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This week we will kick off with the string of cities along the Baltic Coast from L\xfcbeck up to K\xf6nigsberg (modern day Kaliningrad). Who founded them and why? And why so many? Who were the people who came to live there, how did they organise themselves and most importantly, what did they produce and what did they trade?

We will dwell on the most splendid of those, Gdansk or Danzig in German, the one city in the Baltic that could give L\xfcbeck a run for its money, a place that developed as six separate cities and only became one entity in the late 15th century. And as we talk about Gdansk, we will also talk about the Vistula River, Europe\u2019s nineth longest that connected Gdansk not just to many of Poland\u2019s great cities, but also to the agricultural wealth of the Prussia of the Teutonic Knights, to the Ukraine and to ancient Lithuania.

And all that foodstuff is put on ships and goes to the growing cities of Flanders, the Rhineland, England, Northern France and even Spain. For the first time since the fall of the Roman empire do we hear about large scale grain shipments that sustain urban centres, urban centres that couldn\u2019t otherwise exist.

But grain is not the only thing that the Hansa become famous for. The other is Germany\u2019s most popular drink and best-known export, beer. The economics there are even more fascinating, since people did not only drink vast quantities of beer in the Middle Ages, they also cared a lot about where it came from, and Einbecker was Europe\u2019s favourite beer.

The episode webpage with transcripts and further links is available here

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.

As always:

Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www.historyofthegermans.com

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For this episode I again relied

heavily on:

Philippe Dollinger: Die Hanse \u2013

definitely my go-to-book for this season

Die Hanse, Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos, herausgegeben von J\xfcrgen Bracker,

Volker Henn and Rainer Postel

Rolf Hammel-Kieslow: Die Hanse