In the thirteenth century the enterprising Hansa towns had monopolistic trade factories established not only in England and Scandinavia, and at Novgorod in Russia, but at Pleskow and perhaps even at Moscow. Their fur traders penetrated to the White Sea. Within another century they had extended their operations beyond the Urals into Siberia as far as Tobolsk and the River Taz. By then their bold assurance had gained them factories or the protection of trade-guild concessions in Flanders, France and Portugal. They were granted concessions even in Venice, their great Italian rival, whose own trading galleys were in turn annually invading England and Flanders. But cruelty and haughtiness were born of the Hansa’s strength and pride, and lasting enmities resulted. German arrogance met its first tests at Novgorod. There the Hansa traders incurred the everlasting resentment of the Russians, who in an effort to cope with mounting indignities resorted to cheating the Germans at every opportunity. Buying furs was risky business except in well-lighted places where it was easy to test quality. Resentments often flared into conflict, and the factory in Novgorod became a kind of hostile encampment. In spite of reduced returns, however, the Hansa merchants clung tenaciously to their trading privileges in Russia for some time. Not until Ivan the Terrible crushed the independent provinces and consolidated the Russian Empire were the Germans finally driven out--in the sixteenth century. Then the Scandinavian powers revolted against the Hansa monopolies and the cruelties of the Germans within their borders. During the wars that followed the power of the Hanseatic League declined rapidly. With feudalism breaking up on the continent in western Europe, men had been freed for competitive commerce. It was the time of the Renaissance and trading impulses were quickening everywhere. New maritime states, sensing opportunity, had already risen to challenge the monopoly in the Baltic. Danes, Dutch and even the commercially-retarded English had been competing for the prize. In England as early as 1404 a group of merchant adventurers organized a company to carry trade to Baltic cities. But as it turned out the agricultural English were not ready, for, although their sailors and traders fought savagely during piratical encounters in the Baltic, at home they were still hindered by their feudal system, a system against which the Germans had early rebelled as being incompatible with commercial enterprise. The absence of a large middle class, of sufficient urban community life in England, forestalled any real commerce. The backward Englishmen didn’t have anything but lead, tin and cheap skins to export, and they had to buy back some of that, reworked, at a premium. On the continent at the time there was a saying: “We buy fox skins from the English for a groat, and re-sell them the foxes’ tails for a guilder.”