The German Burgher: Useful Positions Worthy of Respect

German Burghers along with their Hanseatic allies, were a central, indispensable part of the solidity, continuity and growth of central Europe in our period.  Educated, even multi-disciplined, in all their forms they provided many functions tying the various means and ends of civic order together. In the cities and many towns, individuals overcoming the language, familial and fraternal differences was the same experience for everyone. If you were born into wealth, you might keep it through work or lose it in bad investments. If you were born poor, in time, with education, work and skill development (and a little luck), you could become respectable. These paths sound familiar but have more to do with them than us. It was their milieu, their civic sense of cultural correctness and devotion to good practice and even religious duty, that proved their works a success that grew, more than any more recent myths of free market capitalism or that famous German order, or opportunism in general.

For one thing there weren't so many poeple along and east of the Rhine, and not in any great clusters.

"In 1500 only twenty-seven of them housed more than 10,000 persons, and half of these lay in the Low Countries. Cologne, the largest German-speaking city, was a metropolis of 40,000 souls, and Prague was nearly as large, but from these giants the gradient ran steeply down to tiny places with only some hundreds of residents. More than half the German lands' burghers lived in small or middling cities of fewer than 10,000 souls. Large, middling, or small these cities possessed similar functions as strong places, markets, and modes of consumption, production, and communications. They also dominated their hinterlands, from which they drew food, raw materials, and labor, and over which they sometimes acquired political lordship." [p. 35]

Our source here is Thomas A Brady Jr's 2009 German Histories in The Age of Reformations, 1400-1650. It is the latest History of the Germans in the time of the Reformation, published by UC Berkeley for the Cambridge Univeristy Press. His brief sketch here lays out the terrain for both German and Hanseatic burgher.

"The burghers' power began with writing, which they learned from the clergy, and extended to trade, which they mastered by themselves. German merchants operated in two zones, northern and southern, each with its distinctive institutions, business methods, and languages (Low German in the north, High German and Italian in the south)."

The Hansa, in the north is the traditional term in English for these traders and merchants and associtaes, but in German, the name simply means 'league'. North and south counterparts and all those in between had, over the centuries, smoothed their cooperative endeavors even though theirs were security, legal and commercial concerns all at work at the same time.

"They collaborated to improve the terms of trade and to protect their ships and goods from pirates and bandits, though their loosely structured association possessed no permanent organs, fleets, armies, or taxes. The league thus replicated the ad hoc look of the typical northern business firm, which was a small operation of two to four partners formed to organize capital, cargos, and ships for individual voyages. Such firms spread risks by borrowing from rural nobles, clergymen, even harbor workers, and by avoiding specialization in wares. The Hanseatic merchants sailed long distances from London and Bruges via Lübeck to Reval/Tallinn, carrying wax and furs westward and textiles and salt eastward, together with Swedish copper and butter, Danish and Swedish dried fish, Scottish and English wool, Prussian and Polish grain, Hungarian metals and south German metal wares, and French and Portuguese sea salt. The merchants spread their Low German as the northern trade's lingua franca and German brewed lager beer as its universal lubricant." [p. 35]

Southern houses tended to be like Italian houses with dynastic holdings centered on certain markets or products. Northern associations tended to be more diverse, acting as investors in several businesses at once. But both forms found expression all over. The Fundaco de Tedeschi was an example of the investor-type corporate association and was located in Venice. There were also dynastic merchants in Copenhagen as well as independent, free Hansa members in far east Riga, Gdansk.
Further examples. Young educated men, sent from Nuremburg to Venice, worked the great German warehouse that was the Fundaco de Tedeschi and learned how a great shipping hub was maintained there. By 1484 they had sent home the knowledge of double-entry bookkeeping, bills of exchange and the efficient use of arabic numerals. [p. 36]

Most burghers were not great bankers or merchants. Instead they ran shops, were local artisans, even servants who served a master or municipality under contract, paid annually or even by piece or project work. To run a shop, a dock, a manufacturer that fashioned or refined products, sets these burghers side by side with guild members, petty laborers and skilled workers from peasant stock. Sometimes individuals could fill all these positions in a  lifetime.

One brief example, Burkhard Zink (1396-1468) was born into a 'solid artisan' family in Memmingen. His mother died at an early age and he was sent to live with an uncle, a priest. Later from a Catholic school south of Ljubljana, he then graduated to work with a furrier. Fom this point he went on several journeys, taking work or patrons where he could find them. He studied in Ulm, Nuremburg, Augsburg. He worked for a wine merchant, a lawyer and eventually married and found work as a secretary. They were poor until she died, but she gave him ten children. Six of which died before adult hood. He married three more times and in all fathered twenty-two children. As an old man he had won several civic offices and honors and could call himself a comfortable burgher. We have his story because he wrote it and 19th century German chroniclers set it down. [pp. 41-2]
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quotes and pagination from: Thomas A Brady Jr: German Histories in The Age of Reformations, 1400-1650;  University of California, Berkeley for the Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2009