Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Hanseatic League began forming guilds known as hansas by 1267 and officially ended in August 1669. The confederation existed from the 13th century until the final meeting of cities in Zwolle on the 1st of September 1669.
Major member cities included Lübeck, Hamburg, Cologne, Bremen, Riga, Novgorod, Bruges, Bergen, London, and Visby. By 2012 the modern successor union had 187 members including twelve Russian cities and twenty-one Polish cities.
Hanseatic merchants exported beeswax, furs, timber, resin, flax, honey, wheat, rye, cloth, manufactured goods, metal ore, stockfish, and beer. These commodities moved east to Flanders and England while textiles traveled westward and grain flowed from Poland and Russia.
League merchants erected blockades against Novgorod in 1268 and 1277/1278 while pressuring Bruges by moving their emporium to Aardenburg from 1280 to 1282. Boycotts against Norway in 1284 and Flanders in 1358 nearly caused famines across affected regions using embargoes as leverage.
The most emblematic vessel type was the cog which carried about 125 tons of cargo with stern rudders plus square rigged masts. By 1400 the hulk replaced cogs and could carry up to 500 tons while later vessels like the Adler von Lübeck reached seventy-eight meters length.