WORLD HISTORY - CITIES OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE

This chapter starts by identifying the chronology of European urbanization in the Middle Ages beginning with the murky origins of urbanity before 1000 and taking into account the different periods of town foundation and the factors influencing them. There follows a more thematic description of the different functions of cities during the golden era of urban growth in the high Middle Ages, before the discussion turns to the late medieval crisis and changes affecting towns. Attention is then given to the development of municipal communalism, which since Max Weber has often been seen as distinctive for the European medieval city. The final section looks at how this urban ideology evolved and spread. The central argument of this chapter stresses the mutual influence of demographic, economic, and political variables that resulted in a vibrant and resilient urban landscape, sustaining a drive towards a first ‘modernity’.1

THE ORIGINS OF MEDIEVAL URBAN EUROPE (LATE ANTIQUITY–11TH CENTURY)

Broaching the subject of the origins of medieval urban Europe may wrongly suggest that the city was a totally new phenomenon in European history. In fact, in many cases medieval urbanity was built on a solid urban tradition, at least in those parts of Europe heavily influenced by the Roman empire or ‘romanitas’2. The urban legacy of Roman antiquity remained most pronounced in the organization of the Catholic Church, which took over the network of Roman ‘civitates’ when developing its own circuit of bishoprics. Hence the extremely unbalanced territorial division of bishops’ sees across Europe that the Church maintained throughout the Middle Ages. This ranged from an impressive number in Italy, the core land of Roman antiquity, where even small cities could still be the seat of a bishopric and the latter’s presence proved decisive for the nature of a city ‘ubi episcopus ibi civitas’, to an almost nonexistent phenomenon, as in the Low Countries where important medieval cities such as Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, Lille, or Douai in Flanders or Antwerp, Brussels, and Malines in Brabant never had a bishop’s seat within their medieval walls, but had to wait until the Counter-Reformation to see the ecclesiastical map adapted to urban realities. Outside the Mediterranean region, urban archaeology testifies to the presence of centres of habitation in many places during the pre-Roman Celtic period and Roman era, but those settlements did not necessarily develop or maintain an ‘urban’ character. In the eastern parts of Europe, and in the first place beyond the banks of the Rhine and Danube, urban development was barely influenced by the territories’ later incorporation by Christianity. On the contrary, the remarkable development of urban life in the Rhineland was heavily affected by Roman antecedents, which gave cities such as Strasbourg, Worms, Speyer, Mainz, Cologne, and Utrecht and their bishops—several of them becoming prince-bishops andimperial electors—an important role to play in the centuries to come. Ecclesiastical power was enhanced by secular power, since the Holy Roman Emperors bestowed on many bishops control over the territory covered by their dioceses. In Italy this gave birth, at least in the Po valley, to the contados controlled by the cities.

In the centuries following the demise of the power structures of late antiquity, during the 5th to the 7th centuries, urban life often decayed and was reduced to the level of squats in large public buildings. As a result, a form of ‘privatization’ of earlier public buildings took place: the Colisseum in Rome, the arenas in Verona, Lucca, Nîmes, and Arles as well as many temples, mausoleums, theatres, basilica, baths, and big patrician dwellings were divided into separate apartments, as they housed people who fled raids.

The general threat to public order and the insecurity resulting from the incessant incursions first of Germanic tribes (from the 3rd century on) and later of the Vikings, Huns, or Saracens in the course of the 9th and 10th centuries, gave birth to the trend of fortifying urban centres. Even abbeys and the suburbia around abbeys were fortified and became little walled and garrisoned settlements, as examples in northern France show: Saint-Géry in Cambrai, Saint-Rémi in Reims, Saint-Médard in Soissons, Sainte-Colombe in Sens, Saint-Denis near Paris. In the Mediterranean part of ancient Gaul and in northern Italy, the eclipse of territorial power led to the establishment of armed contingents often under noble command within city towers (as in Carcassonne, Toulouse, Béziers), in arenas (as in Nïmes and Arles), and in public baths (as in Aix). The very presence of these milites and boni homines created a special relationship between city and nobility, profoundly different from that in many other parts of medieval Europe.3 At the very same time, a remarkable urban civilization developed in the Muslim Iberian peninsula (711–1492) and in Muslim Sicily (827–1091). In both cases the highpoint was reached during the 11th century. Córdoba, after 929 the capital of the Umayyad caliphate, developed its twenty-one boroughs and two palatial quarters into an agglomeration numbering between 100,000 and 200,000 inhabitants.4 Palermo became the new capital of Sicily under Islamic rule and, in the course of the 10th century, also reached the threshold of 100,000 inhabitants. In both cities a remarkable cultural effervescence based on Islam merged with Greek (Byzantine) and ancient traditions, allowed the flowering of a rich urban civilization able to compete with the splendours of Baghdad. Meanwhile, urban life in western Europe shrank, as the map of Trier illustrates; here the ancient city had contracted by around 1100 to a defensible centre around the cathedral, the bishop’s palace and its dependencies. Even the subsequent growth and new walls constructed up to the 13th century did not reoccupy the abandoned space of the ancient city. The great number of parish churches in cities like Trier by 1200 also implied an equal number of urban graveyards, bringing to mind Jacques Le Goff’s statement that contrary to antiquity the medieval city has ‘urbanised the dead and the city is henceforth also the city of the dead’.5

