When the Hanseatic League became the mistress of the North we find the Germans in absolute control of commerce. They obtained considerable privileges, even the right to acquire pasture land. They fortified their depots with stockades of thick planks, where no Russians had the right to penetrate without their leave. This German trading company was governed by the most narrow and exclusive ideas.
No Russian was allowed to belong to the company, nor to carry the wares of a German, and Englishman, or a Fleming. The company only authorized a wholesale trade, and to maintain her goods at a high price. She forbade imports beyond a certain amount.
During three centuries this league concentrated in her own hands all the external commerce of northern Russia, with the result that Novgorod and her sister city, Pskof, were deprived of free commerce with the West, abandoned to the good pleasure and pitiless egoism of the German merchants.
But while Novgorod and Northern Russia, of which she was the center, fell under the commercial sway of the Germans, and finally was obliged to bow the knee to Moscow, the church had steadily grown in power and at length became thoroughly established throughout the north.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
