HANSE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Hanse

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noun

Hanse n. An association; a league or confederacy.

Hanse towns (Hist.), certain commercial cities in Germany which associated themselves for the protection and enlarging of their commerce. The confederacy, called also Hansa and Hanseatic league, held its first diet in 1260, and was maintained for nearly four hundred years. At one time the league comprised eighty-five cities. Its remnants, Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen, are free cities, and are still frequently called Hanse towns.

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Etymology of 'Hanse'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Hanse" Quotes from Famous Books

... they thought that English players had attained great perfection. In 1621 there were as many as ten thousand strangers in London, engaged in one hundred and twenty-one different trades. The poet need not go far from Blackfriars to pick up scraps of German and folk-lore, for the Hanse merchants were located in great numbers in the neighborhood of the steel-yard ...

— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... of traders became a processional led out, in turn, by the merchants of one city after another. It is a picturesque study, that of the trade-routes of the Middle Ages! There was the Mediterranean seaboard, and there were the Baltic towns and the Hanse towns; the Portuguese mariners and traders; the Venetian merchant princes. There was the Spanish colonial trade; the Dutch trade of the East Indies; the trade of Amsterdam and London. There were the Elizabethan sea-rovers. ...

— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown