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 possessed, about the middle of the seventeenth century, 600 ships, some of which were very large; and the commerce by which Hamburgh is still distinguished, is in some measure the result of what it enjoyed as a member of the Hanseatic League.