German commerce suffered especially by the rise of the Dutch to an independent position. So long as Antwerp was the great market of the Continent Germans traded freely with it, and through it to Lisbon. The substitution of Amsterdam for Antwerp was a most serious blow to German interests. The Dutch had very different ideas from those of the Flemish; they wanted to do all the trade themselves and to force other people to a position of commercial dependence on them. They made the lower Rhine practically useless for their rivals, raising the tolls sixfold and more, and thereby coming into a control of the trade as far as Frankfort on the Main. =296. The damage done by internal dissensions and by the Thirty Years’ War.=—Germany was not only cut off from the outside world by tariff barriers, but cut up inside by the tolls of cities and territories. Every city on a trade route wanted to make itself a “staple,” _i.e._, have all goods passing the vicinity brought there for taxation and for sale. Frankfort on the Oder, for instance, demanded that all boats passing down the river Warthe should come _up_ to Frankfort before they could continue their journey down the Oder to Stettin. The cities of Stettin, Frankfort, and Breslau, all situated on the Oder, instead of using that river for peaceable exchange, made bitter commercial war on each other with tolls and prohibitions. Conditions grew still worse after the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), a terrible conflict which, without exaggeration, cost Germany one hundred, perhaps two hundred, years of development. The physical means of transportation declined. On the Elbe, for instance, the dikes ceased to be repaired, the tow-path disappeared, the banks crumbled; and sand bars and snags became so common that navigation was difficult and costly. Tolls not merely doubled; they increased fivefold and more. Space is lacking for a description of all the evils; they were practically a reproduction of the conditions which happier states had left behind them five hundred years before.