So called Bartman jug<\/em> made of Rhenish stoneware, found in the house of the klausturhaldari<\/em> of Skri\u00f0uklaustur (image Helgi Hallgr\u00edmsson).<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1584, it seems that Eir\u00edkur settled in Hamburg. He embarked on a voyage to Hamburg on the ship of Jochim Warneke and shortly afterwards married Anna Korfemaker and bought a brewery. The next year he travelled back and forth between Iceland and Hamburg and it is most likely that he was a member of the fraternity of St Anne that united most merchants and sailors who travelled to Iceland. In 1586 he died in Hamburg and was buried there at the cemetery of St Jakob.<\/p>\n

There are numerous sources which shed a light on Eir\u00edkur’s contacts with German merchants in Iceland. In the fjord now known as Berufj\u00f6r\u00f0ur, south of Skri\u00f0uklaustur, Bremen merchants (who called the fjord Ostforde<\/em>) had been trading for a long time. In 1575, a conflict broke out between two of them, Bernd Losekanne and Christoffer Meyger, due to alleged mutiny. In the ensuing court case before the Bremen city council, one of the problems discussed was the ownership of a barrel of osemund<\/em> (iron from Sweden) which Losekanne had sold to Eir\u00edkur Arnason but which was left in the merchant\u00b4s booth, of which Eir\u00edkur as bailiff had the keys. Also, a load of va\u00f0m\u00e1l<\/em> he left in the booth was destined for a Hamburg merchant named Matthies.<\/p>\n

It is clear that during\u00a0his time as s\u00fdsluma\u00f0ur<\/em> and klausturhaldari<\/em>, Eir\u00edkur had been trading actively with the German merchants in the area. This is also attested by contemporary objects. From the house of the klausturhaldari<\/em> stems a complete Bartman jug of the 16th century, a common pouring vessel of that time, produced in one of the major stoneware production centers along the Rhine (such as Frechen, Raeren or Cologne).\u00a0It is more than likely that this jug was used by Eir\u00edkur who had bought it from the German merchants in Berufj\u00f6r\u00f0ur. Another link is the gravestone of his mother \u00dalfhildur \u00deorsteinsd\u00f3ttir which is thought to have been imported from Germany by Eir\u00edkur.<\/p>\n

Eir\u00edkur’s connections with German merchants probably went further than that. In\u00a01580 Bernd Losekanne and Christoffer Meyger (who had apparently reconciled) complained about interference of Hamburg merchant Matthias Eggers in Ostforde<\/em>. Eggers, on the other hand, said that he had a general trading license for Iceland which obviously permitted him to use any harbour he liked. Losekanne and Meyger then replied to this that this was unfair because Eir\u00edkur had acquired that license for himself when he had visited the Danish royal court, and had entered into a trade agreement with the Hamburg merchants, in return for a part of their ship. Eggers was also probably the man named Matthies for which Eir\u00edkur had put aside the va\u00f0m\u00e1l<\/em> in 1575.<\/p>\n

Merchants from Bremen are known to have entered into trade relations with Icelanders as well, but that might be a topic for a future post.<\/p>\n

References:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Friederike Christiane Koch, Isl\u00e4nder in Hamburg 1520-1662. Beitr\u00e4ge zur Geschichte Hamburgs vol. 49 (Hamburg 1995) pp. 150-153.<\/p>\n

Staatsarchiv Bremen, 2-R.11.ff.<\/p>\n

Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 111-1, Cl. VII Lit. Kc. no. 11, Vol. 3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trade in the North Atlantic was neither simply an exchange of goods between ports in Iceland and in Germany, nor did the islanders stay at home and wait for German merchants to show up each spring. In some cases, more complex relations between islanders and Germans existed, and in what follows we will present an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[73,111,33,65,112,110,18,28,113,114],"class_list":["post-418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories","tag-archaeology","tag-bernd-losekanne","tag-bremen","tag-ceramic","tag-christoffer-meyger","tag-eirikur-arnason","tag-hamburg","tag-iceland","tag-matthias-eggers","tag-skriduklaustur"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fishandships.dsm.museum\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fishandships.dsm.museum\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fishandships.dsm.museum\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fishandships.dsm.museum\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fishandships.dsm.museum\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=418"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/fishandships.dsm.museum\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":442,"href":"https:\/\/fishandships.dsm.museum\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions\/442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fishandships.dsm.museum\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fishandships.dsm.museum\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fishandships.dsm.museum\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}