The Hanseatic World and Scandinavia

Northern Europe is often undervalued in surveys of the historical development of cities. The reasons have been the relatively small size of most urban settlements; the peripheral location of Scandinavian and most Hanseatic cities, when viewed from Western Europe; and the complexity underlying the concept of the Hanse, which connected many of the settlements. The importance of the towns and cities in the area lay in their multiple functions – be they economic, commercial, political, religious, cultural or military – and in the fact that they were nodes in larger networks. These connections meant that the Scandinavian towns and towns in the Hanse were fully integrated into urban Europe. The Hanse, a unique premodern urban organisation, illustrates how rich this urban history was.