- Project Runeberg -  Norway and Sweden. Handbook for travellers /
379

(1889) [MARC] Author: Karl Baedeker
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firmed by the fact that the principal churches of the place were
erected by several of the different rival nations. — The famous
maritime Code of Visby, which has no pretension to originality,
being a compilation from Netherlandish and Romanic sources,
is called (in Iowr German) the ‘ Waterrecht, dot de Koopliide und de
Schippers gemaket hebben to Wisby’. — The wealth of the town
in its palmy days was proverbial: —

‘Guld väga de Gutar pä lispundvåg
Och spela med ädlaste stenar.

Svinen äta ur silfverträg

Och hustrurna spinna på guld-tenar’.

( Old Ballad).

(The Gutlanders weigh their gold with twenty-pound weights and play
with the choicest jewels. The pigs eat out of silver troughs, and the
women spin with golden distaffs.)

Having become involved in the wars between Sweden and
Denmark, Visby was attacked by Valdemar III. of Denmark in
1361. He landed at Eista-Soeken, to the S. of the town, and
outside the gates of the city defeated the inhabitants, of whom 1800
fell. He then plundered the place, carrying off his booty to
Denmark, but the largest of his vessels foundered near the Karlsoar,
where it is said still to lie, laden with rich treasures. The town
never recovered from the effects of this invasion.

The annals of the following centuries are chequered with the
varying fortunes of the wars between Sweden and Denmark. For
a time the island was in the possession of the Teutonic Order,
a period (according to Prof. Bergman , the author of ‘Gotlands
Geografi och Historia’) still regarded by the natives as one of the
happiest in their history; but it seems always to have formed a
refuge for adventurers^and marauders of all kinds, including the
‘Vitalienbriider’. Eric XIII. of Pomerania, the deposed king of
Sweden, Ivar Axelson, and particularly Severin Norby, the Danish
admiral. The possession of this 1 insula latronum, as it is called
by Adam of Bremen, was long contested by Swedes, Danes, and
burghers of Liibeck, with varying success, but it was finally
reunited to its proper mother-country by the Peace of Brömsebro in
1645. By this time, however, the prosperity of the place had
dwindled to a mere shadow, and even so early as 1534 the Regent
of the Netherlands writes, probably with some exaggeration , that
Visby, once the most important commercial town in the Baltic,
was then a mere heap of ruins.

Visby {Stad s-Ho tellet, StranJ-Gatan, Pl. B, C, 3, with
restaurant and cafe ; Smedman s Hotel, Häst-Gatan, Pl. C, 3, and
Gastgif-miregard, at the Södraport, Pl. C, 5, are hotels garnis; Restaurant,
Strand-Gatan 18; Ruths of the Xya Radhusbolag, to the S. of the
harbour), which now contains 6700 inliab., or less than one-third
of its population in the days of its mediæval prosperity, is
picturesquely situated partly at the base of and partly upon the Klint,
a cliff 100 ft. in height, and now occupies less than half of the

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