Hildebrand Veckinchusen

Hildebrand Veckinchusen's letter of February 18, 1422, which he sent from the Bruges debt tower to his second wife Margarethe (last page).

Hildebrand Veckinchusen (* around 1370 , probably in Westphalia ; † July 1426 in Lübeck ) was a merchant living in Bruges during the Hanseatic League . In addition to the fact that Hildebrand and his brother Sivert were among the most respected Hanseatic merchants of their time, Veckinchusen was of outstanding importance for researching the business practice and life of merchants in the late Middle Ages due to the transmission of more than 500 letters and ten trading books .

Life

Origin and education

Hildebrand Veckinchusen's year of birth has not been passed down, but is generally put around 1370. His mother's first name was "Rixe", his father's is not known. There is no conclusive knowledge about Hildebrand's origin. Based on a statement by Hildebrand, Luise von Winterfeld suspects that he saw the Kaiser in Dortmund as a child in early 1377 , that Hildebrand was also born in Dortmund. Dollinger considers a Livonian city ​​to be more likely due to the fact that Hildebrand's third brother was councilor in Riga and mayor between 1402 and 1408 and a Bertold Veckinchusen between 1342 and 1353 as councilor and later mayor in Reval (now Tallinn ) . Irsigler , on the other hand , cites an inheritance agreement from 1395, which was notarized before the council of the town of Radevormwald in Westphalia , in which a Gottschalck Veckinchusen compared himself with his brothers Hans, Hildebrand, Sievert, the clergyman Mr. Ludwig and three sisters. The fact that the family name "Veckinchusen" is derived from the village of Fockinghausen near Radevormwald or from a village of the same name near Meschede suggests that Veckinchusen came from Westphalia. In any case, the unusually high mobility of the family remains to be noted, because in the 14th century merchants of this name appeared in the entire Hanseatic region.

In his youth, Veckinchusen completed an apprenticeship as a merchant's assistant in Livonia together with his older brother Sivert, before he followed him to Flanders , where he probably continued his training. The first commercial activities of his own are recorded in Dordrecht in 1390 , where Hildebrand obtained a certificate from the pile that he had duly bought two terlings of cloth and twelve bottles of wine.

Business and social situation around 1400

Hildebrand is mentioned for the years 1393 and 1398, and Sivert for the year 1399 as Aldermann of the Hansekontor in Bruges , which indicates a rapid rise in business for the two brothers. This is supported by the fact that Hildebrand's first marriage was to the sister of the Dortmund councilor and mayor Claus Swarte. This and Sivert's possession of three houses in Bruges, which later became the residence of the Hansekontor, suggests, according to Rolf Hammel, that the two brothers were "among the most respected Hanse merchants in Flanders" in those years.

Shortly after the death of his first wife, Hildebrand remarried through the mediation of his brother Caesar, who lived in Riga. In 1398 Caesar put him in contact with Margarethe Witte (around 1382 - after 1433), who came from a wealthy Riga merchant family, who in a letter from Caesar to Hildebrand dated July 1, 1398 as a "respectable virgin of 15 years" ( sůverlike juncvrouwe van 15 jaren ). After a short stay in the house of his father-in-law Engelbrecht Witte, Hildebrand traveled to Novgorod , then fell out with Engelbrecht over a dowry of 100 marks and finally settled - following the example of his brother Sivert - in Lübeck . There he became a citizen and around 1400 married Taleke, his daughter from his first marriage, to Peter van dem Damme from a Lübeck council family, thus expanding his circle of relationships in Lübeck. Hildebrand returned to Bruges as early as 1402, where he stayed until 1426, apart from a few short trips. However, he retained his Lübeck citizenship all his life; his wife Margarethe and his children also lived in Lübeck.

Expansion and organizational structure of commercial transactions

From the evaluation of the business letters discovered by the economic historian Wilhelm Stieda in the last third of the 19th century, it is known that Veckinchusen, from Flanders, maintained an extensive network of trade relationships based mainly on family ties that spanned the entire Hanseatic region from Novgorod to London and in addition to the south to Venice , in the west to Bayonne on the French Atlantic coast.

