Victual Brothers, or Likedeelers

Lübeck had become the "Queen of the Hanseatic League" in the fourteenth century, being by far the largest and most powerful member of this medieval trade organization.

The League primarily trades timber, furs, resin (or tar), flax, honey, wheat, and rye from the east to Flanders and England with cloth (and, increasingly, manufactured goods) going in the other direction.

Metal ore (principally copper and iron) and herring come southwards from Sweden.

The League has a fluid structure, but its members share some characteristics.

First, most of the Hansa cities had either started as independent cities or gained independence through the collective bargaining power of the League.

Such independence remains limited, however.

The Hanseatic free imperial cities owe allegiance directly to the Holy Roman Emperor, without any intermediate tie to the local nobility.

Another similarity involves the cities' strategic locations along trade routes.

In fact, at the height of its power in the late 1300s, the merchants of the Hanseatic League have succeeded in using their economic clout (and sometimes their military might—trade routes need protecting, and the League's ships sailed well-armed)—to influence imperial policy.

The Hansa also wages a vigorous campaign against pirates.

From 1392, maritime trade of the League has faced danger from raids of the Victual Brothers and their descendants, privateers hired by Albert of Mecklenburg against Queen Margaret I of Denmark.

The island of Gotland, near Sweden, considered by some historians to be the original homeland of the Goths, had been governed separately from the city of Visby.

A civil war caused by conflicts between the German merchants in Visby and the trading peasants of the countryside had had to be put down by King Magnus III of Sweden in 1288.

Waldemar Atterdag of Denmark in 1361 had invaded the island.

The Victual Brothers, a companionship of privateers who later turned to piracy, had occupied the island in 1394 to set up a stronghold headquarters on their own in Visby, impartially raiding everyone's shipping.

Their famous battle cry is "God's friends and the whole world's enemies".

Queen Margaret and King Albert of Sweden concede Gotland to the allied Teutonic Order as a pledge (similar to a fiefdom), awarded to them on the condition that they expel the piratical Victual Brothers from their fortified sanctuary.

An invasion army of Teutonic Knights under Konrad von Jungingen, the Grand Master of the Order, conquers the island in 1398, destroying Visby and driving the Victual Brothers from Gotland.

The Hanseatic League has tried repeatedly to end the anarchy in the Baltic Sea after the Victual Brothers' defeat and expulsion from Gotland in 1398, but with little luck.

Many Victual Brothers still remain at sea.

Deprived of their influence in the Gulf of Bothnia, the Gulf of Finland and Gotland, they operate from the Schlei, the mouth of the river Ems and from other locations in Friesland.

The successors of the Victual Brothers give themselves the name Likedeelers, which means to share in equal parts, which they even do with the poor population along the coast.

They expand their field of activities into the North Sea and along the Atlantic coastline, raiding Brabant, France and as striking as far south as Spain.

Their most famous leader is Captain Störtebeker, who got his name allegedly because he could swallow four liters of beer without taking the beaker from his mouth.

However, it might simply be a family name from Wismar.

The Low German word "Störtebeker" means in English: "Down the drink in the beaker".

The Hamburg warship Brindled Cow, leading a small fleet under Commander Simon of Utrecht in 1401, catches up with Störtebeker's forces near Heligoland.

After three days of running battle, Störtebeker and his crew are finally overpowered and trapped by means of a trick.

Störtebeker is executed, yet this is not the end of piracy and coastal raiding by the Likedeelers.

Eric of Pomerania, King of the Nordic Kalmar Union, seizes the duchy of Schleswig in 1409 in a dispute over the Count of Holstein’s possession of it.

A desperate Holstein had opened its ports to the pirates known as the Victualling Brothers, who had eventually compelled Eric to withdraw from Schleswig.

Eric had continued to lose battles and territory to the Holsteiners and their pirate allies during 1416-18, but a series of bloody engagements in 1419 win him control of Fehmarn Island.