and
without having these objects in view, disposed and enabled other powers to
participate in the commerce which they had hitherto exclusively carried on.
It was not indeed to be supposed, that either the monarchs or the subjects
would willingly and cheerfully submit to have all their own trade in the
very heart of their own country conducted, and the fruit of it reaped by
foreign merchants. They, therefore, first used their efforts to gain
possession of their own commerce, and then aspired to participate in the
trade of other countries; succeeding by degrees, and after a length of
time, in both these objects, the Hanseatic League was necessarily depressed
in the same proportion.

The Dutch and the English first began to seek a participation in the
commerce of the North. The chief cities which formed the republic of
Holland had been among the earliest members or confederates of the League,
and when they threw off the yoke of Germany, and attached themselves to the
house of Bourbon, they ceased to form part of the League; and after much
dispute, and even hostility with the remaining members of it, they
succeeded in obtaining a part of the commerce of the Baltic, and commercial
treaties with the king of Denmark, and the knights of the Teutonic order.

The commerce of the League was also curtailed in the Baltic, where it had
always been most formidable and flourishing, by the English, who, in the
beginning of the fifteenth century, gained admission for their vessels into
Dantzic and the ports of Sweden and Denmark. The only port of consequence
in the northern nations, to which the ships of the League were exclusively
admitted, was Bergen, which at this period was rather under their dominion
than under that of Norway. In the middle of the sixteenth century, however,
they abandoned it, in consequence of disputes with the king of Denmark.
About the same time they abandoned Novogorod, the czar having treated their
merchants there in a very arbitrary and tyrannical manner. These, and other
circumstances to which we have already adverted, made their commerce and
power decline; and, towards the beginning of the seventeenth century, they
had ceased to be of much consequence. Though, however, the League itself at
this period had lost its influence and commerce, yet some cities, which had
been from the first members of it, still retained a lucrative trade: this
remark applies chiefly to Lubeck and Hamburgh; the former of these cities