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620 Magnus Ressel

One more aspect gives us an even sharper picture of the fundamental
problem for all German long-distance merchants at the time. If we com-
pare shipping from Hamburg to the Mediterranean with that of its Dutch
competitors after the Thirty Years war, we can specify more clearly who
specifically caused the principal problem for German–Italian trading re-
lations. While Hamburg sent out 4 ships to the Mediterranean in 1647,
this grew to 20 in 1648, only to shrink again to 7 in 1649 and 2 in 1650 .
17
This extremely short-lived boom of just one year stands in stark contrast
to the development of Dutch shipping into the Mediterranean. Looking at
ship arrivals in Livorno, we see 79 Dutch ships arriving in the years from
1642-1646, while from 1647 to 1651, the number rose to 217 . When
18
liberated from the strains of warfare, the Dutch were obviously able to
simultaneously push back the German competitors on the sea and on
the land routes via their shipping alone.
In the case of Hamburg, it seems likely that its lack of an industrial
hinterland comparable to that of the Dutch ports and the absence of
substantial German merchant colonies in the Mediterranean were the
root causes of its inability to maintain substantial shipping traffic
towards Italy when faced with the full brunt of Dutch competition .
19
This, however, was not the case for the actors from Upper Germany
who traded with the Mediterranean over the transalpine routes. The
competition between them and the Dutch merchants active in the
Mediterranean trades was, due to the very different transportation me-
dia and the geographical distance and generally different circum-
stances, less direct than that between Hamburg and Dutch or English
shipping. The potential for a resurgence of transalpine traffic was thus
certainly higher than was the potential for Hamburg to regain sub-
stantial trade via shipping into the Mediterranean.
However, the routes over the Alps were simply too expensive in an
age where sailing ships under the Dutch flag could easily connect very
faraway places, especially in European waters, and from the Levant to
Archangelsk. In the second half of the 16 century, the Habsburgs
th
had significantly increased the tolls along the Alpine passes, and we
may presume that this structure remained substantially unchanged

17 M. Reißmann, Die Hamburgische Kaufmannschaft des 17. Jahrhunderts in sozi-
algeschichtlicher Sicht, Christians, Hamburg, 1975, p. 371.
18 R. Ghezzi, Livorno e l’Atlantico: I commerci olandesi nel Mediterraneo del Seicento,
Cacucci, Bari, 2011, p. 42.
19 M. Ressel, The Global Presence of Merchants from the German Empire: Linking the
Continental Overland and Seaborne Trade, in H. Knortz, M. Schulte Beerbühl (eds.),
Migrationsforschung – interdisziplinär und diskursiv. Internationale Forschungserträge zu
Migration in Wirtschaft, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, V&R Unipress, Göttingen, 2021,
pp. 239-270, here pp. 253-254.

Mediterranea – ricerche storiche – Anno XIX – Dicembre 2022
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)