Wandering around the old town of Tallinn, its size is striking, even for Mediaeval merchants needing a fortified port and entrepôt.
Stone walls and tall towers of the vana linn climb an imposing hill, the Toompea, while narrow, winding streets of river gravel and sand built for horse and cart lead us today on foot into an earlier time. From every angle, we seem drawn into a scene from a woodcut.
Tallinn old town, from the Visit Estonia website
“It is a city built on salt,” writes Tania Lestal on her blog, Tales of Tallinn. “The income obtained from salt trade was stored into the walls and houses of Tallinn.” Here is the gravitas of the old town explained.
Imported from as far as Portugal, and France and Germany, salt by the tonne was crushed, weighed and bagged at the vaekoda or weighing house, for distribution to Russian Novgorod, and to Finland and Sweden. That and exported grain were the source of old Tallinn’s wealth, though it belonged not to Estonians but German speakers.
The “white gold” was extremely valuable, writes Lestal, “and used as one of the currencies in the Hanseatic League. In the 15th century, more than 100 shiploads of salt arrived in the port of Tallinn.” It was shipped in bulk, and on arrival, loaded into smaller boats and taken ashore.
Per capita consumption of salt today runs to 1.5 kilograms per year; 600 years ago the figure was 6kg. And no wonder. To preserve anything, fish for example, salt was and still is essential, as it is for pickling anything to last out the long winters.
The Hanseatic League
Trading centres became fed up with being plundered and robbed as their merchants sailed the North Sea and the Baltic, and set up a military of their own. Tradition has it that the “hansa” – band or troop in German - started in the western Baltic port of Lübeck in 1159. The league expanded over time into a loose confederation of city states, extending from the British Isles and the Netherlands in the west, and as far east as Estonia.
“Fürchte Gott, rede die Wahrheit, tue Recht und scheue niemand” - Fear God, tell the truth, do justice, and be afraid of no one – reads the Hanseatic spirit, chiselled into the façade of the Raekoda, the town hall of Tallinn.
For several centuries the Hanseatic League was immensely successful. The trading vessel, the cog, was superior to Viking ships in naval warfare, standing higher in the water, and offering a solid platform for archery. As Scandinavian raids faded, the Hanseatics took over, along with a flowering of cities such as Hamburg (on the Elbe river), Bergen in Norway, Gdansk in Poland, and Tallinn, and also the inland Estonian towns of Viljandi and Tartu.
From the Baltic ports flowed amber, furs, timber, wax and resins, and rye; in the other direction, vital needs such as metals and salt. All this movement of goods was guaranteed, and the people doing the moving were protected. The Hanseatics trained pilots and built lighthouses; many still stand today, including in Estonia.
The discovery by Europeans of the Americas, and subsequent transatlantic trade, eventually spelled the end of the Hanseatic League. Its members or some of them met for the last time in 1669, not knowing at the time it would be their last. Emerging nation states could and did wage war against the Hanseatic towns, helped by the spread of gunpowder and cannon.
Tallinn survived the centuries relatively intact, as German speakers, Swedes and Russians held sway in turn. Most of the buildings in the old town date from the early 1400s; this central precinct is today a UNESCO world heritage site. If you had only one day to visit Estonia, Tallinn would be a destination of choice.
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