In a League of their own
In the luminescent twilight of a midsummer evening in Tallinn, Old Thomas – the city’s much loved mascot – stares down from the Gothic Town Hall upon an ancient, cobbled market square. The original weather vane, now protected inside the Town Hall, was presented to Tallinn in 1530 by the city’s Baltic German elite and is a relic of the Hanseatic League, a wealthy trading federation that from the 12th to the 17th century dominated commerce in the Baltic Sea.
During the Dark Ages, the Baltic was a lawless no-go zone dominated by pirates and hostile pagan tribes. Intrepid Vikings managed to brave these obstacles and brought back furs and amber from the region that is now Russia, which they traded in Western Europe. The riches of this mysterious land became so well known that in the second half of the 12th Century, merchants from Lübeck began clubbing together with neighbouring towns to send armed flotillas out into the Baltic in search of new trading opportunities. The formula of pooling resources proved so successful that during the next century fortified mercantile ports sprang up throughout the Baltic. They became the Manhattans of the Middle Ages, attracting entrepreneurs and artisans from all over Europe. merchants filled these new boom towns with sumptuously decorated Gothic buildings and churches whose