The development of abbeys often proved to be decisive for the emergence of a local and/or regional market node that could evolve into an urban settlement or trigger the development of a suburb. In the case of England, this path was followed in Canterbury, Worcester, and Winchester. Agrarian growth and the commercialization of agrarian surpluses produced by ecclesiastical landowners allowed for the development of islands of growing market significance during the so-called ‘Carolingian renaissance’ of the years 770–900. More than the effects of long-distance trade that Henri Pirenne once emphasized, it was the internal economic and commercial dynamics in Europe that produced the main impetus for urban growth.6 This was far from being a linear development; setbacks were always possible, as is shown by the fate of the early commercial settlements around the North Sea coast of Europe, the so-called ‘emporia’, such as Quentovic, Domburg, and Dorestat in the Low Countries, and Hamwic, Ribe, Haithabu, and Birka on the coasts of England and Scandinavia. Their activities faded away quickly in the wake of Viking incursions from the 9th century, leaving only archaeological evidence as witness to their once important role.

After this problematic era for European cities before 1000, there was a remarkably long period of continuing urban growth ranging from the 11th until the late 13th–early 14th centuries. Not all urban landscapes were affected in the same way, and important shifts within urban networks were the outcome.

GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT (11TH–13TH CENTURIES)

In Max Weber’s typology the medieval city stands out as a producer (or industrial) city, in contrast to the consumer city of ancient times. Yet the structural processes affecting the European city in the high Middle Ages resulted in very different regional and local outcomes. Even the much-quoted resemblance between the two most urbanized parts of Europe, northern and central Italy on the one hand, the southern Netherlands on the other, with a density of almost 30 per cent of the total population living in cities, has been recently challenged by Chittolini.7 The varied strategies of urban settlement need to be discussed, as they characterized the long period of medieval economic growth stretching from the 11th to the late 13th centuries. Similar trends however are evident in the different parts of Europe, following roughly a pattern and chronology moving from west to east, with Islamic Spain (Al Andalus) the most important exception. Regarding the factors at work in the making of urban Europe, economic development, power, religious interests, and intellectual developments stand out and need attention. What remains striking is the resilience of the most urbanized regions which continued to enjoy a high level of urbanity, even if absolute numbers of town dwellers fluctuated sharply. The regional context is also important in the relationship of cities to political and dynastic powers, and the question of dominance by a city over a larger territory (both in terms of individual property as well as in terms of collective rights) is again crucial. Towards the end of the long period of urban growth, when the internal colonization that Christian Europe had set in motion around the new millennium reached as far as the continent’s northern and eastern borders, as many as 300 new cities were founded per decade between 1240 and 1300 in the Holy Roman empire.8

Looking first at economic development, agricultural surpluses and the existence of urban markets able to distribute and commercialize them were of decisive importance.9 Large landowners had a clear interest in promoting the development of nodal centres of commerce to take advantage of agrarian growth and the general land reclamation which often accompanied it. From 1080 onwards in western parts of France peasants were asked to pay their rents and tenant dues no longer on important religious feast-days, but at the time urban fairs took place. The way a bi-polar city like Arras developed in the course of the 12th century makes clear how regional economic and commercial growth was the driving force behind urban development. The old city nucleus of the ‘civitas’ continued to harbour the bishop and his clerics on one bank of the Crinchon, the river whose hydraulic power sustained several activities linked to the cloth industry, while on the other bank alongside an old Roman road a burgh developed around the abbey of Saint-Vaast, with two marketplaces in its immediate neighbourhood: a smaller one where grain, cloth, and leather were traded, and a bigger one where ironwork and hides were exchanged. Both marketplaces were the pride of the city over the centuries for they remained a critical nexus where agricultural production from the rich surrounding countryside found its outlet to local and (inter)regional markets.

It is clear that the feudal world and its production system coexisted with the urban world without difficulty. This explains the remarkable willingness of princes and lords to promote the development of markets and to grant urban rights, confirm staple rights, and accord exemptions from toll rights, in order to facilitate the organization of markets and the safeguarding of those who participated in them. As we saw in the case of Arras, often an ecclesiastical element was also present, since many cities or boroughs developed in the proximity of a monastery or other ecclesiastical community which needed to market surplus goods (wool, for instance) produced on its estates. Regional economic exchange was integrated within broader urban networks, very often reinforced and formalized in the various cycles of fairs (Champagne, England, Flanders, central Germany) which operated with the support of rulers, and were connected to growing international trade, especially along the coasts of the Mediterranean and northern and Baltic Europe.10 With the intensification of trade, the need for networks of port cities connecting inland trade with the sea increased. In the county of Flanders, count Philippe of Alsace (1157–1191) founded new ports along the Flemish coast facing England: Calais, Gravelines, Dunkirk, Nieuport, Damme, and Biervliet enabled inland production centres of cloth such as Saint-Omer, Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent to have maritime links to the English wool market. The Atlantic coast of northern Iberia developed from around the middle of the 12th until the early 14th century through the creation of dozens of new harbours and port towns in the Basque, Galician, and Cantabrian territories.11 The growing economic development of the Baltic area and the political desire of city merchants to control the coast of a rich agricultural part of Europe stretching from Germany across Poland to the Baltic area led to the formation of the German Hanseatic League. Started formally in the late 13th century as an association of merchants, it grew gradually into a league of cities. The membership of over a hundred cities allowed it to become a major political force during the medieval period which maintained well-organized connections to ‘foreign’ hubs such as Novgorod in Russia, Bergen in Norway, and London and Bruges in western Europe.

