Merchants and Guests: Laws and Conditions of Baltic Trade Hospitality, Twelfth–Fourteenth Centuries

Abstract

On the medieval Baltic Rim, foreign merchants staying in town for their trade were usually called “guests.” This linguistic connection between otherwise very different languages raises the question of whether, and how far, the medieval coastal societies around the Baltic Sea may have shared common conceptions of trade hospitality and securitization of foreign presence. This paper departs from a critique of the German/Catholic chroniclers’ guest-perspective division of the Baltic people into hospitable and unhospitable communities and argues that trade hospitality was an ambivalent enterprise that was never unconditional and always negotiated between the guests and their hosts. Indeed, from the latter’s perspective, treaties with foreign merchants raised the question of the level of safety they were prepared to provide. This meant considering not only in which ways they could benefit from their openness, but also to what extent they were ready to commit themselves toward the strangers and to protect them. In any case, trade hospitality was never unconditional, and the status of guests included rules and boundaries, such as reciprocity or peacekeeping that the rulers and the local populations expected the foreign merchants to abide by. If they did not, the hosts had to find ways to force them to comply with their expectations—if possible without them off.