The Hanseatic Merchants of Bruges, 1300–1450 | Calm Bedtime History

In the autumn of 1340, a Lübeck merchant named Hinrich Wittenborg ties his cog at the quay of Bruges, where the Zwin estuary still runs deep enough to float a ship of two hundred tons. He has come to buy Flemish broadcloth for the warehouses of Novgorod, and to pay his compulsory dues at the German Kontor on the Walstraat. The city holds forty thousand souls, and the bells of the Church of Our Lady mark the hours that regulate trade between the Baltic and the North Sea.