In terms of the impact of power, many new cities were the direct result of the political and economic ambitions of princes and feudal lords or of ecclesiastical lords, who sought to demarcate their respective territories by granting ‘urban’ rights to new or existing settlements. The latter were thus turned into strongholds helping to defend a territory from the ambitions of other lords. In Aquitaine where the Capetian kings of France had created new towns of the ‘bastide’ type in an attempt to contain the heretic movement of the Cathars, the growing tensions between the regional lord, the count of Toulouse, and the king of France led to a wave of new bastides or ‘villes neuves’. Count Raymond VII (1222–49) of Toulouse was responsible for the creation of around forty of this type of new town whose typical morphology and urban grid plan would re-emerge in early modern and modern times in newly founded settlements in the colonial world. When the region of south-western France became the frontline during the confrontation between the French and English kings, both sides tried to consolidate their grip on newly conquered territory by founding new towns as regional strongholds. Between the foundation of Cordes in 1222 and of La Bastide d’Anjou in 1370 no fewer than 450 new bastides have been counted, 350 of them between 1230 and 1340. Their creation was often due to a contract between the owner of the land (in many cases an abbey) and the political overlord. A similar movement, though on a lesser scale, occurred in medieval England; the crown, mainly during the reign of Edward I, created about ten new towns in Wales, populated by English ‘colons’, with the ambition to create urban strongholds on the Welsh border. In the Holy Roman Empire important regional dynasties like the Hohenstaufen in the Rhine valley and Alsace, the Wittelsbach in Bavaria, and the Zähringen in what was to become Switzerland, took initiatives to underpin their regional impact and to affirm their political identity in the face of imperial power, by creating towns as strongholds. In inland Germany local political and often religious rulers created or developed a city around the centre of their secular (Burgstadt) or ecclesiastical powerbase (Domburg). At Würzburg, Erfurt, Münster, Osnabrück, Bremen, Hamburg, Paderborn, Halberstadt, and Magdeburg the new bishoprics created after the 8th century developed into important urban centres, since the organization of the empire meant the (prince-)bishops exercised important political and military power.

In northern Germany the coastal area between Kiel and Riga saw the creation of hundreds of urban settlements such as Lübeck, founded in 1143 by Count Adolph II of Holstein reusing the name of an abandoned Slav grod Liubice. In the Nordic and Baltic area more than a hundred towns received a constitution based on that of Lübeck which facilitated their integration into that economically but also politically important network of cities, the Hanseatic League. In the eastern part of central Europe where the German and Slav influences met and merged, the motor of urbanization consisted of the implanting of mainly German ‘colons’ using the formula of the locatio civitatis. The new settlements received the rights of Magdeburg or Lübeck and were crucial in the spread of German cultural and political domination. As in other fields, Europe experimented in the organization of urban centres and in the way that different social and ethnic groups were accommodated. A striking example were the so-called ‘fondaci’ in the big Italian merchant cities, foremost in Venice. The word is derived from the Arabic ‘funduq’ meaning a quarter reserved for housing foreign (Christian) merchants and often spatially separated from the surrounding city and thus very recognizable.12 As a model it spread all over the European western world.

Cities themselves were involved in the creation of new urban settlements, as for instance in those heavily urbanized parts of Italy where many older and bigger cities took the lead. The procedure became established once the peace treaty of Constance with the German emperor (1183) gave the cities the right to self-government. In the Po valley, the Veneto, and Lombardy, new urban centres, often with the civic recognition of existing agrarian settlements, were established. In many cases they were recognizable by their designation as ‘borgo franco’ or ‘castelfranco’. In Piemonte alone around 200 borghi franchi have been identified. On the island of Sardinia, the maritime powers of Genoa and Pisa developed new foundations, often reusing older sometimes Roman urban structures in order to develop the strongholds that their commercial expansion in this part of the Mediterranean needed. The way the Pisans restructured the city of Cagliari illustrates this kind of action which was very close to a ‘colonial’ enterprise. On the mainland, in Tuscany, the competing cities of Florence, Siena, Lucca, and Arezzo put new cities on the map, in order to reinforce their grip on their contados at the expense of other major Tuscan cities.

