150 FOREIGN TRADE 



those international courtesies which have been to some 

 extent codified by European communities, under the name 

 of the law of nations. The traders from these towns were 

 endowed with considerable privileges and immunities, and 

 encouraged to settle in London 6 . They were the channel 

 by which the produce of the unexplored forests of Russia 

 was brought to Western Europe. One of the most impor- 

 tant articles which they exported from England, Norway, 

 and the Flemish coasts was the herring. The League 

 strove to secure to itself the monopoly of catching and curing 

 these fish. The value of the trade which these Easterlings f , 

 as they were called, brought with them, led to the early grant 

 of considerable privileges to the corporation, and ultimately to 

 considerable jealousy on the part of other towns. The region 

 occupied in London by the Hanse merchants was known by 

 the name of the " House of the Alderman and Merchants of 

 the Steelyard." They were deprived of their tenements by 

 Elizabeth, and bidden to quit them by the last day of Feb. 

 1598. But they were restored by James. 



The trade of the Italian republics, which owed so much to 

 those commercial relations created with the East by the Cru- 

 sades, and which involved the Venetians in particular in the 

 suspicion of indifference to the voice of public conscience in 

 Europe, and even of sympathy with the prosperity of the 

 Mohammedan states, flourished greatly by the demand for 

 tropical produce, and by the fact of its route being restricted 

 to those parts of the Mediterranean with which the Italian 

 trading towns had the closest relations. How great this 



6 Mallet, La Ligue Hansdatique, p. 24. The name given to this body came into 

 general use, according to this authority, at about the middle of the fourteenth century. 

 Hanse in Low-German means a corporation. Ib. p. 65. 



{ Perhaps the protection given to the Jews by Casimir the Great, King of Poland 

 J 333 JST * when they were generally expelled from Western Europe, aided the pros- 

 perity of the Baltic cities on the coast. 



For the literature on the history of the Hanseatic League see Schlozer's Verfall und 

 Untergang der Hansa, &c., with his index ; and in particular Lappenberg's Urkundliche 

 Geschichte des Hansischen Stahlhofes zu London. The older work of Werdenhagen is, as 

 Macpherson observes, i. 421 note, wholly worthless. 



