The centre of the Hansa's power had ever been the Baltic Ocean. On its shores the idea of the League had first taken shape: here it had grown and flourished, and here also it was to receive its death blow. As we have said, in the course of the fifteenth century the Dutch gradually came forward as serious competitors of the League. Their geographical position made them freer than the Hanseatics; enclosed in a sort of inland basin to which at any moment they might lose the key, their astuteness was not less keen than that of their rivals, and like their rivals they wisely made use of any quarrels or dissensions that might be abroad. They were not slow, therefore, to discern that the Scandinavian people and also the Scandinavian kings groaned under the heavy despotism exercised by these German merchants. They proposed themselves as substitutes for the Hansa, offering money and support to the kings and easier and better conditions of trade to the natives. These proposals were unofficially accepted. Neither rulers nor ruled as yet dared oppose themselves openly to the League, but they were not sorry to see its power reduced. [Illustration: CHARLES V.] For awhile the Hansa were able to keep their rivals in check, worrying them by piracy on the one hand, and insisting on their ancient claims and trade rights on the other. But Charles V. had ascended the throne; the greatest emperor that had ever governed in Germany since his namesake Charles the Great. He was ruler not only of Germany, but of Spain and the Netherlands, and to the latter people he was especially well disposed. He looked with no friendly eye upon the League, which made itself a power within his territory, and he was not sorry to see it weakened by competition. When the Sound, their Danish Hellespont, the gold mine of the League, continued to be jealously guarded by them, and its navigation denied to other nations, Charles V. declared quite openly that "he would rather miss three royal crowns, than that his Burgunders should be excluded from the Sound." This was a sort of challenge to the Hansa. Let us hear how other circumstances came about to enforce it from other quarters. It may be remembered that since the days of Waldemar Atterdag, the League had always had a voice in the election of a ruler to one of the three northern kingdoms, and that it regarded with no friendly eye the attempts made at a union of those kingdoms under one common head.