In terms of religion, the cult of saints and the widespread practice of pilgrimages all over Christian Europe resulted in the establishment of urban settlements in order to facilitate the transit of great numbers of pilgrims. Along the roads leading to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, an important number of new burghs appeared between the Pyrenees and Santiago during the late 11th and first half of the 12th century. These new cities, which attracted a great number of immigrant ‘francos’ or settlers, developed where the ‘camino’ crossed a river, or in the neighbourhood of a monastery or Episcopal see, while some older cities, like Pamplona, Jaca, Estella, Burgos, or Leon were revitalized and grew considerably because of their pivotal location on the ‘camino’. The kings of Leon and Castile and later of Portugal used the Church and the Catholic ‘reconquista’ of Islamic territories to expand their power with important implications for the spread of urban settlements and urban rights. In Catalonia, the count-kings and the kings of Aragon combined initiatives for economic growth with the desire to protect the new Christian population through bastide-like foundations, a strategy repeated when Christian influence reached further south, towards Valencia and Murcia.

Lastly, intellectual developments such as the presence of a reputed school, attached to a chapter of canons or to a monastery, attracted outsiders to many cities, as well as meeting the growing urban demand for better trained administrative personnel. Moreover, the advent of that other European medieval legacy, the university, meant for certain cities a fundamental evolution. Already in the older university towns (such as Bologna, Paris, Oxford, or Montpellier, gradually developing into genuine universities in the years 1200 to 1215) the relationship of the ecclesiastical and university authorities with the host municipalities was complex and often problematic, since the universities’ masters and students claimed extensive privileges which often conflicted with the city’s interests. Pressure on cities by emperors, kings, and princes meant that in some cases a city was forced to host a university, while other cities competed among themselves to obtain one. A pattern however emerges: the majority of medieval universities were situated in the cities of southern Europe, reflecting a higher level of urbanization and an earlier presence of lay public life and written law. Economic development and the awakening of nationalist sentiment accounted for another wave of new universities in the later medieval period with the foundation in 1347 of the University of Prague marking a turning-point for central and eastern Europe.13

CRISIS AND DECLINE (14TH–15TH CENTURIES)

The Western world around 1300 has been described by the demographer Pierre Chaunu as ‘un monde trop plein’. It was a time that saw a profound crisis which changed fundamentally the course of economic and urban development. The long phase of sustained and generalized economic growth after 1000 gradually came to a stand-still in the last quarter of the 13th century, with direct and important consequences for urban society. The crisis provoked a number of severe and long-lasting social and political conflicts that were acute in the great urban centres of the Flemish, northern Italian, and Catalan regions. The big concentrations of the urban workforce in specialist sectors, notably textile production, meant that falling living standards led to serious political disturbances. As a result, a first wave of generalized unrest spread through Europe’s urban society from around 1275 onwards, and continued with variable intensity until c.1320. More of these waves of urban revolts were to follow—around 1380 for instance. Such protest movements were also indicative of the fact that by the start of the 14th century the Malthusian limits of the economy had been reached; in the years 1315–1317 a general famine hit the north-western part of Europe, the first of a long list to come. In some cases we can measure the death rate, highest in the cities; thus the industrial city of Ypres in Flanders lost 10 per cent of its population between May and October 1316. In the following years in certain cities of Lithuania, England, and Poland scenes of cannibalism were mentioned, a biblical topos undoubtedly, but nevertheless testimony to the social chaos that famine provoked.14

There was more to come. The Black Death of 1347–1350 hit Europe and was responsible for the loss of at least one-third of the total population, not least in cities. More important still, bubonic plague became endemic and outbreaks recurred almost every ten or fifteen years, which meant that until the middle of the 15th century every generation had to face once or more of the effects of excessive mortality. Critically, young adults, that is the most productive groups, were the worst hit. They did not have time to develop any form of immunity and the fact that they were often under-nourished made them extra vulnerable to the repeated outbreaks of the disease. Contrary to what happened in the countryside where many villages were abandoned, cities continued to attract a new and fresh population from their hinterlands and urban networks showed a remarkable resilience, albeit on a much reduced demographic scale. Depopulation had very important effects: the sharp fall of the value of houses and property, for instance, together with a substantial redistribution of wealth, all of these were responsible for an urban society in which social relations were redefined. Although precise indications remain scarce, an exceptional source such as the first general survey of Florentine families in 1427 made for fiscal purposes, the catasto, allows us to see a growing difference in the age at which people first married: around 25–30 years of age for a man, while a woman was much younger when she entered into marriage.15 The result was an urban society in which the remarriage of widows and prolonged adolescence of young males posed serious social problems and created a turbulent political atmosphere.

One effect of decline was visible in the townscape; in many cities buildings were left uninhabited which resulted in the abandonment of whole quarters, often in the suburbs. This was only partly offset by higher immigration from the countryside towards cities or between cities. Only in the second half of the 15th century did a slow demographic recovery set in, though urban Europe had to wait until industrialization accelerated after 1800 to recover fully and reach the population levels attained already around 1300. The commercial hubs of western Europe so important in the early modern period (Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London) escaped economic recession up to a point, buoyed up by diversified international trade, including to the Baltic, and by 1500 enjoyed increasingly high living standards that attracted newcomers.16

General insecurity, and more precisely war and famine, were responsible too for renewed attention to fortifications and the need to defend the city and make it less vulnerable to attacks from the outside. Hence revived investment in walls, gates, and fortifications, which had important consequences not only for the built environment, but also for the creation of a more effective financial structure (taxes and loans) to fund these works. The latter development in its turn contributed to the redistribution of wealth and the growth of social inequality, which provided fuel for new social conflicts.

