Where are we? ...and what is a cog?

This being another posting on our conservation project, which will eventually lead to presenting a whole medieval shipwreck in a museum, it makes sense to consider a bit geography and historical context. So where are we actually located with this wreck of a Cog named Peeter and why is it important?

Geographical location is actually of great importance in explaining how come we have such a shipwreck in our hands, and in fact, why we two FOG guys are here participating into conservation and display of it.

The Cog is now in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, which is to say that we are in Northern Europe by the Baltic Sea, on the Southern shore of the Gulf of Finland. It’s a small city of less than half a million inhabitants, with history stretching way back in time. History remains evident in the cityscape still today, especially inside the Old Town walls. It was here I recently took my fifth grader, who was struggling to understand medieval history at school. It all became much more approachable once she got to see some genuine walls, towers and everything from those days. Actually, the whole town layout with narrow winding roads reeks of moods from times past. History became alive for my daughter, and so does it to just anybody who’s not blindfolded, when walking the streets of Old Tallinn.

It used to be a place of great importance already in 14th century. Not called Tallinn at the time, though, but Rävel, which was one of the ports of the Hanseatic League. Who were they, these Hanseatic people?

The question is not really that much about who they were, but about how come such a network came into being? For a network it was, a trade one, very much geared to efficient transport of goods. Here one must think once again the geographical location I outlined just above and try to reach towards the mindset of those people living in medieval Europe. Of course, every good trader wishes to move goods efficiently from where those particular goods abound to wherever it is needed. How to go about it in medieval Northern Europe? There’s the Germanic continental European side on the South of Scandinavian nations to the North. Russia looms eastwards. Each geographical area has its special raw materials or products well worth exporting. But how to transport it? By land, through roads perhaps? Nope, roads were scarce and generally not well maintained. Transporting anything took ages with some creaking carriages in pretty much impossible terrain.

The answer is by water. I’m not sure but I have a vague impression that many a people today might considers seas, lakes and rivers as some kind of hindrances. Crossing them might seem laborious as in today’s milieu, where smooth roads offer safe and fast movement, not to mention flying, but that wasn’t the case back then. Water offered a way to move around relatively easily. Seas, rivers, lakes – there’s a readymade network of routes to move around, once boats and navigation skills develop enough. And they did - already the ancients mastered the seas early on, and come the middle ages, they were of such a high level that something like the Baltic Sea could be sailed easily with vessels big enough to carry substantial amounts of cargo.

Indeed, water doesn’t separate but connects, and back then even much more than today. Hence the Baltic Sea was early on seen as a brilliant trade route along which goods could be moved swiftly within the vast area it covers. This truly happened, and eventually something called the Hanseatic League formed. This was a league of merchants, who made the trade more systematic by establishing ports of their own in convenient places along the Baltic. In the Hanseatic towns, which were many, the members could utilize the network for the sake of efficient trade.

But what were the vessels using that network? Was it just any kind of ships they happened have at their disposal? Of course, there must have been all kinds of ships and boats sailing the Baltic, but the Hanseatic traders systematized this as well. They developed a certain ship-type, the Cog, which as good as it got in terms of capacity and navigability. A beautifully shaped hull it seemed to have apparently without large deck-structures. Seemed to have… Apparently had… I use such expressions, because for a long time Cogs were mostly known from seals of Hanseatic towns and archival sources, which of course could only give vague impressions of the real thing.

The seal of Stralsund, 1329. Image: Wikimedia commons Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=974389

Cogs hadn’t survived, except of course in the form of wrecks, which were not that known until quite recently, when the Bremen Cog excavated from a river in Germany was conserved and placed on display in the Bremerhaven museum. Other cogs have been found within the 20th and 21st centuries and some of them have even been conserved, but by no means are they common. No, very rare they are, which makes the Peeter Cog a very, very important find. Not just because it’s a rare example of the ship-type once used by the Hanseatic League, but because it belongs just here in Tallinn. After all, Tallinn was one of those Hanseatic towns. Or actually Rävel, as it was called back then. It is only fair that Tallinn will have its own cog in a museum inside the old city walls, and we at FOG are more than happy to be able to participate in the project.

…Which brings me to the bit I put in the start about us and how come we’re here in Tallinn with our company. Of course, we’re here because we have unique experience in dealing with such shipwrecks, but as for our company, For Our Generation, through which we participate in the project, we’re established here because Tallinn is not only a historical city but a very forward looking one as well. It’s the capital of Estonia, which today pioneers in e-services for its citizens but for others as well. We’re actually proud to be e-residents of this thriving nation, which made it very easy to start a company here. Happy to be virtual Estonian!