Victual Brothers - Likedeelers, The Successors of The Victual Brothers

Likedeelers, The Successors of The Victual Brothers

After the Victual Brothers' defeat and expulsion from Gotland in 1398, the Hanseatic League tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to completely control the Baltic Sea. Many Victual Brothers still remained at sea. When they lost their influence in the Gulf of Bothnia, the Gulf of Finland and Gotland, they operated from the Schlei, the mouth of the river Ems and other locations in Friesland. The successors to the Victual Brothers gave themselves the name Likedeelers ("equal sharers"): they shared with the poor coastal population. They expanded their activities into the North Sea and along the Atlantic coastline, raiding Brabant and France and striking as far south as Spain.

Their most famous leader was Captain Klaus Störtebeker. He allegedly got his name because he could swallow four litres of beer without taking the beaker from his mouth. However, it might simply be a family name from Wismar. The Low German word Störtebeker means "Down the beakerful". In 1401 the Hamburg warship Bunte Kuh, leading a small fleet under Commander Simon of Utrecht, caught up with Störtebeker's forces near Heligoland. After three days' running battle, Störtebeker and his crew were finally overpowered and trapped by means of a trick.

However this was not the end of piracy and coastal raiding by the Likedeelers. In 1429, some 28 years after the execution of Störtebeker, other members of the Victual Brothers attacked and plundered the city of Bergen in Norway, eventually burning it to the ground. Until about 1440, maritime trade in both the North Sea and the Baltic Sea was seriously in danger of attack by the Likedeelers.