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.