ugh somewhat distant from the sea,
nevertheless occupy a place of honor as pioneers of German marine
commerce. Between these two western groups and those in the East there
was a wide gap extending as far as the mouths of the Elbe and the
Weser. At the entrance to these rivers, however, and along the borders
of the Baltic were the great maritime communities, the chief members
of the Hanseatic League, including the before-mentioned Wendish group
and the cities of Bremen and Hamburg. Yet not these alone, although
they were in some respects the most important. Inland, the municipal
groups extended so as to embrace Berlin, then very unimportant,
Perleberg, etc., in the Mark of Brandenburg, the Saxon cities of
Magdeburg, Hanover, Luneburg, Goslar, Hildesheim, Brunswick, and
others; in the far-eastern part of the empire the six rapidly growing
cities of the Teutonic order, Kulm, Thorn, Dantzic, Elbing,
Braunsberg, and Koenigsberg; and finally, in Livonia and Esthonia,
Riga, Dorpat, Reval, and Pernau. Noteworthy was the treaty concluded
in A.D. 1241, between Hamburg and Lubeck, whereby the former assumed
control of the interests in the North Sea and the Elbe, while the
latter safeguarded those of the Baltic. This treaty between Hamburg
and Lubeck is sometimes regarded as the beginning of the Hanseatic
League. It has here been sufficiently demonstrated, however, that the
association was the result of a slow and gradual process, enforced by
conditions, and that it did not originate in the mind of any
particular statesman as a definite plan.

The two groups, the maritime and the inland municipal, had developed
independently: it now remained to unite them; and from the union thus
effected sprang the great institution of the German Hansa. The private
associations, not excepting the Gothland Company, in view of the rapid
extension of commerce and the consequent jealousy of foreign
competitors, were no longer able to afford sufficient protection to
the foreign trade--a condition which did not escape the statesmen of
Lubeck, with their marked power of initiative and political sagacity.

Thus it came, during the last decades of the thirteenth century, that
the private societies became more and more dependent upon the
municipal unions, which, under the leadership of the free and
centrally located city of Lubeck, now assumed the energetic
guardianship of maritime commerce, by reason of which they were drawn
from their hitherto isolated