Organizationally, the business of the Veckinchusens was often based on trading companies that were entered into with a small number of partners for a fixed period of time. This form of organization had the advantage that more capital could be used and the risk for the individual could be reduced. The capital employed was usually evenly distributed among the individual shareholders and profits and losses were later evenly divided.

In contrast to about the middle of the 13th century, when Hanseatic merchants usually accompanied their goods themselves and sold them in barter, Hildebrand Veckinchusen ran his business from his Bruges office and only went on important occasions - such as the regularly held trade fairs . The goods provided with his house label were usually entrusted to the transporter - in the case of sea trade, the captain of the merchant ship concerned - or accompanied by a commercial journeyman and sold at the destination by Veckinchusen's correspondents.

Trade between Flanders and Livonia

Historical map of Livonia , probably 15th century.

At the beginning of the 15th century Veckinchusen mainly traded with Livonia, where he shipped cloth, salt and spices and in return bought wax and furs. Hildebrand and his brother Sivert were organized in several trading companies for this trade, which took place on the Flanders - Livonia line. On August 3, 1405, together with the brothers Hartwig and Gottschalk Steenhus, they entered into a company, about whose individual transactions we are informed in detail by an extensive account of the Riga councilor Hartwig Steenhus dated December 1407. According to Walter Stark's calculations, the Veckinchusen / Steenhus-Gesellschaft achieved a profit of 12% in the two years of its existence, which, however, would not have been achieved if a single very successful business with wax from Livonia to Lübeck had not absorbed the losses of the other sub-operations . In 1406 Hildebrand and his brother Sivert founded another trading company together with partners in Reval and Dorpat, which, however, did not make a profit in the six years of its existence, as the profits from the sale of cloth did not offset the losses from the trade in fur and wax. Irsigler attributes this to the fact that the price level for these goods on the Flemish and Livonian markets had adjusted too much at that time.

The "venedyesche selscop"

Furs were one of the Veckinchusen brothers' most important trading goods. Between 1403 and 1415 they imported considerable quantities from the east: around 90,000 from Reval alone, 67,000 from Riga and 153,000 from Danzig. The experiences of the Hanseatic merchants in the Baltic States and in Russia also shaped Hanseatic art. Here one of four carved panels of the Riga driver's chairs , which the Stralsund Riga drivers gave to the Nikolaikirche in their hometown in the 14th century: bearded Russians hand over their hunt, squirrel and ermine skins, to a German merchant.

In order to establish direct contacts to Northern Italy and to eliminate the Venetian middlemen based in Bruges, twelve merchants, among them Sivert and Hildebrand Veckinchusen, founded the so-called “venedyesche selscop” (Venetian Society) in the first decade of the 15th century. The shareholders of the Venetian Society almost exclusively transported their goods by land and sold the goods they bought in Venice, such as spices, sugar, brazil wood , alum and incense in the markets of Flanders, England, the Holy Roman Empire and Scandinavia. In return, prayer wreaths made of amber, cloth and fur came to Venice. Until 1409, the business of the Venedische Gesellschaft was apparently so good that the partners Peter Karbow, Heinrich Slyper and Sivert Veckinchusen suggested in a letter from Cologne from their Bruges co-partners Heinrich op dem Orde and Hildebrand Veckinchusen an increase in the company's capital from 5,000 to 11,000 Marks .

Presumably due to the ruinous business practice of the merchant Peter Karbow, who was sent to Venice on behalf of the trading company, and his nephew of the same name, the Venetian company fell into a crisis around 1411. Karbow bought overpriced goods and ruined the prices on the Venetian market with an oversupply of skins, so that in April 1411 the goods bought in Venice worth around 70,000 ducats were finally compared to Hanseatic goods worth around 53,000 ducats. The company's large turnover could only be financed by drawing bills of exchange from partners based in Bruges, Cologne and Lübeck , the due dates of which were often before the date of sale of the goods. In addition, there was the apparent dishonesty of Peter Karbows, who was finally arrested in Lüneburg in 1412 . After his capture, Karbow gave up all goods stored in Venice to society in order to buy his freedom. The end of society came at the latest with the trade ban against Venice issued by King Sigismund in 1417.