If, in general, cities withstood the effects of the repeated demographic disasters of the late Middle Ages, some fundamental shifts are evident in the European urban system. Due to new and better techniques of communication and exchange, the traditional overland trade route between northern and southern Europe, centred on the Champagne fairs, had already declined rapidly from the late 13th century in favour of the development of the Atlantic seaboard whose many port cities were drawn into the general commercial upswing. The cities on Spain’s north coast, on France’s Atlantic shore and on both the south and south-eastern coast of England and on the coastline of what became from the late 14th century the Burgundian Low Countries created a network of commercial and economic strongholds in which urban interests and urban policy were the driving forces, as the reasons behind the gradual shift between Bruges and Antwerp as the leading emporia in north-western Europe at the very end of the medieval period suggest.

New shipbuilding methods, sailing techniques, and advanced insurance, originally developed in the great Italian maritime cities of Genoa and Venice, and also in Florence and Milan, gradually spread to the Atlantic coast of Europe and helped to underpin the early colonial enterprises of Portugal and Spain, and later of England and the Netherlands. Older historiography considered the Hanseatic area of northern Germany and the Baltic as lagging behind in the new financial developments but, on the contrary, that part of medieval Europe adapted their commercial methods to support the growth of their bulk trade in grain, wood, hides, and furs.

The structural adaptations in both textile and metallurgical economic activities highlighted another pole of remarkable urban growth during the 15th century in southern Germany, where inland cities like Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Ulm flourished, enjoying direct commercial links through Venice to the Mediterranean and Middle East.

Despite recurrent warfare from the time of the Crusades in the 11th century, the Arab ports and commercial cities in the Middle East, such as Aleppo, Alexandria, and Cairo, continued to function as major entrepots for trade with the West. The exchange rate between East and West may have been to the advantage of the East throughout the Middle Ages, but the commercial activity of merchants from Genoa and Venice (but also from Catalan or Provençal ports) maintained the importance of intercontinental traffic in luxury goods, both imports (spices, silks) and exports (mainly textiles and silver) that linked European cities through the Middle East to Asia. Trade with the Middle East and beyond also enabled the accumulation of experiences that would prove useful when Europeans started their colonial adventures to Asia and the Americas.

THE MEDIEVAL CITY AND ITS LEGACIES

Behind this survey of urban society, its long era of growth and subsequent crisis, however differentiated in its impact in different parts of medieval Europe, the question remains what were the legacies of the European medieval city. Inevitably some of the ideas proposed by Max Weber come to mind. Here the medieval communal ideal, nurturing the emergence of the ‘burgher’, the typical inhabitant of a burgus, rejoicing in a set of individual rights, and at the same time engaged in a collective enterprise with a set of duties and responsibilities, may have been the most striking theme. Gourevitch pointed out how the medieval burgher was a quite exceptional phenomenon that appeared in European history, and was as such not present in contemporary Byzantine or Islamic societies.17 Recent historiography has argued that ‘communalism’ deserves as much attention as more traditional topics like ‘feudalism’ or ‘parliamentarism’ in the analysis of Europe’s medieval past. The communal element in urban history came to the fore—and was identified as such—when cities reached a level of economic and political influence that put them in a special relationship vis-à-vis traditional powers whether the Church or the princely state (kings and emperors). This different level of development explains why communes were abundant in northern and central Italy from the 12th century onwards, while they remained absent in the south. In the latter region, the Norman conquest, followed by the repression of the communes (as in Messina in 1232) by Emperor Frederick II, prevented a similar flowering of a communal movement, which was potentially on the cards given the advanced urban development of the preceding Byzantine and Islamic period. For similar reasons, cities on the northern German coast were precocious in developing urban autonomy, while this barely affected eastern European cities. The first wave of communes touched the Flemish and Picard area and northern Italy in the years 1070–1130 and were commonly based on a mutual oath between free burghers, a ‘conjuratio’ meant to guarantee freedom and peace within the cities.18

Apart from its relationship with the outside world, the commune redefined the internal organization of cities. In many cases, the commune took over or was based on earlier associations. A very early example in north-western Europe was the ‘ghilde’ in the city of Saint-Omer, in place at the end of the 11th century already and which evolved from an association aiming at the protection and mutual support of the city’s merchants to being an organization open to all formal burghers of the city. In Novgorod the association of merchants, the so-called ‘Hundred men of Ivan’ (from the 13th century onwards), fulfilled a similar role. Novgorod and Moscow were the two Russian towns which participated in the communal movement because of the presence of active associations of merchants.

This brings us to another crucial element of Weber’s archetypal European city: the effects of self-governing urban institutions. In Arezzo, for instance, a private deed of 1098 had already mentioned the presence of two urban consuls, while a formal letter of Pope Pascal II in 1111 addressed to the ‘universitas civium’ of the same Tuscan city allows us to conclude categorically that an autonomous urban body politic in which consuls were active existed by that date. In many cases the juridical proof of the existence of an urban organization was preceded in time by the reference to civic officials at work.

