Of 140 treaties are recorded in the "Chunqiu", more than half are bilateral. Bilateral treaties were concluded for mutual defence, trade, marriage alliance, and for the sake of traditional friendship between states. With the hegemony of Duke Huan of Qi the states came to rely more upon the meetings of the leagues to settle their problems, and the greater number of the recorded treaties became multilateral. Multilateral treaties often carried more weight with individual states because there were provisions for joint action on the part of the other signatories against any state which violated the provisions. It was only with the decline of Jin power toward the close of the 6th century BC that a system of bilateral alliances again became predominant.