Quote:
Originally Posted by Skybird
(my favourite example being the Hanse which blossemed when it had no caste of career politicians, and once the career politicians took over, got immersed in unneeded foreign political conflicts and so descended).
|
You are once again oversimplifying and twisting history to back your worldview.
The Hanseatic League was already very much embroiled in foreign conflicts long before its (gradual) decline. The League's decline was more to do with outside pressure from other emerging powers than "career politicians".
The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire, Vol. 2 summarizes:
Quote:
The debut of the League was thus very successful. As a political
weapon it proved itself equally successful in the struggles which it was
to wage in the subsequent hundred or hundred and fifty years. The
Treaty of Utrecht of 1474, which concluded a somewhat similar
conflict with England a century later, still found the League in full
possession of its foreign privileges and as triumphant over its enemies
as it had been in 1370. Yet, successful as the League was in direct
political action, it failed, as it was bound to fail, in its attempt to arrest
the march of economic and political forces which continued to shape
the evolution of trade in northern Europe. It was unable to defend its
position in Novgorod in the face of the rising power of the Tsars;
unable to maintain its old position in Flanders in opposition to the new
centres of northern trade which were rising under different auspices
in Brabant and Holland; unable to maintain its monopoly of eastern
routes; in fact unable to maintain the route itself, which came in the
end to be rivalled and replaced by other routes crossing the continent
further south. Above all it was incapable of preventing the rise of the
two great rivals who were destined in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries to supplant the Hanse in the economic leadership of northern
Europe — England and Holland.
|