The Germans were not entirely unprepared for the changes following the discoveries, for they had long gone in considerable numbers to the Spanish peninsula, by land through southern France or from a French or Italian harbor to Barcelona. Many Germans had settled in Portugal, and for a time the great merchants of south Germany shared in the Indian trade at its source, in Lisbon. The great German financiers shared also for a brief period in the commerce of the New World. The Ellingers and Welsers leased the copper mines of San Domingo; the Crombergers had silver mines at Sultepeque; the Tetzels exploited the copper mines of Cuba. The Welsers founded Venezuela by a military expedition which they financed, and held the country for a few years. =294. The chief cause of decline of German commerce in this period was political.=—The most obvious explanation of the failure of Germany to take a place with the other states in the commercial expansion following the discoveries is the disadvantage of her position. It has been said that the diversion of commerce to the oceanic routes exposed the countries of central Europe (Italy, Germany, etc.) to a condition of commercial glaciation, such as Norway would experience physically if it lost the warm current of the Gulf Stream. The difference in distance of a few hundred miles in voyages of thousands does not explain the matter. No physical differences suffice to explain why Amsterdam rose and why Hamburg fell so rapidly. The weakness of Germany was not physical. Nor was it economic; German merchants of this period had more free capital, more business ability and greater energy than the merchants of any other country. Germany’s weakness was political. The payments which merchants and other Germans made in the form of taxes and loans to political authority did not form a single fund which could be used for furthering German interests at home and abroad. The money went to a great number of rival governments, and was consumed in their particular quarrels, not helping but actually hurting German business interests. =295. The natural outlets of commerce stopped by hostile states.=—The political weakness of Germany enabled other states, now rising to power, to crumble off fragments of the country, in which they established a commercial policy hostile to German interests. Before long the mouth of every one of the large rivers which were the natural commercial outlets of the country had passed under foreign control. The Rhine was Dutch; the Weser Swedish; the Elbe Danish; the Oder Swedish; the Vistula Polish. Tolls hampered the passage of wares as effectually as though Germany were surrounded by a physical barrier on the sea side; and German ships almost disappeared from the ocean.