Political disorder and the fragmentation of power in the feudal Europe of the high Middle Ages reinforced in a decisive way the communal movement. In many cities, the power of the local bishop proved no longer capable of imposing the peace that commerce needed so badly. One of the oldest communal statutes known, that of Pistoia of 1117, obliged the local consuls to guarantee peace in the city and in the surrounding contado covering more or less the territory of the diocese, the ‘civitas’ of old times. No surprise that the oldest communes in northern France all developed in the context of episcopal cities: thus Cambrai (1077), Saint-Quentin (1081), Beauvais (1099), Noyon (1108–1109), and Laon (1110–1116). Communes reflected the growing distance between the interests of the economic elites within the cities and the feudal power of the bishops. Their close link to the peace movement did not prevent them from providing an armed response to lords threatening their cities. By the end of the 12th century, however, a shrewd ruler such as the French king Philip Augustus, grantor of no fewer than twenty-eight communal charters between only 1180 and 1190, succeeded in combining his own political agenda with that of the urban peace movement. Some decades earlier, in the years 1127–1128, a major political crisis in the county of Flanders was resolved in such a way that enabled urban interests, in this case of the great Flemish cities of Ghent, Bruges, Saint-Omer, and Lille, to coincide with those of a new dynasty of counts, that of the house of Alsace. The latter took power at the expense of a candidate put forward by the French king, while in return the cities took some steps on the political scene for the first time. A century later, the representatives of the same cities advanced to political centre stage and played an important role as ‘scabini Flandriae’ (aldermen no longer of a single city, but of the county of Flanders) in international politics, above all in relation to making commercial treaties with England. Typical urban institutions, such as the aldermen, could in other words expand their representative role and functions, so that their action embraced the whole of the local region and beyond.

According to Weber, the right to civic administration was characteristic of the medieval commune. Below the level of civic power personified by the aldermen, consuls, or other office holders who acted both as local judges and political administrators, a sometimes complex multi-layered system of organizations combining religious, charitable, or occupational associations evolved. It provided a reservoir of ambitious men—women remained excluded from public functions—active in the public sphere because they felt responsible for what became the leading principle of the commune, the ‘public good’ or ‘bono commune’.19 The wish of the inhabitants of a city to constitute a universitas, a corporative association free to meet and to have internal consultations, was so fundamental that in many cases the portraits of the consuls or aldermen became the image par excellence the city displayed to the outside world, representing them on their seals for instance (see Plate 12.1: seal of the city of Meulan, 1195). Older historiography may have over-emphasized the differences between cities governed by aldermen and those under the regime of consuls, for instance. Ultimately the form of urban government, the way the aldermen, consuls, jurats, échevins, regidores, and the like were designated and the relationship between the different levels of authorities that intervened in the process, responded to one fundamental guiding principle derived from Roman law: ‘quod omnes tangit ab omnibus tractari et approbari debet’ (‘what concerns all has to be negotiated and approved by everybody’), a principle originally conceived in order to settle claims on private property.

In reality, many urban governments tended to become dominated by a small oligarchy. The complex rules and procedures guiding and directing the many elections rarely guaranteed an outcome that corresponded to the early 20th-century liberal dream of ‘urban democracy’. Of course, urban governments were based on the mandate that office-holders were invested with after a successful election. But the fluctuating number of electors, the preliminary elections on the level of parishes, quarters, guilds, corporations, confraternities, the way decisions were reached, preferring votes sometimes by the ‘major pars’ (majority) and on other occasions by the ‘sanior pars’ (the wiser part of the electorate), all these elements ensured that a straightforward ‘democratic’ process was almost never realized. The complex system of selection and decision-making was reflected in communal political structures that in an overwhelming number of cases had a three fold aspect. At the basic level, a general assembly composed of all male inhabitants or burghers having full political rights, a meeting that had in theory sovereign and decisive power but in practice seldom convened; on the second level a more or less limited council which could in certain cases number several dozen, if not more participants, composed of representatives of guilds and similar bodies; and finally an executive body, consisting of the aldermen or consuls who were supposed to handle daily political and financial affairs. Architecturally, this political structure was reflected in the oldest civic palaces in the northern Italian communes: in Brescia (1187), Verona (1193), Bergamo (1200), and Cremona (1206) where in each case a big logia at floor level, open to market activities and ready to receive the popular mass meetings, was surmounted by a series of rooms where the council and the lord mayor and the aldermen could convene, supported in an almost literal way by the underlying bigger meeting of the ‘populo’.20 In a later phase around the middle of the 13th century, both in the big urban centres of central Italy (Bologna is a well documented example) and Flanders (Lille, Ghent, Bruges), a new central market square was ‘constructed’, often an important and costly enterprise which resulted in an open public space available for public political meetings.

