5o8 Outlines of European Histor)' 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. Liibeck was always the leader, but among the seventy towns which at one time and another were included in the confederation, we find Colbgne, Brunswick, Danzig, 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 befor«e the discovery of new routes to the East and West Indies revolutionized trade. It should be observed that, during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, trade was not carried on between ?iations, but by the various towns, like Venice, Liibeck, 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 if found in the town where the debt was due. At the period of which we have been speaking, an inhabitant of London was considered as much of a foreigner in Bristol as was the merchant from Cologne or 1 The ships of the Hanseatic League were very small (see below, Fig. 233).
