TY - JOUR AU - Hammel-Kiesow, Rolf PY - 2020/01/06 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - The North Atlantic trade with Iceland, Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes and the policy of the Hanseatic Diet (1369–1535) JF - AmS-Skrifter JA - AmS-Skrifter VL - IS - 27 SE - Part I: The context and character of trade DO - 10.31265/ams-skrifter.v0i27.253 UR - https://journals.uis.no/index.php/AmS-Skrifter/article/view/253 SP - 27-42 AB - <p>This paper explores the limits of the Hanseatic Diet’s ability to regulate Hanseatic trade with Iceland and the North Atlantic&nbsp;island groups of Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes*. It comes to the conclusion that the Hanseatic Diets prohibited direct&nbsp;commercial links to Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes consistently from 1416, but turned a blind eye to the Iceland trade.&nbsp;The reasons for this inconsistent policy were the necessity of maintaining the Bergen’s monopoly on the stockfish trade&nbsp;(which was also in the interest of the Danish-Norwegian crown),&nbsp; while at the same time keeping the door open for Hanseatic&nbsp;merchants who were not active in the Bergen trade to forge commercial links with Iceland, albeit at their own risk. The&nbsp;representatives of the Hanseatic towns often preferred to leave an issue undecided, in order to keep as many options open as&nbsp;possible. The huge divergence in the interests of merchants and towns forced the Diet to dissemble, pursuing policies out of&nbsp;the public gaze which subverted the resolutions the Diet had passed for public consumption.</p> ER -