Note 557 — Chapter IX · —Oceans And Enclosed Seas

The same thing has come to pass in the North Sea. Originally Celtic on its western or British side, as opposed to its eastern or Germanic coast, it has been wholly Teutonized on that flank also from the Strait of Dover to the Firth of Tay, and sprinkled with Scandinavian settlers from the Firth of Tay northward to Caithness.557 The eleventh century saw this ethnic unification achieved, and the end of the Middle Ages witnessed the diffusion of the elements of a common civilization through the agency of commerce from Bruges to Bergen. The Baltic, originally Teutonic only on its northern and western shores, has in historical times become almost wholly Teutonic, including even the seaboard of Finland and much of the coast provinces of Russia.558 Unification of civilization attended this unification of race. In its period of greatest historical significance from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, the Baltic played the rôle of a northern Mediterranean.559 The countless shuttles of the Hanse ships wove a web of commercial intercourse between its remotest shores. Novgorod and Abö were in constant communication with Lübeck and Stralsund;560 and Wisby, on the island of Gotland at the great crossroads of the Baltic,561 had the focal significance of the Piræus in ancient Aegean trade.