For ninny years the Hanseatic league was the undisputed mistress of the Baltic and German ocean. It created new centers of trade and civilization in numerous parts of northern Europe, and contributed to the expansion of agriculture and other industrial oils. by opening new channels of communication by means of the canals and road's with which it connected together the members of its association. The greatest powers dreaded its hostility and sought its alliance, and many of the powerful sovereigns the middle ages were indebted to it for the most substantial benefits.
In England, since the time of king Ethelred, German traders had enjoyed the same privileges as native-born Englishmen. Henry H. took the Cologne merchants, tocrether with the house which they occupied on the Thames, specially under his protection, allowing to them and their successors the privilege of exporting goods free of duty, and selling their Rhenish wines for the same price at which French wines were then sold in London; and in 1261 these privileges were extended by.Benry III. to all the Germans in Loudon who had a share in the Hanseatic factory, or Aula Teutonicorum, was long known to Londoners as the " steelyard." In 1338 the Hansards gained the good will of Edward III. by supplying him with the money necessary to redeem the regalia and coronation jewels of his queen, which lie had pledged to Cologne money-lenders, and by allowing loin to draw upon their houses for large sums with which to defray the cost of his French wars. Their relations to other sovereigns at that period were equally significant of their power, for they defeated kings Eric and Hakon of Norway, and king Waldemar III. of Denmark, in 1348, deposed Magnus of Sweden, and bestowed his crown upon duke Albert of .NIecklenburg; and in 1428 equipped a fleet of 248 ships, carrying 12,000 soldiers, against Eric of Denmark.
With the 15th c. the league reached at once its culminating point and its decline, for in proportion as the seas and roads were better protected by the states to which they belonged, and rulers learned to comprehend the commercial advantages of their domin ions, its supremacy declined; while the discovery of America, and of a new sea-rmite to India, gave an entirely different direction to the trade of Europe. The Hansa hod, moreover, arrogated to itself, hi the course of time, presumed rights of imposing the greater and lesser ban, and exercising acts of sovereignty and judicial power, IN high were incompatible with the supremacy of the rulers it whose states they were enforced, and hence the league was necessarily brought into frequent hostile collision with the local authorities. Thus, in accordance with their system of exclusive policy, the Han
sards refused to grant to merchants trading in foreign parts the same privileges in the Hanseatic cities which they themselves had enjoyed for centuries in England, Russia, and Scandinavia, and hence arose dissensions, which not unfrequently ended in a fierce maritime warfare. By way of retaliation for the pertinacity with which the league refused to grant to the English the same immunities which had been accorded to traders of other nations, parliament required that Germans should pay the tax on wobl and wine, which was exacted from all other foreigners in the English markets; and although the Hansards strongly resisted, they were at length condemned by the courts, in 1469, to pay a fine of £13,500; and they would probably have lost all they possessed in Eng land, if their cause had not been advocated by Edward IV., who had more than once been indebted to them for money and aid, and who in 1474 secured for them, by a clause in the treaty of Utrecht, a restitution of nearly all their former rights England: In 1598 their obstinate pertinacity in insisting upon the maintenance of their old pre rogatives, notwithstanding the altered condition of the times, drew upon them *lie auger of queen Elizabeth, who dispatched a fleet under Drake and Norris to seize upon the ships of the of which 61 were captured, while she banished the liansards from their factory in London. These measures had the desired effect of compelling the • league to receive English tradets on equal conditions, and thenceforward the Hansards were permitted to occupy the steelyard. as in olden The Hansa had, however, outlived its date, and at the diet held at Ltibeek, in 1630, the majority of the cities formally renounced their alliance. Hamburg, Lubeck, Bremen, and, for a short time, Danzig, remained faithful to their ancient compact, and continued to form an associa tion of free republics, that existed unchanged till 1810, when the first three were incor porated in the French empire. These, in 1813, combined with Frankfort-on the-Nain to.form a union. Frankfort became Prussian in 186E; whereas at a convention in July, 1870, the powers and privileges of the three free towns were re-established and reorgan ized. and under the empire they still retain their local self-government. See Sartorms, Gesch. des hanseatischen Randes (1802-08); Barthold, Gesch. der deutschen Hansa (1854); Hansische Geschichtsblatter (1871-77).