One of my courses this semester was on medieval history and for the final paper in this course, I decided to write about the magna societas alemannorum (Great Society of the Germans), also known as the company of the Humpis or Great Ravensburg Trading Company.
The company was founded around 1380 as the family cooperation of the Humpis, Mötteli and Muntprat from Ravensburg and Constance, today at the border between Germany and Switzerland.
During it's 150 year long existence the company had a network of outposts across Europe with outposts in Valencia, Genoa (Italy), Milan, Venice, Geneva (Switzerland), Lyon, Avignon, Bruges (Belgium), Antwerp and Nuremberg.
The company has fascinated historians since 1909, when by lucky coincidence a few boxes of old documents were found in the monastery of Salem at Lake Constance, which have been edited and published by Aloys Schulte in 1923 and make this the best documented German merchant company of the late middle ages.
What did they trade in?
The main exports of company from Swabia were fustian and linen. In the early period (1400-1420) the company exported these through the Rhône to Avignon and from there to Barcelona. In Catalonia they exchanged these textiles for saffron, then as now an expensive luxury product with volatile prices, and corals, which were used to make buttons (Veronesi 2014).
Around 1420 the company starts to expand into the Spanish Wool trade. The Merino-Wool was currently experiencing an boom in demand in Renaissance era Italy which lasted until around 1450. By 1428/29 our Ravensburg company controlled between one third to 40% of the exports of this profitable trade from Catalonia (Veronesi 2014, p. 129). The company also established an outpost in the heart of Italian cloth production in Milan, which drove a large part of the demand for Spanish wool. By having an outpost on both ends of the trade and along the way, in Valencia and Genoa, the company was always well informed about disruptions on the producers, transportation and consumption side and could adjust their trading before other market participants could.
By the middle of the 15. century the company had expanded all across western continental Europe, trading in a wide variety of goods. Besides the already mentioned trade in Spanish wool the company also expanded to trade through Genoa with the Levant and Istria and Dalmatia on the Adriatic. On the continent they regularly attended the fairs in Frankfurt and Lyon, bought metals in Nuremberg.
By the end of the century the company pretty much traded with every kind of textile you could imagine. Silk and gold threads (aurum filatum) from Genoa, cloth from Flanders, wool from England and Spain. In the documents published by Schulte we can see that the company's merchants weer constantly experimenting with new goods to find profitable businesses.
The employees
The question historians have debated most aver the last 135 years was the question of company structure and status. Since we lack the rule book of the corporation, historians could only guess at the form of the corporation from the way it operated. Some historians (Meyer, 2001) hold the position that the company is a family company, in the style of the Fugger, Welser and Diesbach-Watt companies. And while this is certainly how this company started in the 14. century, it is not how it developed. Companies in the 15. century were periodically renewed for a three, six or ten year period and thus every three, six or ten years changes to the structure of the company could be renegotiated.
By the 1460s the company had reached a pivotal moment. It had recruited many of the German merchants active in the Mediterranean, becoming the only German merchant company in Genoa and dominating Barcelona (Veronesi 2014, pp. 169-185).
In the course of four years between 1462 and 1466, the company removed it's two person leadership team ("Regierer") and replaced them by a nine person executive committee, not necessarily dissimilar to the "chief officers" at a modern multinational corporation, though we have no idea how they divided responsibilities between each other.
This committee was elected at the general assembly of shareholders, which was held every three years, lasted more than a month and was accompanied by feasts and also where the accounts of the company were calculated and dividend payments set.
By 1477 records from one of those meeting indicates that the company had between 50 and 70 shareholders, most of whom would have been employees who earned shares as a reward for their service or their heirs. It was not unusual even for junior employees to be rewarded in shares (Schulte 3, Source 106). We also know of some purely capitalist investors, who gained their shares by putting capital into the firm and without contributing labour first.
By allowing a large part of the employees to own shares in the company and together control the company executives, they had incentive to work to the benefit of the entire company and discouraged corruption or self-dealing when employees were stationed for years or decades in far away outposts across western Europe.
The outposts
Each outpost was staffed by at least one employee of the corporation, who could remain in a city for years or even decades. Ottmar Schläpfer was stationed in Genoa for twenty years from 1443 to 1463, Hans Kloter from 1477 to 1492. During this time they became integrated into the local society, provided credit, acted as sponsors for local German artists and maintained relations with local elites and rulers. Around and between the outposts existed an extensive information network, which made the company itself a vital part of information networks between Italy and Germany (Daniels, 2012).
Because the outposts were permanently stationed in a city, the company could more flexibly and reliably trade. They were more reliable, because in case of a dispute they were capable and knowledgeable of the local institutions to deliver justice.
Most merchants in this era were travelling merchants. They constantly travelled between their home city and a series of smaller and bigger markets. When these merchants arrived in a city, they had only a few days or weeks to trade whatever goods they had and restock to move on to the next place. Because of this time pressure, they often had a disadvantage when buying or selling a good and had to compensate this disadvantage by making as many stops along their route as possible (Lopez 1964). The outpost network of the Ravensburg company made these merchant journeys obsolete. In their outposts they would buy at the most favourable moment and by the time a transport, ships or wagons, arrived at their outpost, they could simply off-load and restock the transport and didn't have to wait until the trades were made. The company had primitive form of a division of labour between trading and logistics. Some merchants were dedicated to trading from their outposts, while others were dedicated to travelling between outposts and the headquarters in Ravensburg.
