gally by extorting heavy taxes and forced
loans whenever their treasuries were empty. The portionless brothers and
relatives of the feudal lords, to whom no employments save war,
adventure, and piracy were open, pillaged them illegally. Along the
coasts especially, piracy was considered not only a legitimate, but a
genteel, profession. So in order to protect themselves, the cities began
to join themselves into leagues.

=The Hanse League.=--About the beginning of the thirteenth century[4]
Hamburg and Luebeck formed an alliance afterward called a _hansa_; at the
beginning of the fourteenth century it embraced seventy cities, having
the capital at Luebeck. At the time of its greatest power the League
embraced all the principal cities of western Europe nearly as far south
as the Danube. Large agencies, called "factories," were established in
London, Bruges, Novgorod, Bergen, and Wisby. The influence of the League
practically controlled western Europe.

The Hanse League performed a wonderful work. It stopped piracy on the
seas and robbery on the land. Industrially, it encouraged
self-government and obedience to constitutional authority. Shipbuilding
and navigation so greatly improved that the ocean traffic resulting from
the discovery of the cape route to India quickly fell into the hands of
Hanse sailors and master-mariners. The League not only encouraged and
protected all sorts of manufactures, but its schools trained thousands
of operatives. The mines were worked and the idle land cultivated. It
was the greatest industrial movement that ever occurred.

[Illustration: HANSE ROUTES--THE HANSE LEAGUE REORGANIZES THE TRADE OF
THE WORLD]

Socially, the Hanse League brought the wealth that gave those comforts
and conveniences before unknown. The standards of social life,
education, art, and science were raised from a condition scarcely
better than barbarism to a high plane of civilization. Indeed, the
civilization of western Europe was the most important result of it.

It forced the rights of individual freedom, as well as municipal
independence, from more than one monarch, and punished severely the
kings who sought to betray it. It crushed the power of those who opposed
it,[5] and rewarded those who were faithful to it. Its most important
mission, however, was the overthrow of feudalism and the gradual
substitution of popular government in its place.

Having accomplished the regeneration of Europe, the Hanse League died