A closer look
Sinking your ship in the Baltic Sea didn't mean your financial ruin; it usually meant a Hanseatic merchant was about to get rich. The Hanseatic League, a mega-monopoly of medieval trading cities led by Lübeck, practically turned shipwreck salvaging into a Wall Street hedge fund. They wrote ruthless 'strand laws' ensuring that local lords could legally seize wrecked cargo. If you didn't have the right Hanseatic paperwork when you washed ashore, your ruined spices and wax legally belonged to the beachgoers.
