Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
Slowly but surely the foreign commerce of the country, hitherto conducted by the Italian, the Hanse merchant, or the trader of Catalonia or southern Gaul, was passing into English hands. English merchants were settled at Florence and at Venice. English merchant ships appeared in the Baltic.
Yet the month of April passed away without the occurrence of any event important to the Hanse Towns, the inhabitants of which vacillated between hope and fear. Attacks daily took place between parties of Russian and French troops on the territory between Lunenburg and Bremen. In one of these encounters General Morand was mortally wounded, and was conveyed to Lunenburg.
I allude to the decree for burning all the English merchandise in France, Holland, the Grand Duchy of Berg, the Hanse Towns; in short, in all places subject to the disastrous dominion of Napoleon.
Sweden, Denmark, the Hanse Towns, were in harmony with France, Holland, Savoy, and the whole Protestant force of Germany a majority both in population and resources of the whole empire. What army, what combination, what device, what talisman, could save the House of Austria, the cause of Papacy, from the impending ruin?
Commerce, the mother of Netherland freedom, and, eventually, its destroyer even as in all human history the vivifying becomes afterwards the dissolving principle commerce changes insensibly and miraculously the aspect of society. Clusters of hovels become towered cities; the green and gilded Hanse of commercial republicanism coils itself around the decaying trunk of feudal despotism.
In 1796 he was appointed a Minister to the Hanse Towns, and, without knowing why, he was hailed as the point of rally to all the philosophers, philanthropists, Illuminati and other revolutionary amateurs, with which the North of Germany, Poland, Denmark, and Sweden then abounded.
And be it remembered that they were able to achieve this because many of the North-Netherland towns were themselves members of the Hanse League, and possessed therefore the same rights and privileges commercially as their rivals, Hamburg, Lübeck or Danzig.
I declared that it was urgent to put an end to this state of things. The Hanse towns had been reduced from opulence to misery by taxation and exactions, and were no longer able to provide the funds. During this year Napoleon, in a fit of madness, issued a decree which I cannot characterise by any other epithet than infernal.
He often protected Hamburg against exorbitant exactions, The Hanse Towns revived a little under his government, which continued longer than that of Mortier, Michaud, and Brune. The memory of Bernadotte will always be dear to the Hamburgers; and his name will never be pronounced without gratitude.
I was myself, indeed, at a loss to conceive how the absurdity of employing me to make such a proposition was overlooked, for I had, really no advantage to offer in return to the Hanse Towns. Against whom did Bonaparte propose to protect them? The truth is, Napoleon then wished to seize these towns by direct aggression, which, however, he was not able to accomplish until four years afterwards.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking