Every German knows the ‘Vitalienbrüder’, a legendary company of pirates fighting under the leadership of Klaus Störtebeker and Gödeke Michels against the mighty ‘Hansa’. The great seafaring nations of the West may have had their famous pirates and privateers, Germany has Klaus Störtebeker – notwithstanding the undeniable fact that the North Sea and the Baltic are somewhat smaller than the oceans the others may have crossed. The ‘vitalian brethren’ are in a way so well known, that we tend to take their existence for granted. But what do sources mean, when they mention the ‘vitalienbrodere’? Were there people who denoted themselves as such, or did others call them so? Who was called a ‘vitalienbroder’ and by whom? Who was not? We have to ask these questions before we can deal with the issue of whether these dubious people may have been a menace for maritime trade.

In what follows I will argue that the term ‘vitalienbrodere’ did not designate an organized group of privateers or pirates respectively, but an abstract threat to economic distribution. Because commercial and political customary law permitted the withdrawal of goods in many well-defined cases, violence was not an alien assault from outside, but an integral part of the game. Businessmen conducted these legitimate divestments themselves, or they commissioned professionals to do so.