[Sidenote: The Hanseatic League. Towns in the Netherlands: Bruges]
The Hanse or the Hanseatic League, as the confederation of Cologne, Brunswick, Hamburg, Lübeck, Dantzig, Königsberg, and other German cities was called, waged war against the Baltic pirates, maintained its trade-routes, and negotiated with monarchs and municipalities in order to obtain exceptional privileges. From their Baltic stations,— Novgorod, Stockholm, Königsberg, etc.,—the Hanseatic merchants brought amber, wax, fish, furs, timber, and tar to sell in the markets of Bruges, London, and Venice; they returned with wheat, wine, salt, metals, cloth, and beer for their Scandinavian and Russian customers. The German trading post at Venice received metals, furs, leather goods, and woolen cloth from the North, and sent back spices, silks, and other commodities of the East, together with glassware, fine textiles, weapons, and paper of Venetian manufacture. Baltic and Venetian trade- routes crossed in the Netherlands, and during the fourteenth century Bruges became the trade-metropolis of western Europe, where met the raw wool from England and Spain, the manufactured woolen cloth of Flanders, clarets from France, sherry and port wines from the Iberian peninsula, pitch from Sweden, tallow from Norway, grain from France and Germany, and English tin, not to mention Eastern luxuries, Venetian manufactures, and the cunning carved-work of south-German artificers.
THE AGE OF EXPLORATION
[Sidenote: Desire of Spaniards and Portuguese for New Trade-Routes]
In the unprecedented commercial prosperity which marked the fifteenth century, two European peoples—the Portuguese and the Spanish—had little part. For purposes of general Continental trade they were not so conveniently situated as the peoples of Germany and the Netherlands; and the Venetians and other Italians had shut them off from direct trade with Asia. Yet Spanish and Portuguese had developed much the same taste for Oriental spices and wares as had the inhabitants of central Europe, and they begrudged the exorbitant prices which they were compelled to pay to Italian merchants. Moreover, their centuries-long crusades against Mohammedans in the Iberian peninsula and in northern Africa had bred in them a stern and zealous Christianity which urged them on to undertake missionary enterprises in distant pagan lands. This missionary spirit reënforced the desire they already entertained of finding new trade-routes to Asia untrammeled by rival and selfish Italians. In view of these circumstances it is not surprising that Spaniards and Portuguese sought eagerly in the fifteenth century to find new trade-routes to "the Indies."
[Sidenote: Geographical Knowledge]
In their search for new trade-routes to the lands of silk and spice, these peoples of southwestern Europe were not as much in the dark as sometimes we are inclined to believe. Geographical knowledge, almost non-existent in the earlier middle ages, had been enriched by the Franciscan friars who had traversed central Asia to the court of the Mongol emperor as early as 1245, and by such merchants and travelers as Marco Polo, who had been attached to the court of Kublai Khan and who subsequently had described that potentate's realms and the wealth of "Cipangu" (Japan). These travels afforded at once information about Asia and enormous incentive to later explorers.
Popular notions that the waters of the tropics boiled, that demons and monsters awaited explorers to the westward, and that the earth was a great flat disk, did not pass current among well-informed geographers. Especially since the revival of Ptolemy's works in the fifteenth century, learned men asserted that the earth was spherical in shape, and they even calculated its circumference, erring only by two or three thousand miles. It was maintained repeatedly that the Indies formed the western boundary of the Atlantic Ocean, and that consequently they might be reached by sailing due west, as well as by traveling eastward; but at the same time it was believed that shorter routes might be found northeast of Europe, or southward around Africa.
[Sidenote: Navigation]
Along with this general knowledge of the situation of continents, the sailors of the fifteenth century had learned a good deal about navigation. The compass had been used first by Italian navigators in the thirteenth century, mounted on the compass card in the fourteenth. Latitude was determined with the aid of the astrolabe, a device for measuring the elevation of the pole star above the horizon. With maps and accurate sailing directions (portolani), seamen could lose sight of land and still feel confident of their whereabouts. Yet it undoubtedly took courage for the explorers of the fifteenth century to steer their frail sailing vessels either down the unexplored African coast or across the uncharted Atlantic Ocean.