To the person unacquainted with the story of the North, it will be no small surprise to land on this remote island and to see a mediæval city that is almost unrivalled for interest even in the South of Europe. Here was a chief cradle of the far-told Hansa League, whose name appears to be derived from an ancient Gothic word.[75] The confederation for long centuries controlled the shipping and the commerce of the North, from the Steelyard in London to Novgorod the Great on the Russian plains; from Bergen of rockbound Norway to the remotest river-ports of vineyard-terraced Rhine.
The merchants needed to protect themselves whom no prince would shield. As with the East India Company in later years, an association of traffickers was driven into politics and compelled by circumstances to make war and peace, and to take up all the responsibility of a mighty sovereign state. Had London been further away and the English kings of feebler frame, the career of the Cinque Ports might have been very similar. But the sovereigns of England were deeply interested in all that concerned their Kent and Sussex harbours, and desired to utilise their ships. The Holy Roman Emperor at Aachen was not far off from the teeming Hansa towns; but, German though he was, his eyes were fixed on the splendid cities of Italy and the glittering palaces by the Tiber rather than on the stalwart shipping of the cities of the North. Had the Emperor looked north and not south, had the Empire been German not Roman, the Hansa towns had not played a greater part in history than did the English Cinque Ports. Merchants would not have made treaties nor exercised the prerogatives of princes. But no German Empire was to arise during mediæval days; the towns went their own way and refused to do anything of mark for the Kaiser, who did almost nothing for them.
Rapidly waxed the fortunes of the old place of sacrifice, and during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the city had grown to be the Baltic's leading port. It had become a chief centre of the trade of Northern Europe and the remotest East, whose riches were such that an old ballad declares:
With twenty pound weights their gold they weigh,
With costliest jewels as toys they play;
Their swine-troughs are silver, their distaffs are gold,
In Gothland luxurious in wealth untold.
Visby was declared a Free City by the Emperor Lothar, the Saxon (1125-37); in 1237, Henry III. granted its merchants free trade all over England. So important was British commerce with those parts that the Easterlings gave to English currency the name by which (slightly clipped as sterling) it is known to-day.
Fair churches still attest Visby's devotion, great walls its military strength. Undefended towns, famed for their wealth, were almost as unsafe in the early middle ages as they would be to-day. Visby unwalled suffered much. In the Saga of Olaf Tryggvison we read how one of the Earls of Ladir (p. [69]), driven forth by that king, "took such rede that he gat him a-shipboard and went a-warring to gather wealth for him and his men. First he made for Gothland, and lay off there long in the summer season, waylaying ships of chapmen who sailed toward the land, or of the vikings else; and whiles he went aland and harried there wide about the borders of the sea." But at least our fathers had the advantage over us that in the intervals of all this fighting they did not need to be practising the oldest of the arts. They knew not our crushing burdens. The same hands held the account-book and the sword; the same ships plowed the sea for trading and for war.
Thus from the turbulence of neighbours the most peaceful of cities has left us some of the most impressive examples of military architecture that all Europe has to show. During the thirteenth century the burghers walled their town. The defences are of solid stone and make a bean-shaped circuit of two miles and a half. For 1,950 yards they run along the shore, where to-day is the Students' Walk between the lofty walls and a line of tall trees. The original height of the walls was fifteen to eighteen feet, according to the ground. Wide battlements, each second one pierced by a small embrasure, frowned along the top and just behind them was the customary parapet-path, sustained by a series of arches within—a very common way of economising materials from Roman to latest times. Much stronger were the walls from having two moats towards the land without, and on the north side there were three.
Three older structures—little towers—were built into the walls, and so remain to-day. The Krut Torn, or Powder Tower, clearly named in later days, looks over the sea; the Tjärhof, or tar-house, and the Mynt Hus, look over the land. The tar-house is clearly known from a use to which it was degradingly put in latter days. There was a mint at Visby in the thirteenth century, and there seems to be no evidence whatever that it was not in this Mynt Hus. Six towers were also built to strengthen the wall, all toward the south; one of them is round, established on a jutting rock. One is known as Kejsar Hus, or Cæsar's Tower, named evidently because connected in some way with the Holy Empire of Rome.[76] For Roman indeed was the Empire still when these proud walls rose. As we have already seen, the sovereign was for ever straining his eyes towards the ancient city of the Cæsars, there to receive the Imperial Crown, in Italy to exercise imperial sway.
A little later in the century, Horace Porter[77] thinks about the middle, more towers were added and, on the east, barbicans to enfilade the moats.