The city not only acted as a positive force assembling and uniting the strength of its individual burghers, but also defined the limits of citizenship and regulated the influx of newcomers and their access to the social, juridical, and political protection it offered. Indeed, even in the harsher times of demographic crisis, the city continued to attract newcomers, despite the urban graveyard effect it exercised. To many, therefore, the advantages of living in a city clearly outweighed the disadvantages and inherent risks. The attitude of cities to newcomers was discriminatory and restrictive; already in the 1191 Ghent charter it was said newcomers could be expelled if they were judged to be ‘toti oppido et universitati inutilis’ (‘of absolutely no use to the town and mankind’).

From urban accounts appearing in the 14th century, we can see that special taxes were levied on those who were judged unprofitable to the city. If these measures did not drive them away, then banishment or expulsion from the city could follow. Banned individuals who dared to transgress such measures put their lives in jeopardy. Thus the medieval city not only offered urban-based amenities able to make life easier and respond to social needs, but it also drew clear lines as to who might share in them, and thereby shaped and modelled social behaviour, the labour market, and economic opportunity. It generated its own marginal class and the collective fear of marginal behaviour that went with it, leading to repressive behaviour towards lepers, homosexuals, Jews, beggars, and the like.

Whether or not one was a burgher, and as such had access to the rights and duties associated with it, was a cornerstone of the European urban community and profoundly influenced the later development of European society in a way that other urban civilizations with a different approach to the rights of individual inhabitants did not.21

THE CONSTRUCTION OF CIVIC MEMORY AND IDEOLOGY

The most precious object preserved in many urban palazzi would have been the arca communis, containing both the archives and the financial documents of the commune. Urban emancipation in the central and late Middle Ages and urban (self-)government were epitomized by the organization of urban memory and the breach it created in the clerical monopoly on the written word. This urban pragmatic literacy is testified to from the 12th century, first in the northern Italian cities, where each development of the body politic of the city (from podestà towards a popular regime) went hand-in-hand with a quantitative and qualitative advance in the documentary power of the city. This ever more coherent documentary power became a potent tool in the hands of urban politicians and administrators, powerful since it also successfully underpinned the grip cities exercised on the surrounding countryside. David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber had good reasons for considering the Florentine catasto of 1427 as a renaissance monument, intellectually as impressive as many famous works of art.22 In this respect the example of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s ‘good government’ in the town hall of Tuscan Siena comes to mind.23

Together with pragmatic literacy, a great tradition of urban ideology evolved in which inspiration from Roman and canon law, as well as intellectual thought from the universities and clerical reform movements, came together to give birth to new ideas of civic power focused around the shared responsibility for the ‘common good’. From the 13th century onwards the Franciscan and Dominican friars developed this urban ideology further.24 Marsiglio of Padua’s famous Defensor pacis of 1324 demonstrates how an Aristotelian view of the origin of power looking for its source in the free communal meeting of citizens became embedded in the urban experiences and practices of the Italian city.

Prior to this quite a singular practice developed in Italy after the late 12th century that aimed at pacifying internal feuds and conflicts within the urban elites by confining governmental authority in a city to a so-called ‘podestà’, an itinerant judge, recruited from among the leading families of the time and trained as a professional mediator. The remarkable circulation of podestàs among north Italian cities had a unifying effect on political ideas and practices and became an effective tool for developing a very urban approach towards governance. A similar movement in the diffusion of codes and practices can be observed in the spread of urban chartered rights: for example, the charters of Louvain in the Low Countries, or of the modest German town of Soest, which were adopted by much bigger cities such as Cologne or Lübeck, the latter in turn influencing the charters of hundreds of urban centres along the Baltic coast. This was a powerful cultural and political manifestation of the importance of imitation and emulation among European cities.

A temporal dimension was added when the political contract among citizens and between the body politic of the city and its ruler, be it a bishop or a secular prince or sovereign, was re-enacted at each dynastic succession and on the occasion of the yearly swearing in of magistrates.25

The mutual set of rights and obligations was read aloud and oaths taken and if necessary discussed and debated. In this respect again, the European city was a hotbed of liberties but in the medieval sense: not of individual citizens, but of collective enterprises. The medieval civitas was a variant of the universitas, in which justice, peace, and concord were but manifestations of divine love. A community was above all a religious community; belonging to a city meant not being an infidel, heretic, or dissident. In sum, the two-fold nature of the medieval European city emerges: an urban community that creates and reinforces bonds among its members, but excludes without compassion those who do not comply.

CONCLUSION

All in all, the medieval city paved the way for important developments of the European city in the early modern period. The urban network created during the Middle Ages, the urban space within the walls and many medieval civic institutions continued to distinguish pre-modern European urbanity, albeit subject to change and fashion and the growing influence of external forces. As we have seen, several medieval developments had quite different outcomes depending on the part of Europe affected, with some regions lagging behind in time, and this regionality would continue in the following centuries. Clearly certain ideas, of the individual burgher, of collective responsibility, and the near religious experienced feeling of belonging to the community of burghers were vital for and characterized the urban medieval experience. It is in the field of ideas, of cultural expressions, that the European cities would be confronted by the greatest challenges after 1500. What response would be given to religious upheaval, economic hardship, new techniques of warfare, totally new consumer products, and new exotic cultures, new technologies in production and consumption, and the growth of ever more centralized and powerful ‘states’? The nature of that response is discussed in the next chapter.

