Hildebrand Veckinchusen
Hildebrand Veckinchusen (born around 1370, probably in Westphalia; died July 1426 in Lübeck) was a merchant living in Bruges (thrn under the Burgundian State) at the time of the Hanseatic League.
Irsigler, on the other hand, cites an inheritance contract from 1395, recorded before the council of the town of Radevormwald in Westphalia, in which a Gottschalck Veckinchusen compared himself to his brothers Hans, Hildebrand, Sievert, the clergyman Mr. Ludwig and three sisters.
His first commercial activities are recorded for the year 1390 in Dordrecht, where Hildebrand had himself certified at the stack that he had duly purchased two terlings of cloth and twelve bots of wine.
Thanks to the analysis of business letters discovered by the economic historian Wilhelm Stieda in the last third of the 19th century, it is known that Veckinchusen was involved in a widely ramified network of trade relations from Flanders, mainly based on family ties, which spanned the entire Hanseatic region from Novgorod to London and extended south to Venice and west to Bayonne on the French Atlantic coast.
Organizationally, the Veckinchusens' business was often based on trading companies that were entered into with a small number of partners for a fixed period of time.
[6] Unlike in the mid-13th century, when Hanse merchants usually accompanied their goods themselves and sold them in barter, Hildebrand Veckinchusen managed his business from his Bruges office and only traveled on important occasions, such as the regular trade fairs.
The goods bearing his house mark were usually entrusted to the carrier - in the case of sea trade transactions, the captain of the merchant ship concerned - or accompanied by a journeyman and sold at their destination by Veckinchusen's correspondent.
Moreover, the company's large turnover could only be financed by bills of exchange drawn on partners based in Bruges, Cologne and Lübeck, which often matured before the date of sale of the goods.
[14] Added to this was the fact that Veckinchusen did not get back his share of a loan made to the Roman-German King Sigismund in 1417 on his accession to power when he was pressed by his creditors.
His wife Margarethe, who remained in Lübeck with the children, became increasingly financially strapped and was sued out of the house by his brother Sivert's mother-in-law and lost it.
After his release from the debtors' prison on April 14 or 15, 1426, Hildebrand made one last attempt to pay off his creditors by resuming trading activities, but then embarked for Lübeck on May 1, 1426, at Margaret's insistence, where he died a few weeks later.
Wilhelm Stieda began the first comprehensive processing of this material in the summer of 1879, around a year and a half after taking up his professorship at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu).
According to his own statement, he used the semester break for a trip to Reval, after he had become aware of the letters in the city archives there through a collection of registers by Eduard Papst and Gotthard Hansen.
[16] During this stay, he found further source material himself: "A lucky coincidence led me to discover a wooden box in the archive one day, which contained a large number of letters, also from and to Hildebrand Veckinchusen, under a thick layer of pepper, many more than had previously been recorded in the aforementioned place.
[18] The publication of a two-volume complete edition planned by Stieda, the first volume of which was to contain the letters and the second the trading books also found in Reval, was repeatedly delayed due to a lack of money, the outbreak of the First World War and unfavorable circumstances.
Hildebrand Veckinchusen's thirteen trading books, which contain the individual entries of his transactions, were kept in the Reval city archives until the Second World War.
In retrospect, Lesnikov himself wrote that it would have been a dereliction of duty to science if he had not "seized the opportunity to open wide the doors to a treasure trove that had been closed for so long, such as the Veckinchusen books are for the economic historian", as the economic-historical significance of the source could not be overestimated.
The letters exchanged between Hildebrand Veckinchusen and his second wife Margarethe are an example of this, about which Rolf Hammel judges that the correspondence "reveals the emotional relationship between married couples at the beginning of the 15th century like no other late medieval testimony.
Veckinchusen's letters and trade books in the Tallinn City Archives are one of the 17 documents on the history of the Hanseatic League that UNESCO added to its World Documentary Heritage List on May 18, 2023.
[27][28] Auxiliary means: Unpublished sources: Hildebrand Veckinchusen's account books and letters are now in the city archives Tallinn (Tallinna Linnaarhiiv).
