the League expanded its influence. The political union, originally intended as an emergency measure, remained in place, with the Council of Five elected every seven years by merchants and councillors from all League cities.
In the Baltic, flourishing trade with the Lithuanians led to a closer integration, and in 1720, when the kingdom faced civil war over the succession, most of its cities chose to join the League. Within months, the kingdom was controlled by the Hanse in all but name (which followed in 1793).
Outside the Baltic area, the Hanse accepted several cities along the Channel into its arms, and began expanding its trade network. In 1647, the Azoresjoined the League, giving it a foothold in the Atlantic. While other nations in the world began colonizing the far reaches of the world in the name of kings or gods, the Hanse sent its cogs. With money and gunpowder, it carved numerous ports out of Africa and grew ever richer by trading with the local kings and chieftains. By 1700, the Hanse bought and sold gold, spices and slaves everywhere between the Americas and India. In the 1730s, the League showed that it had learned from its last great war when the Sultan of Selangor tried to break the merchant's control over the Malayan trade. In a short, vicious campaign, League forces beat the Sultan's army and took control of the kingdom.
In Africa, explorers, adventurers and traders pushed deep into Africa along the Congo river, and brought back diamonds, gold and silver from Lake Kivu. The Congo's tribes were often engaged in war and grateful to accept the Hanse's money and weapons against their foes, which allowed the Europeans to successively take control of the whole of the Congo basin without fighting themselves.
Today, the Hanse is a powerful player in the world. Malayan rubber, tin and silver, Indonesian pepper, Congolese diamonds and European coal are traded almost everywhere, and with this new-fangled idea of „electricity“, copper might become even more valuable.
Its numerous contors trade the wealth of Malaya and the Congo along the „run“, a sealane running from Selangor over Sri Lanka, the Seychelles and the bustling coastal cities of Africa into the ports of the world, protected by the powerful League Navy and regiments of musketeers.