Lübeck
Before embarking National Geographic Explorer on Monday afternoon we had been treated to a private showing of one of Europe’s premier archaeological collections at the National Museum in Copenhagen, preceded by a delightful Danish lunch. It was here, early in the nineteenth century that the paradigm of an ascending order of technology as a way to explain the chronological development of prehistoric societies originated when the curator of the museum re-arranged his collection by separating stone, bronze and iron artifacts. Observant guests might have noted that the display of horned helmets is to be found in the Bronze Age section of the museum and not in the Viking section, since no example of horned helmet from the Viking period has ever been found outside of Hollywood, children’s comics and – regrettably – school textbook illustrations.
Monday morning saw us enter the mouth of the Trave River on the northern coast of Germany, with the tower of St Jacob’s church a navigational marker for us as it has been for centuries of mariners. For a modern ship Lübeck seems too far inland, but for most of its history this river-moated harbor was thus protected from raiders. Our morning riverboat cruise around the city took us past a replica cogge, the flat-bottomed ship of the Hanse traders, a mediaeval merchant guild that made Lübeck its headquarters. Lübeck controlled the trade in salt that arrived in the town via a canal from Luneberg. Salt preserved fish from coastal Norway that were exchanged for woolen cloth in Bruges or beeswax and furs in Novgorod. A network of Hanseatic cities, several of which we shall be visiting on this voyage became centers of merchant capitalism in the economic vanguard of the Middle Ages. Our morning walking tour included a visit to St Mary’s church, the tallest brick-built church in Europe, completed by the mid-fourteenth century and imitated in several other Hanseatic towns around the Baltic coast. An afternoon historical walk encountered a Rood carved by Bernt Notke dating from the late fifteenth century and, in the mediaeval art museum housed in the former St Ann’s Convent a magnificent altarpiece by Hans Memling from later in the same century. Both works testify to the patronage, not of noble families, but of merchant guilds, a new phenomenon in European history.
The day was not exclusively devoted to mediaeval history. An afternoon walk was offered to the Botanical Garden, local beers were sampled on the aft deck and many guests had taken the opportunity to buy some of the famous local marzipan. But even the marzipan speaks of Lübeck’s Hanseatic past: almonds and sugar were imported from the eastern Mediterranean to this the ‘Queen of the Hanseatic Cities’ and then turned into confectionery and exported for profit. It will be hard to escape history’s shadow on this voyage…
