The foundations of this originally peaceful confederacy were, curiously enough, laid in war, and that of the baser sort--war for the sake of pillage. The Vikings, finding themselves unable to realize the spoil with which they were sometimes gorged, conceived the idea of founding a market-place to which, by assurances of safety and immunity from further theft, they could induce peaceful merchants to attend and receive, and pay for, the goods which they had stolen. Such was the now vanished town of Jomsborg which Palnatoki, the Jarl of Fjon, founded about 950 in the country of the Wends, near the mouth of the Oder. This town was intended to be an abode of peace, where not only could the merchants reside in safety, but to which the Viking Jarls, fighting elsewhere between themselves, might resort to exchange the results of their raids. And this city gradually became not only the market for the goods which the sea-rovers gathered from sacked cities and ruined monasteries, but also the emporium of the merchandise of the East, which reached the Baltic from Byzantium by the Euxine and the Dnieper. It was in this Viking market town that the first German merchants established among themselves that association which eventually grew to be the most important trading community of the Middle Ages. The name which the association took to itself was a Gothic word, and was not improbably conferred upon them by the Vikings themselves, since Hansa means--in the language of the Goths--"a company," or "a troop," and in that sense it occurs in the Gothic version of the Scriptures by Ulphilas, a copy of which is preserved in the library of Upsala. Some of the rules which Palnatoki made for these merchants remained in force throughout the existence of the League, and formed the basis of the laws by which all the factories of the Hansa were governed. The _Joms Vykinga Saga_ contains some of these rules:--"No man older than fifty years or younger than eighteen winters could be received." "Anyone who committed what had been forbidden was to be cast out, and driven from the community." "No one should have a woman within the burgh, or be absent from it for three nights." Governed by such rules, the Kontors of the League formed among the alien populations in which they were placed semi-monastic establishments, holding only such intercourse with their neighbours as their business required, much like the early British factories established in India.