Lübeck Mark

The Lübeck mark (Mark lübisch) was the money of account, and later a coin, of the city of Lübeck, the leading town of the Hanseatic League. Divided into 16 schillings of 12 pfennigs each, it formed the basis of a shared coinage among Lübeck and its neighbouring Wendish towns and was widely used to reckon prices and debts in the Baltic trade.

The Hanseatic League never had a single common currency. Its member towns issued their own coins, and several regional standards existed side by side. The Lübeck standard, however, was one of the most influential, and the mark of account survived in North Germany until the German currency reforms of the 1870s.

The mark began as a weight for silver used across northern Europe, and then became a unit for counting money: a mark of account represented a fixed number of smaller silver coins rather than a coin of its own. Lübeck became a free imperial city in 1226 and struck its own pfennigs. Over the following century its money, reckoned in marks, schillings and pfennigs, became a common reference for merchants trading between the North Sea and the eastern Baltic.

The division of the mark into 16 schillings differed from the English and French system of 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound, which descended from Carolingian reckoning and is seen in the English penny. Both systems, though, used the mark or pound as a unit of account that was far larger than any coin in everyday use.

In 1379 Lübeck, Hamburg, Wismar and Lüneburg agreed to strike coins to a common standard. This arrangement, known as the Wendish Monetary Union (Wendischer Münzverein), was later joined at various times by other towns in the region, including Rostock and Stralsund. The partners issued silver coins such as the witten, worth four pfennigs, and later schillings and fractions of them, all valued in Lübeck marks.

The union was renewed many times and was one of the longest-lasting monetary agreements of medieval Europe. Like most silver coinages of the period, its coins lost silver content over the centuries, a process of gradual debasement that reduced the silver value of the mark. From the early sixteenth century the towns also struck coins with a face value of one mark, so that the mark existed for the first time as a physical coin.

Hanseatic merchants traded grain, timber, furs, wax, fish, salt and cloth across a network stretching from London and Bruges to Bergen and Novgorod. Many transactions were settled through credit and book entries between merchants rather than by moving coin, and the Lübeck mark was a common way to express these sums. Lübeck also struck gold gulden from the fourteenth century for larger payments.

The Lübeck system influenced coinage outside Germany. Denmark and Norway used a mark of 16 skilling as a unit of account, reflecting North German practice. In the early modern period the large silver thaler spread through the region and was valued in Lübeck or Hamburg marks.

From the sixteenth century Hamburg gradually overtook Lübeck as a commercial centre, and the closely related Hamburg mark became the dominant money of the region. The Bank of Hamburg, founded in 1619, kept accounts in a "mark banco", a bank money defined by a fixed weight of silver and used for settling a bill of exchange and other large payments. This was an early example of public banking designed to escape the uncertainties of circulating coin.

The mark of 16 schillings (the Mark courant) remained the currency of Lübeck and Hamburg until the German Empire introduced a single national currency, also called the mark, in the 1870s. The old mark was converted at 1.2 new marks. The name continued in later German currencies, including the Deutsche Mark, and in the Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark.

• British Museum – Collection online
• American Numismatic Society