NOTES

1. I am very much indebted to several people with whom I discussed this text, some of whom deserve special thanks: foremost among them Martha C. Howell (Columbia University), Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan (Paris Sorbonne), Claire Billen (Université libre de Bruxelles), Peter Arnade (University of Hawaii). The editor kindly helped revise the text and Susie Sutch helped improve the English.
2. The question of the origins of cities (and of ‘what’ defines a city) is a much debated one: recent attempts to synthesize our knowledge, greatly influenced by urban archaeology, are Adriaan Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages. Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
3. See the synthesis by Patrick Boucheron, Denis Menjot, and Marc Boone, ‘La ville médiévale’, in Jean-Luc Pinol, Histoire de l’Europe urbaine. I de l’Antiquité au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003), 308–17 (available in a Spanish translation by Universitat de Valencia, 2010).
4. F. Miranda Garcia, Y. Guerrero Navarrete, Historia de Espana. III: medieval, territorios, sociedades y culturas (Madrid: Silex Ediciones,2008), 47–53, 64–5.
5. Jacques Le Goff, Histoire de la France urbaine. II: la ville médiévale des Carolingiens à la Renaissance (Paris: Le Seuil, 1980), 15.
6. See the still classic: Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities. Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1923).
7. Giorgio Chittolini, ‘Urban Populations, Urban Territories, Small Towns: Some Problems of the History of Urbanization in Northern and Southern Italy (Thirteenth–Sixteenth Centuries)’, in Peter C. M. Hoppenbrouwers, Anteun Janse, and Robert Stein, eds., Power and Persuasion. Essays on the Art of State Building in Honour of W. P. Blockmans (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 234–5.
8. On this and the literature in post-Weber mode concerning the definition of a city: Peter Johanek, F. -J. Post, eds., Vielerlei Städte. Der Stadtbegriff (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2004), and Ferdinand Opll and Christophe Sonnlechner, eds., Europäische Städte im Mittelalters (Innsbruck-Wien: 2010).
9. For the dialectic relation between a city and its direct hinterland: Paulo Charruadas, Croissance rurale et essor urbain à Bruxelles. Les dynamiques d’une société entre ville et campagnes (1000–1300) (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 2011).
10. An overview of the history of commercial fairs: Franz Irsigler, ‘Jahrmärkte und Messesysteme im westlichen Reichsgebiet bis ca. 1250’, in Volker Henn, Rudolf Holbach, Michel Pauly, and W. Schmid, eds., Miscellanea Franz Irsigler. Festgabe zum 65. Geburtstag (Trier: Porta Alba Verlag, 2006), 395–428.
11. Beatriz Arizaga Bolumburu, ‘Las actividades economicas de las villas maritimas del norte peninsular’, in Las sociedades urbanas en la Espana medieval. XXIX semana de Estudios Medievales, Estella 2002 (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2003), 195–242.
12. See below, Ch. 15, and further: Donatella Calabi and Derek Keene, ‘Merchant’s Lodgings and Cultural Exchange’, in id., ed., Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, vol. 2: Cities and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/ ESF, 2007), 318–31.
13. Hilde De Ridder-Symoens, ed., A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1: Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
14. William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine. Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
15. David Herlihy and Cristiane Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles. Une étude du catasto florentin de 1427 (Paris: Ed. CNRS, 1978).
16. See below, Ch. 14.
17. Aaron Gourevitch, Les catégories de la culture médiévale (Paris: Gallimard, 1983) (original Russian edn. 1972).
18. Knut Schulz, ‘Denn sie lieben die Freiheit so sehr…’ Kommunale Aufstände und Entstehung des europäischen Bürgertums im Hochmittelalter (Darmstadt: 1992); Peter Blickle, Kommunalismus: Skizzen einer gesellschaftlichen Organisationsform, 2 vols. (Oldenbourg: 2000).
19. Cf. Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, eds., De Bono communi. The discourse and Practice of the Common Good in the European City (13th–16th c.) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010).
20. An overall view in Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Les villes vivantes. Italie XIIIe–XVe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2009).
21. Leo Lucassen and Wim Willems, Living in the City. Urban Institutions in the Low Countries, 1200–2010 (New York: Routledge, 2012) (in press).
22. See above, n. 15.
23. Patrick Boucheron, ‘“Tournez les yeux pour admirer, vous qui exercez le pouvoir, celle qui est peinte ici”. La fresque dite du Bon Gouvernement d’Ambrogio Lorenzetti’, Annales. Histoire sciences sociales, 6 (2005), 1137–99.
24. Francesco Todeschini, Ricchezza francescana. Dalla povertà volontaria alla società di mercato (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004); M. S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
25. Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, La ville des cérémonies. Essai sur la communication politique dans les anciens Pays-Bas bourguignons (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004).

By Marc Boone in "Cities in World History", edited by Peter Clark, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2013, excerpts chapter 12. Adapted and illustrated by Leopoldo Costa.