Baltic maritime trade began in the Late Middle Ages and continued to develop into the early modern period.
During this time, ships carrying goods from the Baltic and North Sea passed along the Øresund, or the Sound, connecting areas like the Gulf of Finland to the Skagerrak.
The Baltic trading system of this era can be explained as beginning with the Hanseatic League and ending with the Great Northern War.
[3][4] The long-lasting success of the Hanseatic trading system can be attributed to Northern Europe’s many rivers and roads that connected German markets and cities to the ports in the Baltic Sea.
[5] Merchants from Lübeck and the Wendish coastal towns specialized in the trading of high-quality western goods, like cloth, spices, and alcohol, for minerals and products from the north and east.
Gradually, eastern Baltic merchants wore away the Hanseatic trading system and began to directly supply ports in London, Amsterdam, and Antwerp.
As the League began to fragment, Lübeck and the Wendish coastal towns became isolated, and trade routes between the Baltic shores, North Sea, and the western Atlantic were established.
Hanseatic towns, however, began to find themselves more and more restricted to the Baltic Sea, as trade routes opened up to the western Atlantic system.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, Lübeck was replaced by Elbe harbor as the main maritime center of the League in the Baltic.
In 1648, Sweden occupied the Pomeranian and northern German shores, which resulted in the last Hanseatic meeting in Lübeck in 1669 to confirm the League’s demise.
[7] At the beginning of the fifteenth century, large numbers of ships from Holland were sailing to the Baltic for grain and western France for salt.
Instead of relying on the Hanseatic staple markets, the Dutch began to buy wheat and rye locally in order to drastically reduce prices.
When Denmark won the Kalmar War (1611–1613), the king imposed a ban on all Dutch traffic heading to Sweden and increased the Sound Toll duties.
At this time, Sweden began to successfully campaign in Jutland and forced the Danish to give up many territories along the Sound and into the Baltic.
[12] In 1667, Sweden changed its mercantilist policies once again by imposing tolls on salt and wine that were shipped from foreign markets, greatly undermining trade coming from Amsterdam.
In the beginning of the seventeenth century, Dutch trade dominated the eastern Baltic region with goods like spices and high-quality cloth.
There are a few proposed explanations for this, one being that Baltic grain lost competitiveness in the western markets because Polish-Lithuanian farms declined in efficiency.
In an effort to remove the Dutch from the market, Sweden attempted to buy grain surpluses and entire stocks of leather from Russia.
Some of examples of these policies are: After Sweden fell in the Great Northern War, Russia gained its ports from Novgorod to Riga, Reval, and Narva.