Quotulatiousness

June 30, 2024

The medieval salt trade in the Baltic

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the long-awaited third part of his series on salt, Anton Howes discusses how the extremely low salt level of water in the Baltic Sea helped create a vast salt trade dominated by the merchant cities of the Hanseatic League:

The extent of the Hanseatic League in 1400.
Plate 28 of Professor G. Droysen’s Allgemeiner Historischer Handatlas, published by R. Andrée, 1886, via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s difficult to appreciate salt’s historical significance because it’s now so abundant. Societies used to worry about salt supplies — for preparing and preserving food — as a matter of basic survival. Now we use the vast majority of it for making chemicals or chucking on our roads to keep them from getting icy, while many salt-making plants don’t even operate at full capacity. Yet the story of how we came to achieve salt superabundance is a long and complicated one.

In Part I of this series we looked at salt as a kind of general-purpose technology for the improvement of food, as well as a major revenue-raiser for empires — especially when salt-producing coastal areas could dominate salt-less places inland. In Part II we then looked at a couple of places that were all the more interesting for being both coastal and remarkably salt-less: the coast of Bengal and the Baltic Sea. One was to be exploited by the English East India Company, which needlessly propped up a Bengalese salt industry at great human cost. The other, however, was to prove a more contested prize — and ultimately the place that catalysed the emergence of salt superabundance.

It’s worth a brief recap of where we left the Baltic. Whereas the ocean is on average 3.5% salt, along the Baltic coast it’s at just 0.3% or lower, which would require about twelve times as much time and fuel to produce a given quantity of salt. Although there are a few salt springs near the coast, they were nowhere near large enough to supply the whole region. So from the thirteenth century the Baltic’s salt largely came from the inland salt springs at Lüneburg, supplied via the cities of Lübeck and Hamburg downstream. These two cities had a common interest against the kingdom of Denmark, which controlled the straits between the North and Baltic seas, and created a coalition of trading cities that came to be known as the Hanseatic League. The League resoundingly defeated the Danes in the 1360s and 1430s so that their trade in salt — and the fish they preserved with it — could remain free.

But Lüneburg salt — and by extension the League itself — was soon to face competition.

Lüneburg could simply not keep up with the growth of Baltic demand, as the region’s population became larger and wealthier. And so more and more salt had to come from farther afield, from the Bay of Biscay off France’s western coast, as well as from Setúbal in Portugal and from southern Spain.1 This “bay salt” — originally referring to just the Bay of Bourgneuf, but then extended to the entire Bay of Biscay, and often to all Atlantic solar-evaporated salt — was made by the sun and the wind slowly evaporated the seawater from a series of shallow coastal pools, with the salt forming in coarse, large-grained pieces that were skimmed off the top. Bay salt, however, inevitably ended up mixed with some of the sand and dirt from the bottoms of the pools in which it was held, while the seawater was never filtered, meaning that the salt was often brown, green, grey or black depending on the skill of the person doing the skimming — only the most skilled could create a bay salt that was white. And it often still contained lots of other chemicals found in seawater, like magnesium chloride and sulphate, calcium carbonate and sulphate, potassium chloride and so on, known as bitterns.2

Bay or “black” salt, made with the heat of the sun, was thus of a lower quality than the white salt boiled and refined from inland salt springs or mined as rock. Its dirt discoloured and adulterated food. Its large grains meant it dissolved slowly and unevenly, slowing the rate at which it started to penetrate and preserve the meat and fish — an especially big problem in warmer climates where flesh spoiled quickly. And its bitterns gave it a bitter, gall taste, affecting the texture of the flesh too. Bay salt, thanks to the bitterns, would “draw forth oil and moisture, leading to dryness and hardness”, as well as consuming “the goodness or nutrimental part of the meat, as moisture, gravy, etc.”3 The resulting meat or fish was often left shrunken and tough, while bitterns also slowed the rate at which salt penetrated them too. Bay-salted meat or fish could often end up rotten inside.

