Heinrich Sudermann

Heinrich Sudermann

Heinrich Sudermann (also Suderman born August 31, 1520 in Cologne ; † September 7, 1591 in Lübeck ) was a lawyer and first syndic of the Hanseatic League .

Career

Sudermann was born the son of Cologne's mayor and patrician Hermann Sudermann and Artes studied law at the old University of Cologne from 1538 to 1541 in Orléans and Italy (probably in Bologna ), from which he graduated with the degree doctor utriusque iuris . He gained practical experience at the Imperial Court of Justice in Speyer before returning to Cologne. His father introduced him to Cologne's external relations as a Hanseatic city , and Sudermann was initially involved on the part of the city of Cologne in legations to the Hanseatic days and the Hanseatic offices important for Cologne (the Stalhof in London and the Hanseatic office in Bruges ). In 1556 he entered the service of the Hanseatic League as in-house counsel and thus became the first managerial employee ever to be part of an employment relationship with the otherwise deliberately unlawful Hanseatic League. He was initially appointed several times for a period of six years and was not taken over for life until 1576. Today this position must be understood like that of a general secretary. The creation of this office was part of a reorganization of the Hanseatic League, in which Lübeck remained head of the Hanseatic League, but was significantly weakened in the leadership position by the events of 1534/35 under its mayor Jürgen Wullenwever .

During his term of office, the turbulent decline of the offices in England and Bruges, which were particularly important from Cologne's point of view, fell. Contact with and traveling to the offices in Bergen and Novgorod did not belong to his area of ​​responsibility as a syndic.

Sudermann and the English

Already in 1552 King Edward VI. revoke the trading privileges of the cities confirmed in the Peace of Utrecht (1474) . His successor Queen Maria I confirmed this again as expected in 1553, but the local economy soon imposed restrictions again, so that the hopes of Hanseatic diplomacy soon rested on the foreseeable successor Queen Elisabeth I. This hope alone was disappointed; Elisabeth's repressive trade policy ultimately meant the end of a privileged position for German merchants in England trade, despite all of Sudermann's diplomatic missions. This fact was favored by some of the Hanseatic cities themselves, which favored English competition without having achieved reciprocity with stacking rights in German ports. The worsening relationship between England and the Netherlands brought closer ties between the Hanseatic League and the Netherlands, but here, too, individual cities of the Hanseatic League for their own benefit, so that there could be no efficient trade blockade against England. When Hamburg granted the Merchant Adventurers settlement rights in 1567, there were no longer any reasons for England to allow German merchants to trade in England. There were only four Germans left in the London Stalhof. The English no longer had any reason to compromise and on June 30, 1589 even hijacked 68 Hansa merchant ships in the port of Lisbon for no reason.

Sudermann and Flanders

Office building in Antwerp

In the same way, Sudermann's professional activity as a syndic in Flanders went hand in hand with the religious war there. The Hansekontor in Bruges, which was legally independent as a legal entity, agreed with Antwerp in 1545 that the Hanseatic League would settle on the Scheldt , which did not have the problems of silting up the Zwin . The new Osterlinge house in Antwerp, built by the architect Cornelis Floris II , was subsidized by the city of Antwerp in 1563 with an investment of 124,000 guilders with 64,000 guilders, but was not handed over to its destination until 1569 due to the troubled times.

The ongoing financing of the new office, however, was called into question again and again, so that Sudermann's hometown Cologne did not want to participate in the lap (taxes), which meant a constant conflict of interests for him, also in view of his personal origin. In 1567, a year after the iconoclasm in the city, Sudermann even temporarily moved to Antwerp. Since the city and the House of Orange wavered between the moderate Catholicism of Georg Cassander and the Augsburg Confession , unrest and uncertainty were so great that he sent his family back to Cologne. The different interests of the cities and the merchants working in the office shattered the office's finances to an extraordinary degree. Sudermann refused - also against the background of personal aversions to individual elderly people - decidedly to continue to take up residence in Antwerp and saw no real chance to put an end to the grievances against the existing power structures.

Appreciation

As unsolvable as the problem in dealing with England was for Sudermann, he managed to find and implement an alternative for the declining pile of Bruges when dealing with a large number of employers with their often conflicting interests. However, many historians note in this context that the decision in favor of Antwerp was strategically wrong, as Amsterdam overtook it as a commercial center.

Overall, his personal notes show a pure travel time in the service of the Hanseatic League of 14½ years. He died on a day trip in Lübeck and was buried in Cologne five weeks later. The Cologne councilor Hermann von Weinsberg reports in his memorial book about Sudermann's last trip, against which the Lübeckers raised concerns. Sudermann himself had expressed the wish on his deathbed to be buried in patrio sepulchro tumulari and not in Lubecae aput haereticos . The other Cologne ambassadors of the Hanseatic Day packed the body in ox skins and sent it to Cologne as simple merchandise, where it was buried in the Minorite Church. Sudermann's written estate was acquired by the Hanseatic cities and is in the archive of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck .

It was not until 1605 that the cities appointed him a successor in office as Hanseatic Syndic in Johann Domann .

Afterlife

A street in Cologne and the adjoining Sudermanplatz were named after the Sudermanns. In appreciation of Heinrich Sudermann's importance, both for the Hanseatic League and for Cologne, a figure on the Cologne town hall tower was dedicated to him in 1994 (→ list of Cologne council tower figures , sculptor: Erwin Nöthen). There is also a Sudermannstrasse ( Suderman Straat ) in Antwerp .

literature

• Hermann Keussen :  Sudermann, Heinrich . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 37, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1894, pp. 121-127.
• Philippe Dollinger : The Hanseatic League . 5th edition, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3520371057 .
• Johann Peter Wurm: The correspondence of the Hansesyndikus Heinrich Sudermann with the royal governor in Schleswig and Holstein Heinrich Rantzau 1579-1591 . In: Das Gedächtnis der Hansestadt Lübeck , Lübeck 2005, pp. 491–515. ISBN 3-7950-5555-5
• Volker Henn (cord): Heinrich Sudermann at LVR: Personalities of the Rhenish History

Remarks

1. ↑ The Cologne line of the Dortmund family was founded by Heinrich Sudermann († 1421).
2. ^ Text of the appointment 1576 in Dollinger in the source appendix.
3. ↑ Quoted from Wolfgang Schmid: Grab und Residenz - Meisenheim am Glan in the 16th century , at fn. 17, as of September 19, 2007 ( Memento of the original from March 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and still Not checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Sudermann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files