In its heyday, the Hanseatic League was so powerful that it imposed economic blockades against kingdoms and principalities to enforce their economic interests and in exceptional cases even waged wars. Thus, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Hanseatic League had several disputes with the Danes. The Sundzoll, which had been introduced since , for the passage of the hordes of the Oresund, also caused disputes for centuries.
From the 13th to the middle of the fifteenth century, the Hanseatic League largely dominated the exchange of goods between the north-east and the north-west of Europe by covering the raw material and food supplies of the West from the East, which had been opened by the German colonization, and the east with the Western- Products. These included, for example, furs, wax, grain, fish, flax, hemp, wood and timber products such as pitch, tar and potato. In return, the Hanseatic merchants brought into these countries the industrial finished products of the West and South like cloths, metal goods, especially weapons, and spices.
In addition, the Hanseatic League, from Russia to Portugal, distributed numerous smaller branches, the so-called factories, across Europe.
The long-distance buyers pursued commercial objectives. Since the second half of the 14th century, however, the hanseatic cities were trying to create a firmer alliance organization for mutual support against aristocratic rule claims. With this firmer union, they also wanted to face problems caused by the growing competition of English, Italian and South German merchants and Dutch freightmen and by the state strengthening in the target countries of the trade. However, the development could not be stopped and the influence of the Hanseatic League was reduced, although trade in the 16th and early 17th century still showed enormous growth.
The Hanseatic League's aggressively protectionist trading practices often aroused opposition from foreign merchants. The league typically used gifts and loans to foreign political leaders to protect its commercial privileges, and when this proved inadequate, it threatened to withdraw its trade and occasionally became involved in embargoes and blockades.
Only in extreme cases did the league engage in organized warfare, as in the s, when it faced a serious challenge from the Danish king Valdemar IV, who was trying to master the southwestern Baltic and end the league's economic control there. The league's members raised an armed force that defeated the Danes decisively in , and in the Peace of Stralsund Denmark was forced to recognize the league's supremacy in the Baltic.
In the 14th century the Hanseatic League claimed a membership of about towns, mostly German. Though basically a mercantile rather than a political organization, the league tried to ensure peace and order at home; warfare between member towns, civic strife within towns, and robbery on the roads were all suppressed as far as possible. The league had no constitution and no permanent army, navy, or governing body except for periodic assemblies diets. These were convened less and less frequently from the early 15th century, as the towns' peculiar and regional interests began to outweigh their common concerns.
The Hanseatic League declined partly because it lacked any centralized power with which to withstand the new and more powerful nation-states forming on its borders. The Dutch were growing in mercantile and industrial strength, and in the 15th century they were able to oust German traders from Dutch domestic markets and the North Sea region as a whole.
New maritime connections between the Baltic and Mediterranean seas and between the Old World and the Americas caused a gradual diversion of trade westward to the great Atlantic ports.
The league died slowly as England contested with the Netherlands for dominance in northern European commerce and Sweden emerged as the chief commercial power in the Baltic Sea region.
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