The Hanse or the Hanseatic League, as the confederation of Cologne, Brunswick, Hamburg, Lübeck, Dantzig, Königsberg, and other German cities was called, waged war against the Baltic pirates, maintained its trade-routes, and negotiated with monarchs and municipalities in order to obtain exceptional privileges. From their Baltic stations,-- Novgorod, Stockholm, Königsberg, etc.,--the Hanseatic merchants brought amber, wax, fish, furs, timber, and tar to sell in the markets of Bruges, London, and Venice; they returned with wheat, wine, salt, metals, cloth, and beer for their Scandinavian and Russian customers. The German trading post at Venice received metals, furs, leather goods, and woolen cloth from the North, and sent back spices, silks, and other commodities of the East, together with glassware, fine textiles, weapons, and paper of Venetian manufacture. Baltic and Venetian trade- routes crossed in the Netherlands, and during the fourteenth century Bruges became the trade-metropolis of western Europe, where met the raw wool from England and Spain, the manufactured woolen cloth of Flanders, clarets from France, sherry and port wines from the Iberian peninsula, pitch from Sweden, tallow from Norway, grain from France and Germany, and English tin, not to mention Eastern luxuries, Venetian manufactures, and the cunning carved-work of south-German artificers. THE AGE OF EXPLORATION [Sidenote: Desire of Spaniards and Portuguese for New Trade-Routes] In the unprecedented commercial prosperity which marked the fifteenth century, two European peoples--the Portuguese and the Spanish--had little part. For purposes of general Continental trade they were not so conveniently situated as the peoples of Germany and the Netherlands; and the Venetians and other Italians had shut them off from direct trade with Asia. Yet Spanish and Portuguese had developed much the same taste for Oriental spices and wares as had the inhabitants of central Europe, and they begrudged the exorbitant prices which they were compelled to pay to Italian merchants. Moreover, their centuries-long crusades against Mohammedans in the Iberian peninsula and in northern Africa had bred in them a stern and zealous Christianity which urged them on to undertake missionary enterprises in distant pagan lands. This missionary spirit reënforced the desire they already entertained of finding new trade-routes to Asia untrammeled by rival and selfish Italians. In view of these circumstances it is not surprising that Spaniards and Portuguese sought eagerly in the fifteenth century to find new trade-routes to "the Indies." [Sidenote: Geographical Knowledge]