The merchants needed to protect themselves whom no prince would shield. As with the East India Company in later years, an association of traffickers was driven into politics and compelled by circumstances to make war and peace, and to take up all the responsibility of a mighty sovereign state. Had London been further away and the English kings of feebler frame, the career of the Cinque Ports might have been very similar. But the sovereigns of England were deeply interested in all that concerned their Kent and Sussex harbours, and desired to utilise their ships. The Holy Roman Emperor at Aachen was not far off from the teeming Hansa towns; but, German though he was, his eyes were fixed on the splendid cities of Italy and the glittering palaces by the Tiber rather than on the stalwart shipping of the cities of the North. Had the Emperor looked north and not south, had the Empire been German not Roman, the Hansa towns had not played a greater part in history than did the English Cinque Ports. Merchants would not have made treaties nor exercised the prerogatives of princes. But no German Empire was to arise during mediæval days; the towns went their own way and refused to do anything of mark for the Kaiser, who did almost nothing for them. Rapidly waxed the fortunes of the old place of sacrifice, and during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the city had grown to be the Baltic's leading port. It had become a chief centre of the trade of Northern Europe and the remotest East, whose riches were such that an old ballad declares: With twenty pound weights their gold they weigh, With costliest jewels as toys they play; Their swine-troughs are silver, their distaffs are gold, In Gothland luxurious in wealth untold. Visby was declared a Free City by the Emperor Lothar, the Saxon (1125-37); in 1237, Henry III. granted its merchants free trade all over England. So important was British commerce with those parts that the Easterlings gave to English currency the name by which (slightly clipped as sterling) it is known to-day.