But for all these downsides, bay salt required little labour and no fuel. Its main advantage was that it was extremely cheap — as little as half the price of white Lüneburg salt in the Baltic, despite having to be brought from so much farther away.4 Its taste and colour made it unsuitable for use in butter, cheese, or on the table, which was largely reserved for the more expensive white salts. But bay salt’s downsides in terms of preserving meat and fish could be partially offset by simply applying it in excessive quantities — every three barrels of herring, for example, required about a barrel of bay salt to be properly preserved.5

By 1400, Hanseatic merchants were importing bay salt to the Baltic in large and growing quantities, quickly outgrowing the traditional supplies. No other commodity was as necessary or popular: over 70% of the ships arriving to Reval (modern-day Tallinn in Estonia) in the late fifteenth century carried salt, most of it from France. But Hanseatic ships alone proved insufficient to meet the demand. The Danes, Swedes, and even the Hanseatic towns of the eastern Baltic, having so long been under the thumb of Lübeck’s monopoly over salt from Lüneburg, were increasingly happy to accept bay salt brought by ships from the Low Countries — modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands. Indeed, when these interloping Dutch ships were attacked by Lübeck in 1438, most of the rest of the Hanseatic League refused Lübeck’s call to arms. When even the Hanseatic-installed king of Denmark sided with the Dutch as well, Lübeck decided to back down and save face. The 1441 peace treaty allowed the Dutch into the Baltic on equal terms.6 Hanseatic hegemony in the Baltic was officially over.

The Dutch, by the 1440s, had thus gained a share of the carrying trade, exchanging Atlantic bay salt for the Baltic’s grain, timber, and various naval stores like hemp for rope and pitch for caulking. But this was just the beginning.


    1. Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa, trans. D. S. Ault and S. H. Steinberg, The Emergence of International Business, 1200-1800 (Macmillan and Co Ltd, 1970), pp.219-220, 253-4.

    2. L. Gittins, “Salt, Salt Making, and the Rise of Cheshire”, Transactions of the Newcomen Society 75, no. 1 (January 2005), pp.139–59; L. G. M. Bass-Becking, “Historical Notes on Salt and Salt-Manufacture”, The Scientific Monthly 32, no. 5 (1931), pp.434–46; A. R. Bridbury, England and the Salt Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Clarendon Press, 1955), pp.46-52. Incidentally, some historians, like Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740 (Clarendon Press, 1989) p.223, note occasional reports of French bay salt having been worse than the Portuguese or Spanish due to its high magnesium content, “which imparted an unattractive, blackish colour”. This must be based on a misunderstanding, however, as the salts would have been identical other than in terms of the amount of dirt taken up with the salt from the pans. At certain points in the seventeenth century the French workers skimming the salt must simply have been relatively careless compared to those of Iberia.

    3. John Collins, Salt and fishery a discourse thereof (1682), pp.17, 54-5, 66-8.

    4. Bridbury, pp.94-7 for estimates.

    5. Karl-Gustaf Hildebrand, “Salt and Cloth in Swedish Economic History”, Scandinavian Economic History Review 2, no. 2 (1 July 1954), pp.81, 86, 91.

    6. For this section see: Dollinger, pp.194-5, 201, 236, 254, 300.

October 23, 2023

Hero-worship of Admiral Nelson seen as (somewhat) harmful

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Saturday, Sir Humphrey noted the anniversary of Trafalgar and indicated that the Royal Navy’s idolization of Admiral Nelson somewhat obscures the rest of the Royal Navy’s historical role:

“Danish privateers intercepting an enemy vessel during the Napoleonic Wars”.
Oil painting by Christian Mølsted, 1888 from the Collection of the Museum of National History via Wikimedia Commons.

There is an argument, which the author has sympathy with, that the RN has perhaps idolised Nelson too much. That while he did much good, the adoration of him comes at the cost of forgetting countless other leaders and battles which have relevance to this day. This is not to denigrate or play down the impact of Trafalgar, but to ask whether we should be equally aware of other parts of Royal Navy history too. Understanding the Royal Navy of the late 18th and early 19th century can provide us with much to consider and learn from in looking at how to shape the Royal Navy of the early 21st century. If you look at the Royal Navy of today and of Nelson’s time (and throughout the Napoleonic Wars), a strong case can be made that although the technology is materially different, the missions, function, and capability that the RN offers to the Government of the day are little changed.

