An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

Dangers by sea.

Pirates.

Strand laws.

Commerce by sea had its own particular trials, by no means confined to the hazards of wind and wave, rock and shoal. Pirates were numerous in the North Sea. They were often organized and sometimes led by men of high rank, who appear to have regarded the business as no disgrace. Then there were the so-called strand laws, according to which a ship with its cargo became the property of the owner of the coast upon which it might be wrecked or driven ashore. Lighthouses and beacons were few and the coasts dangerous. Moreover, natural dangers were increased by false signals which wreckers used to lure ships to shore in order to plunder them.

The Hanseatic League.

With a view to mitigating these manifold perils, the towns early began to form unions for mutual defense. The most famous of these was that of the German cities, called the Hanseatic League. Lübeck was always the leader, but among the seventy towns which at one time and another were included in the confederation, we find Cologne, Brunswick, Dantzig, and other centers of great importance. The union purchased and controlled settlements in London,—the so-called Steelyard near London Bridge,—at Wisby, Bergen, and the far-off Novgorod in Russia. They managed to monopolize nearly the whole trade on the Baltic and North Sea, either through treaties or the influence that they were able to bring to bear.

The League made war on the pirates and did much to reduce the dangers of traffic. Instead of dispatching separate and defenseless merchantmen, their ships sailed out in fleets under the protection of a man-of-war. On one occasion the League undertook a successful war against the king of Denmark, who had interfered with their interests. At another time it declared war on England and brought her to terms. For two hundred years before the discovery of America, the League played a great part in the commercial affairs of western Europe; but it had begun to decline even before the discovery of new routes to the East and West Indies revolutionized trade.

Trade regulated by the towns (thirteenth to fifteenth century), not by nations or individuals.

It should be observed that, during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, trade was not carried on between nations, but by the various towns, like Venice, Lübeck, Ghent, Bruges, Cologne. A merchant did not act or trade as an independent individual but as a member of a particular merchant guild, and he enjoyed the protection of his town and of the treaties it arranged. If a merchant from a certain town failed to pay a debt, a fellow-townsman might be seized where the debt was due. At the period of which we have been speaking, an inhabitant of London was considered a foreigner or an alien in Bristol, just as was the merchant from Cologne or Antwerp. Only gradually did the towns merge into the nations to which their people belonged.[158]