Lack of money and risky business

The first signs of Hildebrand Veckinchusen's business decline can be found in the warning letters from his business partners that have been passed down for the years from 1414 onwards, which indicate that Veckinchusen was temporarily in dire financial straits. Hammel attributes these problems to the losses in Eastern trade caused by sales problems. Added to this was the fact that Veckinchusen did not get back his share of a loan for the Roman-German King Sigismund, which he had paid when he took office in 1417, when he was besieged by his creditors.

Hildebrand, however, did not give up the risky trade in Venice. In 1417/18 he suffered considerable losses when he sent a large amount of cloth to Venice and apparently misjudged the market situation. In May 1418 two bills of exchange drawn on London burst, which heralded the later catastrophe. In the late summer of 1418 Hildebrand moved with his family to Lübeck and bought a representative house there on Königstraße. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Bruges without a wife and children and was elected Aldermann des Bruges Kontor in 1419, which indicates that at least at that time he still enjoyed credit and respect in Bruges.

Debt tower and death

The high interest rates that Veckinchusen had to pay to the moneylenders based in Bruges on the loans he had taken out made him more and more dependent on them. Added to this was the failure of speculation with French salt, which caused his Livonian business partners to be upset. As the situation worsened, Hildebrand used the Antwerp Whitsun Mass in the spring of 1421 to flee from his creditors. After staying in Lübeck and Cologne, however, he returned to Bruges in the autumn of 1421 to try to repay his loans.

But as early as February 1422, at the urging of one of his creditors, a Genoese banker, he was imprisoned in the Bruges debt tower for a Flemish debt of 120 pounds . Most of his friends turned away from him in the years that followed. His wife Margarethe, who remained with the children in Lübeck, got more and more financial difficulties and was sued from the house by his brother Sivert's mother-in-law and lost it. Sivert only supported Margarethe and the children to the extent that they did not have to go begging, as this would have damaged his own reputation in Lübeck.

Since the autumn of 1424 the last Hildebrand friends intensified their efforts and finally managed to obtain Hildebrand's release with considerable financial resources and a guarantee from his son-in-law Peter van dem Damme. After his release from the debtor's office on April 14 or 15, 1426, Hildebrand made one last attempt to pay off his creditors by resuming commercial transactions, but on May 1, 1426, at Margaret's insistence, embarked for Lübeck, where he had few Died weeks later.

On the source situation and edition history

The tradition of written evidence of the business activities of Hanseatic merchants is extremely poor. Of all the Hanseatic merchants of the Middle Ages, Hildebrand Veckinchusen and his brother Sivert left by far the most extensive source material.

Title page of the edition of letters published by Wilhelm Stieda in 1921 .

Wilhelm Stieda began working on this material for the first time in the summer of 1879, around a year and a half after taking up his professorship at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu ). According to his own statement, he used the semester break for a trip to Reval after he had become aware of the letters in the local city archive through a collection of registers from Eduard Papst and Gotthard Hansen. During this stay he found further source material himself: “One day, a lucky coincidence made me discover a wooden box in the archive that contained a large number of letters, also from and to Hildebrand Veckinchusen, under a thick layer of pepper, much more than before mentioned place. ”In the years 1887 and 1895 Stieda published the first 35 letters as part of two treatises that dealt with Hildebrand Veckinchusen's money business with the later Emperor Sigismund and with the Veckinchusen's trade relations with Venice. The publication of a two-volume complete edition planned by Stieda, the first volume of which was to contain the letters and the second the trading books also found in Reval, was delayed again and again due to a lack of money, the outbreak of the First World War and unfavorable circumstances. It was not until 1921 that Stieda managed to put the letters in the volume Hildebrand Veckinchusen. To publish correspondence from a German merchant in the 15th century . With Stieda's death in 1933, the plan to print the remaining materials remained unfinished. It should also be noted that Stieda did not publish all of the letters it received. Rather, he had a whole series of original letters sent from Reval to the Rostock city archive, which he did not publish later and which are still in Rostock today.

