Region
Baltic Sea
1 pirate in the codex documented as operating here.
The Baltic Sea was the principal medieval European piracy theatre. The Hanseatic League’s trade routes — carrying fish, salt, timber, furs, grain, and amber between Lübeck, Hamburg, Visby, Riga, Reval, and Novgorod — sustained intermittent freelance piracy from the thirteenth century onward, with the most organised operations occurring during the Victualbrüder/Likedeeler period of the 1390s and the parallel Frisian-based operations of the early fifteenth century. The Baltic ceased to be a major piracy theatre after about 1440, as the Hanseatic cities improved their naval coordination and the political conditions in the surrounding kingdoms stabilised.
