The conditions were such as rendered warlike operations between England and the Teutonic order inevitable. It is impossible to trace in any detail the guerilla tactics which were adopted on both sides. It is only necessary for our present purpose to convey some idea of the sea power which the Hansa exercised in order that we may better understand the ambitions of Germany to which the Emperor William the Second and Grand Admiral von Tirpitz gave expression in the early years of the twentieth century. At the outset of its career, its warships were manned by the burghers themselves, but as the fleet increased in size—it was quadrupled during the first half of the fifteenth century—recourse to mercenaries became more and more general. The commanders of the ships were invariably citizens of the towns which had equipped them, and were frequently members of the governing council, while the admiral of a fleet was always a councillor, and usually a burgomaster. The officers of the land forces, which were raised as occasion demanded, were principally drawn from the impoverished nobility, whose members welcomed any opportunity of repairing their shattered fortunes by martial adventure. Of the naval resources of the League, some idea can be formed from the fact that, in the war against the Scandinavian Kingdoms in 1426, it sent out a fleet of 260 ships, manned by 12,000 sailors and fighting men. For the exhausting, if not inglorious, seven years' war against Gustav Wasa's successor, Lübeck alone fitted out 18 men-of-war, of which one, the Adler, carried 400 sailors, 500 fighting men, and 150 "constables." Her armament consisted of 8 carthouns, 6 demi-carthouns, 26 culverins, and many smaller pieces of ordnance. Among her munitions were 6,000 cannon-balls and 300 hundredweight of powder.
The First German Fleet
In one of the window niches on the ground floor of the Military Museum (Zeughaus) at Berlin lies an old and dilapidated 8-pounder gun. In its deep and disfiguring coat of rust it is an inconspicuous object, and, amid that rich and varied collection of artillery from all the ages, the eye of the casual visitor will not rest upon it for more than a disparaging moment. And yet few of the treasures of the museum have a more interesting history to tell, for it is the sole remaining relic of the first serious experiment in naval and colonial policy ever made by a German ruler. On an elevation rising from the beach of Cape Three Points, on the Gold Coast, now British territory, are still to be seen the crumbling ruins of the fort of Gross-Friedrichsburg, built there by the Elector of Brandenburg in 1681, and when the German corvette Sophie visited the spot, with pious purpose, in 1884, this corroded gun was unearthed from beneath the weeds and brushwood that have overgrown the decayed ramparts.
Frederick William, the Great Elector, has been exemplary for many of his successors. Frederick the Great rightly considered him the most able of the previous Princes of the house of Hohenzollern, while the present German Emperor has made a special cult of his memory, and assuredly had a symbolic intention when he appeared at a fancy-dress ball disguised as the first of his ancestors who equipped a fleet and founded a colony.
When Frederick William was called to the Brandenburg throne in 1641 at the age of twenty, Germany was still in the throes of the Thirty Years' War, and no part of the Empire had suffered more than his Electorate from the consequences of that unspeakable calamity. Of all the causes which have contributed to impede the normal development of the painstaking and industrious German race, none had so malign an influence as that stupendous conflict. It not merely delayed civilization, but over vast tracts of country positively exterminated it. At the close of the war many once flourishing towns had absolutely disappeared from the face of the earth, and where formerly a numerous peasantry had tilled its fertile fields a howling wilderness extended in all directions as far as the eye could reach. In North Germany to-day an apparently purposeless pond, or a detached clump of venerable trees, still shows where once a village stood, and bears mute witness to the ruthless barbarity with which the religious partition of Central Europe was brought about.
When an end was put to the bloodshed and rapine by the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the population of Germany had been reduced to one half—in some districts to one tenth—of its former dimensions. Many portions of the Empire are even to-day not so thickly inhabited as they were before the war. Industry and commerce had migrated to England, France, and Holland; and Leipzig and Frankfort were the only German towns that had retained any trade worthy of mention. The Hansa, with its fleets of warships and merchantmen, was but a memory of the past. Königsberg had no longer a ship of its own; the trade of Dantzig and Stettin was almost entirely carried in foreign bottoms; and even Hamburg, which directly had been but comparatively little touched by the thirty years of chaos and turmoil, and had benefited from its exceptional connection with England, was left commercially crippled. At a Hanse Parliament held in 1630, only Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen were represented. Germany had been so drained of money that barter had generally taken the place of purchase by coin; wages were paid in the products of labour, grain, ore, and manufactured goods, and even state officials in some cases received their salaries in kind.
Even before the war broke out, Brandenburg, a country of barren soil and few natural resources, had stood far below the rest of Germany both materially and intellectually. In 1600 the twin towns, Berlin and Cöln, which faced one another from opposite banks of the Spree, and have since been merged to form the colossal capital of the new Empire, contained together no more than 14,000 souls. Brandenburg and Frankfort-on-Oder each had a population of 10,000. Only two other towns, Stendal and Salzwedel, could boast more than 5,000 inhabitants. And it was of the mere ruins of this country that Frederick William formed the foundation-stone of the Prussian Kingdom and of the German Empire of to-day.