While we tend to fix attention mostly on the major battle of Trafalgar, the RN fulfilled a wide variety of different missions throughout the war. The fleet was responsible for blockading Europe, monitoring French movements, and providing timely intelligence on the activity of enemy fleets. Legions of smaller ships stood off hostile coasts, outside of engagement range, on lonely picket duties to track the foe. The Royal Navy also maintained forces capable of strategic blockades in locations like Gibraltar and the Skagerrak, relying on chokepoints to secure control of the sea.

The UK was a mercantile nation with a heavy reliance on trade, and with the land routes of Europe closed by Napoleon, the Merchant Navy was vital to victory. The Royal Navy played a key role in escorting ships in convoy, ensuring their protection from hostile forces and helping ensure vitally needed trade goods arrived in British ports. This included timber from colonies in North America, vital to building and repairing warships. Similarly British policy to defeat Napoleon relied on supporting continental land powers, and a steady flow of munitions and materiel were sent by sea, escorted by RN warships to Baltic ports to help support nations fighting France.

The Royal Navy maintained forces of small raiding craft to hold the French coast at risk throughout the wars, sending vessels to attack French coastal locations, capturing intelligence and tying down hundreds of French coastal artillery batteries and thousands of men who could have been deployed elsewhere to protect French soil. More widely the UK engaged in strategic raiding and blockade, for example operations in the Adriatic Campaign (1807-14) where a small number of British warships blockaded ports, conducted amphibious operations and engaged in surface combat with different foes. In the same vein the UK found itself targeted by Danish & Norwegian raiders too, who fought the so-called “Gunboat War” from 1807 to 14 against the UK, where many small scale actions between British brigs and small ships against gunboats in the Baltic. This often forgotten campaign saw violent clashes and victories on both sides with the sinking and capture of many RN vessels to protect convoy trade.

More widely the Royal Navy worked closely with the British Army in a variety of amphibious operations, providing ships to deploy and sustain the Army on campaign. There were a number of impressive amphibious failures, but also some successes too, particularly in the West Indies and Egypt, where working as part of a jointly integrated force, the Royal Navy provided fire support (and even operated Congreve land attack rockets for shore bombardment) as the British Army fought the French ashore. In the Peninsular War the RN was vital for ensuring the supply of Wellington’s forces and, where necessary evacuating them, such as during the retreat from Corunna.

April 10, 2023

The Crimean Naval War at Sea – Battleships, Bombardments and the Black Sea

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Drachinifel
Published 5 Apr 2023

Today we take a look at most of the naval theaters of the Crimean War on conjunction with the fine people @realtimehistory find their video here: Last Crusade or F…
(more…)

April 8, 2023

Russia’s Last Crusade – The Crimean War 1853-1856

Real Time History
Published 7 Apr 2023

The Crimean War between the Ottoman Empire and Russia (and later the UK and France) has been called the last crusade and the first modern war at the same time.
(more…)

August 25, 2022

The Polish Navy – Founding to the Fall of Poland

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Drachinifel
Published 14 Apr 2021

Today we take a look at the how the Polish Navy came to be, how the core of their ships got away to form the start of the Free Polish Navy, and the last stand the remaining ships and men undertook.
(more…)

September 15, 2021

Hansa – Northern Silk Road – Economic History

Kings and Generals
Pubished 14 Sep 2021

Use our code KINGSANDGENERALS10 and link: https://bit.ly/3mACCeg to get 10% off (save up to $47!) your own authentic Japanese subscription box from Bokksu! Don’t miss out on this amazing snack-journey through Japan!

Kings and Generals animated historical documentary series on medieval history and economic history continues with a video on Hansa, also known as the Hanseatic League, which played a crucial role in the European trade in the late medieval, becoming known as the Northern Silk Road and dominating Baltic and North Sea trade for centuries.

Support us on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/KingsandGenerals or Paypal: http://paypal.me/kingsandgenerals. We are grateful to our patrons and sponsors, who made this video possible: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o…

The video was made by Michael Merc https://bit.ly/340tcO2 while the script was researched and written by Matt Hollis. 2d art and animation – amicus verus (https://www.artstation.com/amicus_verus). Narration by Officially Devin (https://www.youtube.com/user/OfficiallyDevin)

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November 16, 2019

The British army’s “Tractable” shows the continued importance of logistics

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sir Humphrey discusses the ongoing commitment of nearly a thousand British soldiers to Estonia, and how the logistics to get them and their equipment there illustrates a rarely discussed but critical military capability:

One of the most significant exercise commitments this year has been the British Army and “Tractable” (sometimes referred to as either “Op” or “Exercise” but without a title on the British Army website. This major undertaking has been running for some weeks now and has highlighted how the British Army continues to excel at undertaking large scale movements of units in order to be ready to conduct operations as required.

