Even Emperors, who condemned leagues on principle from old Hohenstaufen experience, respected if they disliked ‘the Hansa’ that carried through national police-work in the north of which they themselves were quite incapable.
The Emperor Charles IV, when he visited Lübeck, addressed the principal civic officials as ‘My lords!’ and when, suspicious of this flattery, they demurred, he replied, ‘You are lords indeed, for the oldest imperial registers know that Lübeck is one of the five towns that have accorded to them ducal rank in the imperial council.’ The chronicler adds proudly that thus Lübeck was acknowledged the equal of Rome, Venice, Florence, and Pisa.
In the latter half of the fourteenth century the Hanseatic League stood at the height of its power; for though the political genius of Queen Margaret, daughter of Valdemar III, succeeded in uniting Denmark, Norway, and Sweden by the agreement called ‘the Union of Kalmar’, and also forced the Hansa to surrender the fortresses on the Skaania coast; yet even the foundation of this vast Scandinavian Empire could not shake German supremacy over the Baltic. Under Margaret’s successors the Union of Kalmar degenerated into a Danish tyranny; and because it was the result of a dynastic settlement and not of any national movement it soon came to shipwreck amid general discontent and civil wars.
The Hanseatic League itself, though it lingered on as a political force through the fifteenth century, gradually declined and lost touch with the commercial outlook of the age. The decline may be traced partly to the fact that there was no vigorous national life in Germany to feed the League’s vitality, but also to a steady tendency for towns to drift apart and become absorbed in the local interests of their provinces.
The real blow to the prestige of the League was, however, the departure of the herring-shoals from the Baltic to the coasts of Amsterdam. ‘The Hansa’ had concentrated its commercial interests in the Baltic, and when the Baltic failed her she found herself unable to compete with the Dutch and English traders, who were already masters of the North Sea.
Other and more adventurous rivals were opening up trade routes along the African coast and across the Atlantic; but the Hanseatic League, with her rigid and limited conception of commercial interests, was like a nurse still holding by the hand children that should have been able to fend for themselves. Once the protection of her merchants, she had degenerated into a check on individual enterprise, and so, belonging to the spirit of the Middle Ages, with the Middle Ages passed away.
The Teutonic Knights
Another mediaeval institution, destined also to decline and finally vanish, was a close ally of the Hanseatic League, namely, the Order of Teutonic Knights. Transferred, as we have noticed,[40] on the fall of the Latin Empire in Asia Minor to the shores of the Baltic, the Order had there justified its existence by carrying on a perpetual war against the heathen Lithuanians and Prussians, building fortresses and planting colonies of German settlers, as Charlemagne and his Franks had set the example.
While there still remained heathen to conquer the Knights were warmly encouraged by the Pope, and their battle-fields were a popular resort for the chivalry of nearly every country in Europe, competing in their claim with the camps of Valencia, Murcia, and Granada.