Resilience management in trade, transport and finance between Elbe and Weichsel: The merchant houses Loitz, Grieben and Lindholz, 1544-1576
Final Report Abstract
Among the numerous merchant-banker families in the Holy Roman Empire of the 16th century, the Loitz, who had risen to become wholesale and long-distance merchants in Stettin in the 15th century and from the 1530s also set up businesses in Danzig and after 1550 in Lüneburg, occupied a prominent place. In terms of the scope of their trading and banking activities as well as the internationality of their involvement, the Loitz were undoubtedly one of the largest and most important commercial family entrepreneurs of their time, famous for their decades-long financial cooperation with several princely courts throughout the Baltic region, infamous for their spectacular fall during the economic crisis around 1570. Furthermore, the Loitz are the merchant family in the Hanseatic area of the late period with perhaps the most extensive and multi-layered, albeit very scattered, collection, within which the Danzig account books of the years 1566 to 1570 stand out. These quarterly account books not only offer a detailed insight into the multifaceted business activities of the Danzig Loitz, but at the same time present a particularly meaningful example of traditional Hanseatic bookkeeping and its techniques from a time of significant commercial upheaval, especially in the late Hanseatic Baltic region. – The analysis of Loitz's bookkeeping and a multitude of hitherto ignored or hardly considered sources from numerous European archives enables a complete reevaluation of the Loitz’s entrepreneurial activities in the third quarter of the 16th century. The Loitz, with their diverse enterprises, adapted almost perfectly to the changing conditions in the Baltic region and the neighboring countries in the transitional situation of the 16th century – a Europe-wide process of commercialization –, coped with internal and external crises largely without major losses of their own and were able to make themselves virtually indispensable in north-eastern European high finance. Despite their efforts at internal resiliencing and organizational-strategic adaptation, however, they were caught up in the maelstrom of the European economic crisis that began in the second half of the 1560s, which not only deprived them of many of their previous business fields in the entire Eastern region, but also increasingly restricted their liquidity. The result was at least a partial liquidity crisis, as a result of which the Loitz gradually abandoned their locations and concentrated on business with the Crown of Poland. Nevertheless, the Loitz were perhaps the most important business group and entrepreneurial family in the late Hanseatic Baltic region of the 16th century, whose resilience management was successful for a long time, but not successful enough in the decisive crisis.
Publications
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Freunde, Bekannte und Betrüger: Kreditgeschäfte Johann Philipps Rheingraf von Dhaun und Graf Christophs von Oldenburg mit dem Bankier Stefan Loitz (1553–1559), in: Annales Mercaturae 8, 37-58
Fouquet, Gerhard
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Stefan Loitz, das Salz und die Lüneburger Siedegeschäfte: Das Scheitern einer vielversprechenden Resilienz-Strategie (ca. 1539–1572), in: Annales Mercaturae 8, 59-72
Hagen, Christian
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Die Rechnungsbücher der Danziger Loitz 1566–1570. Franz Steiner Verlag.
Denzel, Markus A.