The genesis of Tractable was the need to rotate assets out of Estonia and send new vehicles from the UK in their place. It is often overlooked that the UK now has over 900 British Army personnel permanently stationed in Estonia as part of wider NATO work to help send a strong signal to deter aggression from nations like Russia – which given its recent history of attacking and invading other countries and acting in a remarkably uncivilised manner is certainly required.

[…]

This may sound an obvious and straightforward thing to say, but investment in logistical tail is rarely something that features in many peoples “fantasy Army ORBAT” threads that litter the internet. Most people focus on combat power, looking at how many tanks or self propelled guns an Army has and then considering what this means for its combat power from there.

For the British Army, the investment in heavy armour, APCs and artillery is important, but equally so is the important in assets like logistics enablers – the ability to lift by train or sealift in order to actually get the Army where it needs to be, and not stuck somewhere irrelevant. The purpose of Tractable has as much been to test that the Army can still do this well, and that the various enablers work as intended to deliver a force that can fight.

In practical terms this has meant a focus on areas that often get relatively little attention. For example the skills required to pull vehicles out of storage, conduct road and rail moves across Europe and then deliver them to Estonia are complex and perishable. There is a lot of work required to ensure that a train can be safely loaded with the right armoured vehicles and then sent through the Channel Tunnel for onwards travel.

Air, land, and sea transportation routes from the UK to Tapa, Estonia.

This work often puts significant responsibility in the hands of very junior soldiers who are responsible for ensuring that millions of pounds of equipment is safely handled and put in place properly. One slip up could have huge consequences and potentially cost lives as well. It is only by practising this activity regularly that it can be done safely and effectively for real though.

In the case of Tractable what it has demonstrated is the critical importance of the Royal Logistics Corp to the wider British Army. While logistics may not be a supremely “sexy” subject to many people, being able to ensure that the Army has the right equipment, people and training to be able to do this sort of work is essential – without it, things would rapidly grind to a halt.

Similarly, Tractable has helped focus attention on other critical capabilities like strategic sealift. The use of the “POINT” class strat ro-ro ferry force to help move vehicles across the channel and into Emden (and then onto Estonia) has helped show how key these vessels are to British Army capability. Without them it would be much harder to do the complex business of deploying overseas. Here too we are also reminded of the critical importance of units like 17 Port and Maritime Regiment, one of the most unusual (and vital) units in the Army today, responsible for co-ordinating the sealift and deployment of vehicles around the globe.

October 21, 2018

The Submarine War – WW2 – 008 October 20 1939

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published on 20 Oct 2018

For the men in the navies of the warring nations in Europe, there was nothing phony about WW2 in October 1939 – mortal danger was immediately under the cold surface at the receiving end of a torpedo or a depth charge…

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Spartacus Olsson an Ben Ollerenshaw
Trainee editor Sarvesh

Coloring by Spartacus Olsson, Olga Shirnina and Norman Stewart

Olga’s pictures: https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com
Norman’s pictures https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

March 25, 2018

Great Northern War | 3 Minute History

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jabzy
Published on 5 Nov 2015

Thanks to Xios, Alan Haskayne, Lachlan Lindenmayer, William Crabb, Derpvic, Seth Reeves and all my other Patrons. If you want to help out – https://www.patreon.com/Jabzy?ty=h

October 20, 2017

Operation Albion Concludes – Allied Failures In Belgium I THE GREAT WAR Week 169

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 19 Oct 2017

100 years ago this week, Operation Albion comes to a successful end for the Germans, as revolution is on the horizon in Russia. The Allies aren’t faring quite so well on the Western Front, where the weather continues to worsen and the death toll climbs ever higher. Haig believes a breakthrough is imminent and German morale is tested. The stalemate continues, but sooner or later the Battle of Passchendaele must come to an end.

October 9, 2017

Great Northern War – Lies – Extra History

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 7 Oct 2017

Could Sweden have won the Great Northern War? Was Charles XII actually assassinated? James answers questions from our Patreon supporters in this special edition of Lies!

