Latest / Trade Routes That Changed Human History Forever — Fexingo History
The Hanseatic League's Dark Secret: Slave Trading
We often think of the Hanseatic League as medieval Europe’s first corporate superpower, a network of merchants who built stone towns and established fair trade. But behind the polished treaties of Lübeck and the wealth of the Novgorod Steelyard lay a more uncomfortable reality: the systematic trading of human beings. In this episode, we uncover how Germanic merchant guilds facilitated the sale of Baltic slaves to the Islamic world and beyond, integrating forced labor into their commercial infrastructure. We examine the legal frameworks that allowed this trade, the specific ports involved like…
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