3o8 Norivay and the NoTtvegians 



of Wisby, the city of Hansa creation, the nucleus of the 

 Baltic trade of the League. He did take the city ; but 

 his action brought about a warlike union of all the 

 Hansa cities, the like of which had never been seen 

 before. Hitherto the League had been apparently only 

 a peaceful corporation. It was its peaceful attitude 

 which deceived Waldemar into despising its power. 

 Now, under the leadership of Liibeck, the League 

 showed that it could put into the field an army superior 

 to any that the Scandinavian countries (once the scourge 

 of Europe) could oppose to it. How completely has 

 the whirligig of time brought its revenge, when we see 

 this league of northern traders defeating the children 

 of those adventurers who had in their day attacked and 

 taken half the chief cities of Europe ! 



After this famous war, which took place in the years 

 1368-9, so far as Norway was concerned, the unques- 

 tioned supremacy of the German traders was established. 

 Bergen may be said to have been given up to them. It 

 was not for two hundred years, till, that is to say, the 

 middle of the sixteenth century, that Norway succeeded 

 in wresting back again the trade in her own produc- 

 tions. 



Up to the time of the monopolising of Norse trade 

 by the ' Liibeckers,' as the Hansa merchants were often 

 called in Norway, the commerce with the British Isles, 

 which the Viking age had first introduced, continued to 

 be one of the chief branches of Norwegian external 

 trade. According to the legend, one of the boats 

 which came to Norway on this errand, brought with it 

 a strange and awful freight. The boat — a cock-boat it 

 is called in the history — came from England, and put 



