ty
had once before formed their political and social institutions upon
German models, so they now, in such cities as Stockholm, Bergen,
Copenhagen, and others, became subject to the cultural and, above all,
the commercial influence of the German burgher.

It is interesting to note the manner in which this extraordinary
influence was secured. In later mediaeval times all classes of the
population were compelled to rely upon self-help. In other words, they
were compelled to replace the defective or insufficient protection
afforded by the State by corporate bodies. Thus the merchants of a
Low-German German town, when in search of a common centre of trade,
pledged themselves by a solemn oath to a defensive and offensive
alliance and mutual furtherance; and wider alliances between the
various towns themselves soon followed. Of all these private
commercial associations none attained to greater importance than did
the Gothland Company, a society of Low-German merchants who visited
Gothland, the centre of commercial activity in the Baltic, for trading
purposes. Here was the seat of the mighty city of Wisby, which
contained such wealth that a Danish king once declared that the swine
there ate from silver troughs. Even at the present day the massive
ruins of the old city wall and of the eighteen churches which once
existed there bear testimony to the former magnitude and grandeur of
the city. The Gothland Company flourished chiefly during the
thirteenth century and enjoyed all the privileges of a political
power; bearing its own seal, policing the seas, and insisting upon
strict compliance on the part of all navigators of the Baltic with the
marine laws which it had created.

Parallel with this development was the formation of unions between
inland towns, caused by the depredations of robber-knights; the
menacing increase of power among the nobility; and by commercial
motives of all kinds, as, for example, the necessity of preventing
banished criminals and debtors from seeking an asylum in neighboring
communities. Along the entire region from Esthland to Holland, both of
which at that time belonged to the German crown, the municipalities
united. In the far-western part of the German empire there was the
municipal group of the Netherlands, among which such cities as
Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Deventer belonged. Farther inland was the
Rhenish-Westphalian group, consisting of Cologne, Dortmund, Munster,
and others, which cities, tho