Hildebrand Veckinchusen's thirteen trading books, which contain the individual postings of his transactions, were in the Reval city archive until World War II . There the Russian historian Michail P. Lesnikov first inspected the materials in 1940 and received two of the books to be copied to Moscow , where he made full copies. Lesnikov copied the trading books with the archive signatures Af 2 and Af 5 (nowadays the trading books are usually named according to their bookmarks in the catalog of the Tallinn City Archives published in 1924, which differ in the numbering from another catalog from 1896), but without already thinking of a publication. During the Second World War, all but two of the trading books were brought to Germany and transferred to the Göttingen state archive warehouse . Lesnikov made copies of the books Af 1 and Af 6 that remained in Reval at the end of the 1940s; He did not find out about the whereabouts of the remaining volumes until the early 1950s. In 1959 Heinrich Sproemberg , at that time chairman of the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft Hansischer Geschichtsverein in the German Democratic Republic", of which Lesnikov had become a member in 1957, suggested that the materials edited by Lesnikov be printed. In retrospect, Lesnikov himself writes that it would have been a breach of duty to science if he had not "taken the chance to open wide the long-locked doors into a treasury like the Veckinchusen books are for the economic historian", because the historical economic importance of the source could not be overestimated. In 1973, the volume Die Handelsbücher des Hansischen Kaufmannes Vechinchusen finally appeared, the edition of the chronologically consecutive trading books Af 1 and Af 6, which cover the period between 1399 and 1415. The publication of a second volume with the subsequent trading books Af 13 (to 1418) and Af 12 (to 1420) was prevented by Lesnikov's death.

In the meantime, the historian Claus Nordmann, who died in World War II in 1942 - independently of Lesnikov - made copies of Veckinchusen's trade books Af 4, Af 5, Af 7 and Af 8. Nordmann reported on this company in an extensive article published in the Hansische Geschichtsbl Blätter a year before his death. For his work he used photocopies that are now deposited in the archive of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck and that were made in 1913 when the trading books stored in the Reval archive were sent to Germany on the occasion of the International Exhibition for Commercial Education.

Signature catalog Revaler Stadtarchiv from 1924	Record collection archive of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck	scope
Af 1	I.	144 ll.
Af 2	II	100 ll.
Af 3	IVa	38 ll.
Af 4	VI	85 ll.
Af 5	Va	12 ll.
Af 6	III	200 ll.
Af 7	VIIa	16 ll.
Af 8	Vb	26 ll.
Af 9
Af 10
Af 11	IIIb	18 ll.
Af 12
Af 13	IVb	50 ll.

Unlike Lesnikov, Nordmann planned to rearrange the individual entries in the trading books for the purpose of publication. In his own edition of the books Af 1 and Af 6, on the other hand, Lesnikov argued for a faithful reproduction of the original by pointing out that Veckinchusen's books form two groups. He referred to the books Af 1, Af 6, Af 12 and Af 13 as memoranda, in which the entries were made rather incoherently and apparently not following any classification criterion. According to Lesnikov, all other trading books are to be classified as account books, since the individual postings were entered according to fixed rules.

In 1982 Walther Stark resumed work on the unpublished handbooks that had been in the Koblenz Federal Archives since 1978 and were then loaned to Berlin. Although Stark was able to complete the work, the manuscript turned out to be unprintable because of the many correction layers. For a variety of reasons, the work could not be promoted to print for decades. Finally, the edition of the trading books was completed in spring 2013.

