h her rival, Venice.[12] Everywhere tyrannies stood out
triumphant. The first modern age of representative government was a
failure. The cities had proved unable to protect themselves against the
selfish ambitions of their leaders.

In Germany and the Netherlands town life had been, as we have seen,
slower of development.[13] Hence for these Northern cities the period of
decay had not yet come. In fact, the fourteenth century marks the zenith
of their power. Their great trading league, the Hansa, was now fully
established, and through the hands of its members passed all the wealth
of Northern Europe. The league even fought a war against the King of
Denmark and defeated him. The three northern states, Denmark, Norway,
and Sweden, fell almost wholly under the dominance of the Hansa, until,
toward the end of the century, Queen Margaret of Denmark, "the Semiramis
of the North," united the three countries under her sway, and partly at
least upraised them from their sorry plight.[14]

On the whole this was not an era to which Europe can look back with
pride. The empire was a scene of anarchy. One of its wrangling rulers,
Charles IV, recognizing that the lack of an established government lay
at the root of all the disorder, tried to mend matters by publishing his
"Golden Bull," which exactly regulated the rules and formulae to be gone
through in choosing an emperor, and named the seven "electors" who were
to vote. This simplified matters so far as the repeatedly contested
elections went; but it failed to strike to the real difficulty. The
Emperor remained elective and therefore weak.[15]

Moreover, in 1346 the "Black Death," most terrible of all the repeated
plagues under which the centuries previous to our own have suffered,
began to rear its dread form over terror-stricken Europe.[16] It has
been estimated that during the three years of this awful visitation
one-third of the people of Europe perished. Whole cities were wiped out.
In the despair and desolation of the period of scarcity that followed,
humanity became hysterical, and within a generation that oddest of all
the extravagances of the Middle Ages, the "dancing mania," rose to its
height. Men and women wandered from town to town, especially in
Germany, dancing frantically, until in their exhaustion they would beg
the bystanders to beat them or even jump on them to enable them to
stop.[17]

France and England were also in desolation. The long "Hundred Years'
War"