The Fall of the Company
There are many theories on how the company ended. We know that sometime around 1530 the company was discontinued. But the causes of the fall go back further. The Italian Wars, which forced the company to evacuate the Genoa and Milan outposts, the Peasants' War in Swabia, which followed the reformation and disrupted the production of linen and fustian in Swabia. The Spanish wool trade might also have played a role again,
The company also never expanded into other areas outside of trade, such as the sovereign financing that made the Fugger or Genoese wealthy and power players. The Fugger financed the Hapsburg Emperors Maximilian and Charles V. and were granted rights to profitable mines in exchange. The Genoese financed the Spanish empire and this other branch of the Hapsburg family. The Ravensburg merchants did nothing of the sort.
From 1514 the capital of the company was in decline. By the beginning of the 1520s the company was in talks of dissolving. And then many of the leading members died during the decade and the younger members started founding new smaller companies instead of continuing the old.
Just like with a modern company or empire, no definitive cause of their end will ever be determined. A complex set of events coalesced to produce conditions in which the company could not continue.
A great company or lucky coincidence?
That we know about this company is the consequence of a lucky coincidence. The last accountant of the company, Alexius Hilleson, kept some of the records of the company. When his grandson became monk in the Cistercian monastery of Salem at Lake Constance, he took these documents with him and there they remained for four hundred years until 1909 when a monk found them and passed them on to the archives of Baden, where Aloys Schulte got to edit and work on them.
In the resulting three volume work Schulte called the company "Große Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft", which can either be translated as "Big Ravensburg Trading Company" or "Great Ravensburg Trading Company". "Groß" in German can mean both. If Germans talk about great rulers, like Charlemagne or Alexander, we say "Karl der Große" or "Alexander der Große". But we also use it to describe mere size: "Das große Haus" / The big house.
Now, in which sense did Schulte use the word? He was certainly justified in using it to describe the mere size. It was big in terms of it's number of shareholders (50-70), number of outposts (more than a dozen) and geographical expanse. But by using "Große" in the name of the company and in the title of his books, it is fair to assume that at least for Schulte this company wasn't merely big, it was also a great company.
In Ravensburg is the presence of the company still visible after six hundred years. The old company headquarters have been preserved as a museum and the founding family of the Humpis ascended to aristocracy under the name Hundbiß.
But Schulte's position is not universally accepted. Chief amongst the critics of the name "Great Ravensburg Trading Company" is Meyer, who pointed to the very lucky circumstances that lead to us having this large pile of internal documents about the company. Would we not call any company special, if we had such a treasure trove of internal documents (Meyer 2001)?
In 2001 Meyer published a study of the familial relationships between the employees of the company, showing that, through marriage and blood relation, a lot of the employees of the company are related to the Humpis or Muntprat families. This he used as an argument to say that the company is just a family firm of the Humpis and Muntprat. Family trading firms, even a "joint firm" of multiple families, are very typical in this era.
But Veronesi has shown that many of the family relations during the middle of the 15. century were developing after employees had already worked in the company for a long time, through marriage into the Humpis and Muntprat family. This leads him to conclude that the company developed from a conventional family firm of the Humpis, Muntprat and Mötteli, to more of a "special" company. To recruit capable and experienced merchants, the company had to grant their employees increasing concessions. First slowely, then quickly, more power in the company was acrewed by the employees against the patriarchs of the Humpis, resulting by 1466 in the elected executive committee and a minimizing of the power of the Humpis in the company, that still bore their name.
This might not make the company "great", but it certainly made it a peculiar case and an unavoidable milestone when talking about German merchants in the 15. century.
Literature (German)
Research on the Great Ravensburg Trading Company has almost exclusively been done in German. I will still provide a list of references here, because it is a basic requirement of historical research, whether in a paper or on a website intended for a general audience, to cite references. If anyone knows a good way of including footnotes in HTML/Markdown, let me know: @csdummi@babka.social. I'd prefer not to develop my own thing for this.
The most recent comprehensive work on the company has been by Marco Veronesi, who used the archives of the city of Genoa, to provide a very good picture of the company in the Mediterranean trade before 1490.
The original work by Aloys Schulte is still the most referenced work in relation to the Ravensburg Trading Company and a lot of his work still holds up, though more recent works (such as that by Veronesi) needs to be consulted.
Daniels, Tobias: Vom Wert der Information: Das Erdbeben von Neapel (1456) und die Beziehungen der Großen Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft im Italien der Renaissance, in: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 99.1 (2012), S. 43 –64.
Lopez , Robert Sabatino: Market Expansion: The Case of Genoa, in: The Journal of Economic History 24.4 (1964), S. 445–464.
Meyer, Andreas: Die Große Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft in der Region. Von der Bodenseehanse zur Familiengesellschaft der Humpis, in: Kommunikation und Region, hrsg. v. Carl A. Hoffmann und Rolf Kiessling (Forum Suevicum. Beiträge zur Geschichte Ostschwabens und der benachbarten Regionen 4), Konstanz 2001, S. 249–304.
Rehme, Paul: Das rechtliche Wesen der großen Ravensburger Gesellschaft, in: Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Germanistische Abteilung 47 (1927), S. 487–566.
Schulte, Aloys: Geschichte der Großen Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft: 1380 - 1530, 3 Bde., Stuttgart u. Berlin 1923, Ndr. Wiesbaden 1962.
Veronesi, Marco: Oberdeutsche Kaufleute in Genua, 1350–1490. Institutionen, Strategien, Kollektive (Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für geschichtliche Landeskunde in Baden-Württemberg / Reihe B, Forschungen 199), Stuttgart 2014.
Schulte, Aloys: Geschichte der Großen Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft: 1380 - 1530, 3 Bde., Stuttgart u. Berlin 1923, Ndr. Wiesbaden 1962.