Hanseatic trade corridors

What you are looking at

Seven corridors carrying Hanseatic trade: the Baltic and North Sea runs, the river routes inland, the overland connections between them, and the mixed routes that used all three.

How to read this layer

Line width is evidence strength, and it is the most important thing on this layer. A wide line is a corridor the sources describe directly. A narrow one is a generalised reconstruction drawn to show that a connection existed. It is not traffic volume, and reading it as volume inverts the meaning.

Dash pattern carries certainty, which is a separate question: how sure we are about this corridor’s dating and course, as opposed to how directly it is attested.

A corridor is not a road. It shows a connection and roughly where it ran. The actual paths varied by season, by cargo and by which lord was charging what that year.

Historical scope

1356 to 1669, phased per feature.

Sources and evidence

After Wubs-Mrozewicz, UNESCO’s documentation, and Marczinek, Maurer and Rauch. Commodity associations are normalised joins rather than free text, so the question “which corridors carried wax” has one answer.

Reconstruction and uncertainty

Every corridor here is drawn. None is digitised from a historical route map, because the League did not produce one. The evidence establishes that goods moved between these places; the line is this project’s way of showing it.

That is why the width encoding exists: without it, a well-documented Baltic run and an inferred overland link would look identical.

Data fields

evidence_type drives width, certainty drives dash. See the Hanseatic data fields.

Data and downloads

GeoJSON under CC BY 4.0. Attribution: Terra Chartarum; Wubs-Mrozewicz; UNESCO; Marczinek, Maurer & Rauch.