December 11, 2016

Baltic Sea Battles – Tanks On Other Fronts I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 10 Dec 2016

Indy sits in the Chair of Wisdom again to answer your questions about World War 1. This week we talk about naval battles in the Baltic Sea and the use of tanks on other fronts than the Western Front.

March 27, 2016

The Russian Navy – Submarines – Trench Mortar I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 26 Mar 2016

More pictures from Flo’s Great Grandfather: https://imgur.com/a/R1T92

It’s chair of wisdom time again and this week we talk about the Russian Navy in the Baltic Sea, submarine warfare and trench mortars.

April 25, 2015

Finnish divers binge on 200-year-old wine and beer

Filed under: Europe, History, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Perhaps “binge” isn’t quite the right word to use…

Finnish divers recently discovered several crates of champagne and beer from a sunken ship that had been at the bottom of the Baltic Sea for nearly two centuries. The experts carefully identified, researched, and analyzed the alcohol…then they drank it.

The divers discovered the wreck just south of Aaland, a Finland-controlled archipelago of some 6,500 small islands in the Baltic Sea. Inside the sunken schooner, they found 168 bottles of champagne and an undisclosed amount of bottles of beer. The ship itself likely dates back to the second quarter of the 19th century, making its cargo almost certainly the oldest alcoholic drinks in existence. By comparison, the oldest wines in private hands are only thought to date back to the very end of the 1800s.

This entire story is a good reminder of a basic scientific truth — when in doubt, start drinking the 200-year-old booze. The divers first discovered the champagne was drinkable when changing pressures caused the cork to pop off one of the bottles, and a diver decided to take a swig. He expected to taste seawater that had seeped into the bottle over the last 200 years — which raises very legitimate questions about just why he decided to take a sip in the first place — but was shocked to discover the wine still tasted fine.

H/T to Never Yet Melted, for linking to a story from 2010.

April 22, 2015

Denmark’s Bornholm Island draws Russian attention

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Strategy Page, Austin Bay talks about the unusual attention paid to a Danish island in the Baltic Sea by Russian military forces:

Denmark’s Bornholm Island apparently troubles Vladimir Putin’s 21st-century Kremlin war planners as much as it vexed their Cold War Soviet-era predecessors.

More on Bornholm’s specifics in a moment, but first let’s cover one more example of Putin Russia’s aggressive wrong doing. According to an open-source Danish security assessment, in mid-June 2014, three months after Putin’s Kremlin attacked and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, Russian aircraft carrying live missiles bluffed an attack on Bornholm. Though the report doesn’t provide the exact date, the bomber “probe” occurred during the three-day period the island hosted a touchy-feely “peoples festival.” The festival’s 90,000 participants were unaware they were seeking peaceful solutions on a bulls-eye.

The Bornholm faux-attack reprised Soviet Cold War “tests” of Danish defenses and is but one of a score of serious Russian military probes since 2008 designed to rattle Northern Europe. These Kremlin air and naval probes, backed by harsh rhetoric, have led Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland to reassess their military defenses. “Nordic cooperation” with an emphasis on territorial defense was the first formulation. The Nordics, however, acknowledged ties to Baltic states (and NATO members) Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Since the Crimea invasion, Denmark and Norway (NATO members) want to reinvigorate NATO military capabilities. Continued Russian aggression in Ukraine has led a few habitually neutral Swedes to voice an interest in joining NATO.

Bornholm Island (via Google Maps)

Bornholm Island (via Google Maps)

Back to Bornholm: the island’s location and geology irritated Soviet-era Kremlin strategists. Located in the Baltic Sea east of peninsular Denmark, north of Poland’s coast and to the rear of what was East Germany, Bornholm gave the Free World outpost north of and behind Warsaw Pact lines.

Soviet communications security officers despised the place. Bornholm’s electronic intercept systems, quite literally, bugged them.

As for geology, unlike Jutland’s flat peninsula, Bornholm is rock. In the 1970s, while serving a U.S. Army tour in West Germany, I heard a senior officer describe Bornholm as “sort of a Gibraltar.” His exaggeration had a point. Dig tunnels and Bornholm became a hard target for Soviet conventional weapons.

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