In the division of the spoil of Henry the Lion Saxony was cut up into pieces; a large portion of it went to the Archbishop of Cologne; and Bernhard of Anhalt, son of Albert the Bear, obtained a considerable part of the remainder; the supremacy over Holstein, Mecklenburg, and Pomerania, ceased; and Lübeck became a free imperial city. All the archbishops, bishops, counts, and barons, seized as much as they could, and became immediate vassals of the empire. Neither Bernhard nor the Archbishop of Cologne was able completely to establish his power over the portion assigned him, and lawless violence everywhere prevailed. "There was no king in Israel, and every one did that which was right in his own eyes," is the language of the Chronicler[113]. [Footnote 113: Arnold of Lübeck, Chronica Slavorum, l. iii. c. 1., apud Leibnitz Scriptores Rerum Brunsvicarum, t. ii. p. 653.] We here again meet an instance of the compensatory principle which prevails in the arrangements of Providence. It was the period of turbulence and anarchy succeeding the outlawry of Henry the Lion which gave an impulse to the building or enlarging of towns in the north of Germany. The free Germans, as described by Tacitus, scorned to be pent up within walls and ditches; and their descendants in Saxony would seem to have inherited their sentiments, for there were no towns in that country till the time of Henry the Fowler. As a security against the Northmen, the Slavs, and the Magyars, this monarch caused pieces of land to be enclosed by earthen walls and ditches, within which was collected a third part of the produce of the surrounding country, and in which he made every ninth man of the population fix his residence. The courts of justice were held in these places to give them consequence; and, their strength augmenting with their population, they became towns capable of resisting the attacks of the enemy, and of giving shelter and defence to the people of the open country. Other towns, such as Münster, Osnabrück (_Osnaburgh_), Paderborn, and Minden, grew up gradually, from the desire of the people to dwell close to abbeys, churches, and episcopal residences, whence they might obtain succour in time of temporal or spiritual need, and derive protection from the reverence shown to the church. A third class of towns owed their origin to the stormy period of which we now write; for the people of the open country, the victims of oppression and tyranny, fled to where they might, in return for their obedience, meet with some degree of protection, and erected their houses at the foot of the castle of some powerful nobleman. These towns gradually increased in power, with the favour of the emperors, who, like other monarchs, viewing in them allies against the excessive power of the church and the nobility, gladly bestowed on them extensive privileges; and from these originated the celebrated Hanseatic League, to which almost every town of any importance in Westphalia belonged,