This limited outlook arose partly from the very different stages of development at which mediaeval towns were to be found at the same moment. Some would be just struggling out of dependence on a local bishop or count by the payment of huge tolls, at the same time that others, though enjoying a good deal of commercial freedom, were still forced to accept magistrates appointed by their neighbouring overlord. Yet again, a privileged few would be ‘free’ towns, entirely self-governed, and owning allegiance only to the Emperor. Perhaps a master mind could have dovetailed all these conflicting systems of government into a federation that would have helped and safeguarded the interests of all, but unfortunately the mediaeval mind was a slave to the fallacy that commercial gain can only be made at the expense of some one else. The men of one town hated and feared the prosperity of another and were convinced that the utmost limit of duty to a neighbour was their own city walls. Nothing, for instance, is more opposed to modern codes of brotherhood than the early mediaeval opinion on the subjects of wrecks. Men and women of those days saw no incongruity in piously petitioning God in public prayer for a good wreckage, or in regarding the shipwrecked sailor or merchant cast on their rocks as prey to be knocked on the head and plucked. The towns of North Germany shared to the full this primitive savagery, but they learned the secret of co-operation that their wealthy southern neighbours utterly missed, and in so doing became for a time a political force of world-wide fame. [Sidenote: The ‘Hansa’] Such was the commercial league of ‘the Hansa’, formed first of all by a few principal ports, Lübeck, Danzig, Bremen, and Hamburg, lying on the Baltic or North Sea, but afterwards increased to a union of eighty or more towns as the value of mutual support and obligations was realized. Law in the Middle Ages was personal rather than territorial--that is to say, a man when he travelled abroad would not be judged or protected by the law of the country to which he went, but would carry his own law with him. If this law was practically non-existent, as for a German during years of anarchy when the Holy Roman Empire was thoroughly discredited in the eyes of Europe, the merchant stood a small chance of safeguarding himself and his wares. It was here, when emperors and kings of the Romans failed, that the Hanseatic League stepped in, maintaining centres in foreign towns where the merchants of those cities included in the League could lodge and store their goods, and where permanent representatives of the League could make suit to the government of the country on behalf of fellow merchants who had suffered from robbery or violence.