Beyond purely historical questions, the Veckinchusen materials - and in particular the numerous letters exchanged between the Veckinchusen brothers and their business friends, business partners, journeymen and relatives - also offer ample space for socio-historical studies. Examples are the letters exchanged between Hildebrand Veckinchusen and his second wife Margarethe, about which Rolf Hammel judges that the correspondence shows "like no other late medieval testimony the emotional relationship between married couples at the beginning of the 15th century." A comprehensive biographical The processing of Hildebrand Veckinchusen's person is still pending, but the material for this is now largely in print.

literature

Aids:

• Hans Jeske: The technical vocabulary of the Hanseatic merchant Hildebrand Veckinchusen. Bielefeld 2005, ISBN 3-89534-591-1 .

Unprinted sources: Hildebrand Veckinchusen's handbooks and letters are now in the Tallinn City Archives ( Tallinna Linnaarhiiv ). Photocopies of the trading books (with the exception of Af 9, Af 10 and Af 12) are available in the archive of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck .

Printed sources:

• Michail P. Lesnikow, Walter Stark (ed.): The trading books of Hildebrand Veckinchusen. Account books and other manuals. Final editing Albrecht Cordes, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-412-21020-5 (contains the account books Af 2 and 4 and the other manuals Af 3, 5, 7–9, 11–13 and the lost manual Af 10, as well as an extensive apparatus).
• Michail P. Lesnikov: The trading books of the Hanseatic businessman Veckinchusen. Berlin 1973 (contains the chronologically consecutive books Af 1 and Af 6; the years between 1399 and 1415 are covered - also the review by Ahasver von Brandt : Die Veckinchusen-Handlungsbücher. Prehistory, problems and realization of a source edition. In: Hansische Geschichtsblätter 93 (1975), ISSN  0073-0327 , pp. 100-112).
• Wilhelm Stieda (Ed.): Hildebrand Veckinchusen. Correspondence from a German merchant in the 15th century , Leipzig 1921 (contains 546 items).
• Wilhelm Stieda: Hanso-Venetian trade relations in the 15th century , Rostock 1894 (contains 31 letters from Hildebrand and Sivert Veckinchusen from the years between 1411 and 1429).
• Wilhelm Stieda: Emperor Sigismund's money business with Hanseatic merchants. In: Hansische Geschichtsblätter 16 (1887), ISSN  0073-0327 , pp. 61-82 (contains four letters).

Representations:

• Thorsten Afflerbach: The everyday professional life of a late medieval Hanseatic merchant: considerations on the handling of commercial transactions. Frankfurt am Main [u. a.] 1993, ISBN 3-631-45737-5 .
• Albrecht Cordes: Late medieval social trade in the Hanseatic region (sources and representations on Hanseatic history NF 45). Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-412-03698-6 (therein the chapter Books and Letters of the Brothers Veckinchusen, pp. 233–260).
• Albrecht Cordes: The Veckinchusen sources and their further research. A fascinating and bulky piece of business history , in: Jürgen Sarnowsky (ed.), Conceptual considerations for the edition of invoices and official books of the late Middle Ages , Göttingen 2016, 73–90.
• Rolf Hammel : Hildebrand Veckinchusen. In: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck. Volume 9. Neumünster 1991, ISBN 3-529-02649-2 , pp. 358-364.
• Franz Irsigler: The everyday life of a Hanseatic merchant family as reflected in the Veckinchusen letters. In: Hansische Geschichtsblätter 103 (1985), ISSN  0073-0327 pp. 75-99.
• Walter Stark : Investigations into the profit of the Hanseatic commercial capital in the first half of the 15th century. Weimar 1985.
• Margot Lindemann: Communication through business letters. Letter “newspapers” in the correspondence of Hildebrand Veckinchusens (1398–1428). Munich [u. a.] 1978, ISBN 3-7940-2526-1 .
• Franz Irsigler: Hanseatic merchants. The Lübeck Veckinchusen and the Cologne Rinck. In: Hanse in Europa: Bridge between the markets, 12. – 17. Century. Cologne 1973, pp. 301-312.
• Franz Irsigler: Merchant mentality in the Middle Ages. In: Cord Meckseper and Elisabeth Schraut (eds.): Mentality and everyday life in the late Middle Ages. 2nd Edition. Göttingen 1991, ISBN 3-525-33511-3 , p. 68 f.
• Michail P. Lesnikov: The Hanseatic fur trade at the beginning of the 15th century. In: Hanseatic Studies. Heinrich Sproemberg on his 70th birthday (Research on Medieval History 8). Berlin 1961, pp. 219-272.
• Luise von Winterfeld: Hildebrand Veckinchusen: a Hanseatic merchant 500 years ago. Bremen 1929 (Luise von Winterfeld's study is rather popular science and not always correct in its presentation of the facts).

