Northern Europe was the site of another great medieval experiment in statecraft, the Hanseatic League of cities that monopolized trade in the Baltic and North Seas. In a time and place of weak central authority, German-speaking cities in the northern tier of the Holy Roman Empire were the most powerful force in Northern Europe. They waged war against territorial states, winning steep concessions from the Danish Empire in 1370 that marked the league’s zenith. What was the source of Hanse power? Lübeck in northern Germany was the de facto capital. This city was the product of German migratory conquests in a vast Christianization effort. Soon it was an alpha city in a far-flung network that controlled trade from England to Russia and points between. The league led by Lübeck was locked in a zealous, centuries-long struggle to gain and protect trading privileges in the burgeoning financial centers of a new urban age. The Hanse cities formed a network within a network, establishing strongholds in the globally significant nodes of Bergen, Bruges, London, and Novgorod.

This chapter revisits Herder’s debate with Kant in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind, paying particular attention to Herder’s ideas on individual self-determination and his history of modern liberty and enlightenment. In this work, Herder reinterpreted human self-determination as a distinctive capacity and moral duty, whilst also viewing it as the highest form of self-preservation and sociability exhibited across the spectrum of natural beings. Kant, by contrast, invoked human ‘unsocial sociability’, presenting morality as a late development in human history as well as underlining the role of the modern state in facilitating this development. Herder rejected all the constitutive elements of Kant’s idea for a universal history, whilst also seeking to refine his account of the history of ‘state-machines’ and political government in Europe. He accordingly proposed an alternative vision of the prospects for greater peace in Europe and the world, drawing attention to a moral learning process in human history and the role of commercial cities in the rise of modern liberty. He set up the ‘Hanseatic league’ as an example for a future European union as well as predicted the empowerment of the subjugated peoples of Europe thanks to growing international trade and improved government.

On Christmas Day in the year 800 CE, Charlemagne, the king of the Franks and the Lombards, and father of at least eighteen children, was crowned ‘Emperor of the Romans’ by Pope Leo III at Old St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Charlemagne thereby united most of Western Europe under his rule, a vast area home to between 10 and 20 million people.1 Almost all of these people lived in the countryside.

The reason for this was that, after the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, Western Europe was characterised by conflict, population decline and de-urbanisation (the movement of people from the cities to rural areas). The Romans, of course, were known for their prosperous cities. A visitor to Rome today can still see the impressive ancient architecture of the Palatine Hill, the Forum, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon.