It was not merely greed for gold and thirst for glory which inspired the colonizing movement. To the merchant's eager search for precious metals and costly spices, and to the adventurer's fierce delight in braving unknown dangers where white man never had ventured, the Portuguese and Spanish explorers added the inspiration of an ennobling missionary ideal. In the conquest of the New World priests and chapels were as important as soldiers and fortresses; and its settlements were named in honor of Saint Francis (San Francisco), Saint Augustine (St. Augustine), the Holy Saviour (San Salvador), the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz), or the Holy Faith (Santa Fé). Fearless priests penetrated the interior of America, preaching and baptizing as they went. Unfortunately some of the Spanish adventurers who came to make fortunes in the mines of America, and a great number of the non-Spanish foreigners who owned mines in the Spanish colonies, set gain before religion, and imposed crushing burdens on the natives who toiled as slaves in their mines. Cruelty and forced labor decimated the natives, but in the course of time this abuse was remedied, thanks largely to the Spanish bishop, Bartolomé de las Casas, and instead of forming a miserable remnant of an almost extinct race, as they do in the United States, the Indians freely intermarried with the Spaniards, whom they always outnumbered. As a result, Latin America is peopled by nations which are predominantly Indian in blood, [Footnote: Except in the southern part of South America.] Spanish or Portuguese [Footnote: In Brazil.] in language, and Roman Catholic in religion. The same religious zeal which had actuated Spanish missionary-explorers was manifested at a later date by the French Jesuit Fathers who penetrated North America in order to preach the Christian faith to the Indians. Quite different were the religious motives which in the seventeenth century inspired Protestant colonists in the New World. They came not as evangelists, but as religious outcasts fleeing from persecution, or as restless souls worsted at politics or unable to gain a living at home. This meant the dispossession and ultimate extinction rather than the conversion of the Indians. [Sidenote: Decline of the Hanseatic League] The stirring story of the colonial struggles which occupied the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will be taken up in another chapter; at this point, therefore, we turn from the expanding nations on the Atlantic seaboard to note the mournful plight of the older commercial powers--the German and Italian city-states. As for the former, the Hanseatic League, despoiled of its Baltic commerce by enterprising Dutch and English merchants, its cities restless and rebellious, gradually broke up. In 1601 an Englishman metaphorically observed: "Most of their [the league's] teeth have fallen out, the rest sit but loosely in their head,"--and in fact all were soon lost except Lübeck, Bremen, and Hamburg.