The trade of the Netherlands with the Mediterranean and the East was mainly through this favored city of Bruges, which, already in the thirteenth century, had risen to the first rank in the commercial world.  It was the resting-place for the Lombards and other Italians, the great entrepot for their merchandise.  It now became, in addition, the great marketplace for English wool, and the woollen fabrics of all the Netherlands, as well as for the drugs and spices of the East.  It had, however, by no means reached its apogee, but was to culminate with Venice, and to sink with her decline.  When the overland Indian trade fell off with the discovery of the Cape passage, both cities withered.  Grass grew in the fair and pleasant streets of Bruges, and sea-weed clustered about the marble halls of Venice.  At this epoch, however, both were in a state of rapid and insolent prosperity.

The cities, thus advancing in wealth and importance, were no longer satisfied with being governed according to law, and began to participate, not only in their own, but in the general government.  Under Guy of Flanders, the towns appeared regularly, as well as the nobles, in the assembly of the provincial estates. (1386-1389, A.D.) In the course of the following century, the six chief cities, or capitals, of Holland (Dort, Harlem, Delft, Leyden, Goads, and Amsterdam) acquired the right of sending their deputies regularly to the estates of the provinces.  These towns, therefore, with the nobles, constituted the parliamentary power of the nation.  They also acquired letters patent from the count, allowing them to choose their burgomasters and a limited number of councillors or senators (Vroedschappen).

Thus the liberties of Holland and Flanders waxed, daily, stronger.  A great physical convulsion in the course of the thirteenth century came to add its influence to the slower process of political revolution.  Hitherto there had been but one Friesland, including Holland, and nearly all the territory of the future republic.  A slender stream alone separated the two great districts.  The low lands along the Vlie, often threatened, at last sank in the waves.  The German Ocean rolled in upon the inland Lake of Flevo.  The stormy Zuyder Zee began its existence by engulfing thousands of Frisian villages, with all their population, and by spreading a chasm between kindred peoples.  The political, as well as the geographical, continuity of the land was obliterated by this tremendous deluge.  The Hollanders were cut off from their relatives in the east by as dangerous a sea as that which divided them from their Anglo-Saxon brethren in Britain.  The deputies to the general assemblies at Aurich could no longer undertake a journey grown so perilous.  West Friesland became absorbed in Holland.  East Friesland remained a federation of rude but self-governed maritime provinces, until the brief and bloody dominion of the Saxon dukes led to the establishment of Charles the Fifth’s