The Insane Economics of Owning a Hanseatic Merchant Cog 1300s Ship (Died Trying)

In this video, we break down the true economics of owning a Hanseatic League merchant cog. From the cost and construction of the ship itself to the fortified foreign trading posts, called Kontore, that decided who was actually allowed to sell inside their walls. But owning the ship was never the same thing as being allowed to trade. The Hanseatic League had no king, no permanent government, and no standing army, and yet it controlled trade across nearly two thousand miles of northern European coastline. When Denmark's King Valdemar tried to break that power in 1361, a federation of merchant cities with no crown of its own did something almost unheard of: they went to war, and won. Using documented cog construction and cargo data, the structure of the four Kontore in London, Bruges, Bergen, and Novgorod, the Victual Brothers piracy crisis, and the Peace of Stralsund, we examine how much a merchant could actually earn, what happened when the League's own fragile unity broke down, and why the real fortune was never really about the ship at all. #MedievalHistory #EconomicHistory #MiddleAges #BusinessHistory #HistoryDocumentary #hanseatic #MedievalEurope