Lords and Towns in Medieval Europe

The European Historic Towns Atlas Project

Howard B. Clarke, Anngret Simms, Howard B. Clarke, Anngret Simms

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351921282
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This volume is based on possibly the biggest single Europe-wide project in urban history. In 1955 the International Commission for the History of Towns established the European historic towns atlas project in accordance with a common scheme in order to encourage comparative urban studies. Although advances in urban archaeology since the 1960s have highlighted the problematic relationship between the oldest extant town plan and the actual origins of a town, the large-scale cadastral maps as they have been made available by the European historic towns atlas project are still necessary if we want to understand the evolution of the physical form of our towns. By 2014 the project consisted of over 500 individual publications from over 18 different countries across Europe. Each atlas comprises at least a core-map at the scale of 1:2500, analytical maps and an explanatory text. The time has come to use this enormous database that has been compiled over the last 40 years. This volume, itself based on a conference related to this topic that was held in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin in 2006, takes up this challenge. The focus of the volume is on the question of how seigneurial power influenced the creation of towns in medieval Europe and of how this process in turn influenced urban form. Part I of the volume addresses two major issues: the history of the use of town plans in urban research and the methodological challenges of comparative urban history. Parts II and III constitute the core of the book focusing on the dynamic relationship between lordship and town planning in the core area of medieval Europe and on the periphery. In Part IV the symbolic meaning of town plans for medieval people is discussed. Part V consists of critical contributions by an archaeologist, an art historian and an historical geographer. By presenting case studies by leading researchers from different European countries, this volume combines findings that were hitherto not available in English. A comparison of the English and German bibliographies, attached to this volume, reveals some interesting insights as to how the focus of research shifted over time. The book also shows how work on urban topography integrates the approaches of the historian, archaeologist and historical geographer. The narrative of medieval urbanization becomes enriched and the volume is a genuine contribution to European studies.

PART I:
THE CHALLENGE OF COMPARATIVE URBAN STUDIES

Chapter 1

The European Historic Towns Atlas Project:
Origin and Potential

Anngret Simms

The human spirit in material form: antecedents of the European historic towns atlas

At the end of the Second World War a desire grew up amongst European countries to work together in the spirit of reconciliation. For its part, the International Commission for the History of Towns (ICHT) agreed in 1955 in Rome to the production of a European historic towns atlas. The intention was then, and still is, to facilitate comparative urban studies and to encourage a better understanding of common European roots. The focus of this work was an edition of the first accurately surveyed cadastral plans produced in the early nineteenth century in order to have a reliable topographical base for comparative research concerning the origin and development of towns in Europe. In fact, the aim of the towns atlas project was not primarily to explore individual towns but to establish a typology of European towns.¹

Yet the project was not the brainchild of the commission alone, but drew on pioneering work by German scholars who lived in the nineteenth century. In a review article M.P. Conzen (Chicago) pursued the question of how, why and when such ‘a creative impulse’ emerged.² According to him, the first scholar to mention the importance of town plans in exploring historic urban morphology and topography was the German social and cultural historian W.H. Riehl, who in 1859 wrote that the town plan of Augsburg served as the ground plan of society and expressed in material form the culture of its people.³

Towards the end of the same century, Johannes Fritz, a secondary school teacher in Strasbourg with a doctorate in history, wrote a brochure containing a study of German town plans.⁴ In the nineteenth century many individual town histories had been written, mainly by parish priests and teachers, yet they did not include town plans. Travel literature such as the Bädecker volumes included town plans, but at a very small scale. Fritz proposed a new approach to urban history. He suggested that, whilst exploring the constitutional identity of medieval towns, we should not forget their physical form and suggested that ‘we look at the material body of towns beyond their constitutions, their statutes and their institutions and compare them according to their manner of construction, layout and appearance’.⁵ He actually proposed the compilation of a book of German town plans.

Following in the footsteps of nineteenth-century historians, Fritz wrote that any overall changes in the physical fabric of a town would have been associated with legal changes such as the granting of a town charter. He pointed out that, wherever east of the River Elbe during the period of medieval German colonization towns were regularly laid out either on the site of an older Slavic settlement, or near to it, or on tabula rasa, the reason for this innovation was primarily to be found in the granting of German town law and not in the activities of German settlers as such.⁶ In his native town of Rostock on the Baltic he observed that the Altstadt (old town), Mittelstadt (middle town) and Neustadt (new town) were founded between 1189 and 1252, and were amalgamated in 1262 when the town was granted a new charter. The amalgamation of the former independent units brought with it the layout of a new centrally located marketplace with a town hall.

Fritz’s innovative brochure was printed in the journal of the school in Strasbourg (Straßburg) where he taught at the time — hardly a publication of high visibility. Nevertheless, five years later the cultural geographer Otto Schlüter referred to Fritz’s collection of town plans as indicators of national identity.⁷ Town plan analysis at that time was preoccupied with the attempt to define regional identities. Medieval historians were supportive of these studies since they were short of documentary evidence for the early formation of towns. Some of them assumed that street patterns reach back into a town’s period of origin. This is a controversial issue to which we need to return later. The emphasis on town plans as source material for urban history gained in importance and provided a counterweight to the historian’s focus on urban constitutional topography, concerned with the power structure that influenced the formation of towns.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars such as Wilhelm Neumann, whose paper on town plans as historical documents appeared in 1911, and Christoph Klaiber, whose book on German medieval town plans was published in 1912, began to recognize distinct growth phases of plans as well as the importance of the urban plot as part of the building blocks.⁸ From the same period stems a masterpiece of thematic urban mapping at a large scale — Hugo Hassinger’s Kunsthistorischer Atlas of Vienna, published in 1916.⁹ In this remarkable work Hassinger, a geographer who established a close link between geography and art history, indicated in colour the age of individual buildings (often distinguishing between façades and the rear), thereby providing information for the preservation of historic buildings as well as illustrating the phased character of the urban fabric.

