[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

were also excluded from the Diet until the close of the fifteenth century. Trade afforded the only outlet for
their activities. But in trade they engaged with such success that, by the close of the Middle Ages, Augsburg
rivalled Florence as a centre of cosmopolitan finance, and the Baltic towns had developed a commerce
comparable to that of the Mediterranean. It was the Baltic trade which gave birth to a new form of municipal
league, the famous Hansa. The nucleus of this association was an alliance formed between Lubeck and
Hamburg to protect the traffic of the Elbe. Other cities were induced to affiliate themselves, and in 1299 the
Hansa absorbed the older Gothland League of which Wisby was the centre. By the year 1400 there were
upwards of eighty Hanseatic cities, lying chiefly in the lower Rhineland, in Saxony, in Brandenburg, and
along the Baltic coast; but the commercial sphere of the League extended from England to Russia and from
Norway to Cracow.
The Hanseatic cities were subject to many different suzerains, and were federated only for the protection of
their trade. The League was loosely knit together; there was a representative congress which met at irregular
intervals in Lubeck; but the delegates had no power to bind their cities. There was only a small federal
revenue, no standing fleet or army, and no means of coercing disobedient members save by exclusion from
IX. THE FREE TOWNS 63
 Medieval Europe
trade privileges. Yet this amorphous union ranked for some purposes as an independent power. The Hansa
policed the Baltic and the waterways and high roads of North Germany; it owned factories (steelyards) in
London, Bruges, Bergen, and Novgorod; it concluded commercial treaties, and on occasion it waged wars. In
the fourteenth century it monopolised the Baltic trade, and was courted by all the nations which had interests
in that sea. In the fifteenth it began to decline, and in the age of the Reformation sank into insignificance.
New sea-Powers arose; England and the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, came into competition with the
Hanso; the growth of territorialism in Germany sapped the independence of the leading members of the
league; and the Baltic trade, like that of the Mediterranean, became of secondary importance when the
Portuguese had discovered the Cape route to India, and when the work of Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro
opened up a New World in the Western hemisphere.
IX. THE FREE TOWNS 64 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]