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 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.