According to the medieval historian Heinz Stoob, the founder and former editor of the Deutscher Städteatlas, formal efforts to produce a towns atlas go back to 1913, when Paul Krauss and Erich Uetrecht, both geographers, published a volume of 50 multi-coloured plans of German towns.¹⁰ Stoob criticized this project because the format was too small and the collection included only big towns; the town plans were drawn to different scales and only street blocks were shown but not individual house plots, which are vital for the interpretation of a town plan.¹¹ Furthermore, the main drawback of this pioneering effort was that the dates of the maps were such that they included all the post-industrial changes in the centre of towns.

The first attempt at compiling a small regional towns atlas was K.O. Müller’s publication in 1914 of old and new plans of Upper Swabian imperial towns.¹² An important step forward was the towns atlas for Lower Saxony compiled by P.J. Meier and first published in 1922.¹³ This contained in folio format 29 cadastral maps of towns in central Europe, published from c.1830, as its centrepiece. These showed the pre-industrial town plan in several colours and were generally considered suitable source material for comparative analysis. Alongside these maps an essay provided a short history of the town. The maps show clearly that the individual urban plot constitutes the fundamental spatial unit that makes up the town plan. For the historic town of Brunswick (Braunschweig), Meier provided maps at different dates in the town’s development and produced a growth map of the type that was to become a feature of later town atlases. Meier’s atlas was reissued in 1926 and folios for a further seven towns were published in 1933 and 1935. Meier died in 1946 at the age of 91 with his regional atlas of reconstructed town plans not completed. The two world wars were probably to blame. Fortunately Meier’s concepts were revived on a European scale in the 1950s by the ICHT.

The International Commission for the History of Towns and the European historic towns atlas project

By the end of the nineteenth century, research into urban history began to flourish, but only within national boundaries. We can reconstruct the steps that led to the establishment of the ICHT from the minutes of the commission.¹⁴ It was at the historical congress in Warsaw in 1933 that the first signs of international urban studies began to surface.¹⁵ At the historical congress in Rome in 1953 Edith Ennen in particular evoked the need for further exploration of urban history at international level in order that a typology of European towns might be established. At the congress a number of historians from France, Germany and Poland agreed informally at an evening session that research into comparative urban history should be encouraged under agreed guidelines. It was also suggested that, in order to facilitate this aim, important source material concerning national urban histories should be made available in print. Hermann Aubin and Ennen, the German representatives on the International Council of Historical Sciences, went a step further and proposed the establishment of a separate international commission for the history of towns. This request was finally granted at the historical congress in Rome in 1955 and Aubin was asked to put the plan into action.¹⁶ He was told to co-opt members and the new commission was to define its own projects. Its first session was held in Dijon in 1956 and since then the commission has convened annually in different European cities and towns.¹⁷ The commission decided to focus its work on the publication of source material for the study of urban history, which was to be done separately in the different European countries but to a common concept. The following tasks were decided on:

1. Top of the list stood the distribution of bibliographies as an aid for neighbouring countries. The motivation for this was to encourage comparative work.¹⁸
2. The publication of medieval town charters. Friedrich Keutgen’s collection of charters concerning the constitutional history of towns that had been in use in Germany for over half a century by then was to serve as a model. This codex was to facilitate comparative studies.¹⁹
3. The publication of an atlas of the historical typology of European towns during the Middle Ages.

The European historic towns atlas project

From the very beginning it was intended that the atlases should be based on a unified concept in order to facilitate comparative studies. Therefore the establishment of agreed guidelines was an important point. In this context the most contested issue was the scale for the core map. A prolonged discussion took place within the ICHT on this point. In 1969 Stoob, showing signs of exasperation, posed the question: ‘How can we contemplate an international atlas at the scale of 1:5000 if that scale implies that we cannot include small towns and medium-sized towns?’ Stoob suggested that it was necessary either to forget about small towns altogether (constituting 80 per cent of all towns) and produce an atlas of big towns only, or to choose another scale at 1:2000 or 1:2500.²⁰ In the end it was decided to use the early nineteenth-century cadastral maps at a scale of 1:2500.

The task of setting up the historic towns atlas project was facilitated by the fact that in 1954, a year before the atlas scheme was decided upon, three well-known German scholars — the historian Erich Keyser and the geographers Thomas Kraus and Emil Meynen — had written a position paper in which they explained why a German towns atlas should be undertaken.²¹ This position paper (Denkschrift) was a manifesto confirming that the German towns atlas was to interpret German towns in their central European context regarding their historical development and present-day existence. The cartographically based volumes were to support scholars as well as administrators. The emphasis was to be on the spatial formation of towns as represented in town plans or reconstructed maps. The focus was to be on the core of towns and cities and on the phased e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Ferdinand Opll: An Appreciation
• Introduction
• Part I: The Challenge of Comparative Urban Studies
• Part II: Case Studies from a National Perspective in the Core Area of Medieval Europe
• Part III: Case Studies from a National Perspective on the Periphery of Medieval Europe
• Part IV: Symbolic Meanings of Town Plans
• Part V: Approaches to the Interpretation of Large-scale Town Plans
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Index