Web links

Commons : Hildebrand Veckinchusen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Briefwechsel Hildebrand Veckinchusen  - Sources and full texts

• Hildebrand Veckinchusen in the repertory "Historical Sources of the German Middle Ages"
• Literature by and about Hildebrand Veckinchusen in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Irsigler, Hanseatic Merchants , p. 304.
2. ^ Margot Lindemann: The origin of the Veckinchusen family, Feckinghaus. In: Contributions to the history of Dortmund and the county of Mark 1980 (72), pp. 173–178.
3. ↑ Hammel, Hildebrand Veckinchusen , p. 359.
4. ^ Series Veckinchusen and Kurt Visch in Riga to Hildebrand Veckinchusen in Bruges (July 1, 1398) (full text of the Stiedas letter edition in the Wikisource project).
5. ↑ Hartwych Stenhus in Riga to Sivert Veckinchusen in Lübeck (December 20, 1407) (full text of the Stiedas letter edition in the Wikisource project).
6. ↑ Stark, Profit bei Hansische Handelskapital , pp. 40–54, here p. 53.
7. ↑ Stark, Profit bei Hansischen Handelskapital , p. 54.
8. ↑ Irsigler, Hanseatic Merchants , p. 310.
9. ^ Sivert Veckinchusen, Peter Karbow and Heinrich Slyper in Cologne to Heinrich op dem Orde and Hildebrand Veckinchusen in Bruges (April 14, 1409) (full text of the Stiedas letter in the Wikisource project).
10. ↑ Exemplary: Wilhelm Weits and Lamsin Kupere in Bruges to Hildebrand Veckinchusen (August 21, 1421) (full text of the Stiedas letter edition in the Wikisource project).
11. ↑ Hammel, Hildebrand Veckinchusen , p. 361f.
12. ↑ Cf. Eduard Pabst / Gotthard Hansen: Contributions to the customer of Est, Liv and Courlands , Volume 2, Reval 1874, p. 174ff.
13. ↑ Stieda, Hildebrand Veckinchusen , foreword, SV
14. Jump up ↑ Stieda, Emperor Sigismund's money business (4 letters) and Hanso-Venetian trade relations (31 letters).
15. ^ Wilhelm Stieda: Hildebrand Veckinchusen. Correspondence from a German merchant in the 15th century . Leipzig 1923.
16. ^ Lesnikov, Handelsbücher , foreword, p. IX.
17. ^ Lesnikov, Handelsbücher , foreword, p. XI.
18. ↑ Nordmann's academic teacher Fritz Rörig , In Memoriam Claus Nordmann , in: Hansische Geschichtsblätter 67/68 (1942/43), pp. 21-24.
19. ^ Claus Nordmann, The Veckinchusenschen Handelsbücher. On the question of their edition , in: Hansische Geschichtsblätter 65/66 (1940/41), pp. 79–144.
20. ↑ Lesnikov, Handelsbücher , Introduction, pp. XX – XXI.
21. ↑ See Albrecht Cordes, The Veckinchusen sources and their further research. A fascinating and cumbersome piece of business history, in: Jürgen Sarnowsky (Ed.), Conceptual Considerations for Editing Invoices and Official Books of the Late Middle Ages, Göttingen 2016, pp. 73–90, here p. 78f.
22. ↑ Hammel, Hildebrand Veckinchusen , p. 363.

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on August 2, 2006 .