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, though somewhat distant from the sea,
nevertheless occupy a place of honor as pioneers of German marine
commerce. Between these two western groups and those in the East there
was a wide gap extending as far as the mouths of the Elbe and the
Weser. At the entrance to these rivers, however, and along the borders
of the Baltic were the great maritime communities, the chief members