As the European population grew after 1100 CE, bishops and princes in the thinly settled regions northeast of what we now call Germany took to generating revenue and labor power by recruiting qualified migrants to newly chartered cities and villages. Often the charters granted access to German law rather than the Slavic or Scandinavian codes and practices that had previously prevailed. German law afforded both merchants and peasants greater individual freedom and more secure claims to property than did earlier legal arrangements. Soon German-speaking cities such as Danzig and Riga were booming as crossroads in the exchange of northern goods for the manufactures of Central and Western Europe. In their hinterlands, German-speaking farmers intensified cultivation and shipped agricultural products to centers of international trade. Fairly soon, however, strengthened coercive monarchies and mercantile federations such as the Hanse extracted revenues and exerted top-down controls that increased inequality between insiders and outsiders of the newly expanding political economy. We might call the whole process Europeanization. Within Europeanization, however, what caused what? How did German law, semi-autonomous cities, intensive farming, exclusive trading federations, developmental states, and proliferating markets interact? Decades of vigorous, often vitriolic, debate among historians have not yet produced a clear-cut victory for the view that well- articulated markets did the crucial work, for the riposte that new forms of force-backed exploitation caused the transformation, or for any alternative to those competing explanations.