The Later Medieval City

1300-1500

David Nicholas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138157170
• eBook ISBN: 9781317901877
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The Later Medieval City, 1300-1500, the second part of David Nicholas's ambitious two-volume study of cities and city life in the Middle Ages, fully lives up to its splendid precursor, The Growth of the Medieval City. (Like that volume it is fully self-sufficient, though many readers will want to use the two as a continuum.) This book covers a much shorter period than the first. That traced the rise of the medieval European city system from late Antiquity to the early fourteenth century; this offers a portrait of the fully developed late medieval city in all its richness and complexity.

David Nicholas begins with the economic and demographic realignments of the last two medieval centuries. These fostered urban growth, raising living standards and increasing demand for a growing range of urban manufactures. The hunger for imports and a shortage of coin led to sophisticated credit mechanisms that could only function through large cities. But, if these changes brought new opportunities to the wealthy, they also created a growing problem of urban poverty: violence became endemic in the later medieval city.

Moreover, although more rebellions were sparked by taxes than by class conflict, class divisions were deepening. Most cities came to be governed by councils chosen from guild-members, and most guilds were dominated by merchants. The landowning elite that had dominated the early medieval cities of the first volume still retained its prestige, but its wealth was outstripped by the richer merchants; while craftsmen, who had little political influence, were further disadvantaged as access to the guilds became more restricted.

The later medieval cities developed permanent bureaucracies providing a huge range of public services, and they were paid for by sophisticated systems of taxation and public borrowing. The survival of their fuller, richer records allow us not only to apply a more statistical approach, but also to get much closer, to the splendours and squalors of everyday city-life than was possible in the earlier volume. The book concludes with a set of vibrant chapters on women and children and religious minorities in the city, on education and culture, and on the tenor of ordinary urban existence.

Like its predecessor, this book is massively, and vividly, documented. Its approach is interdisciplinary and comparative, and its examples and case studies are drawn from across Europe: from France, England, Germany, the Low Countries, Iberia and Italy, with briefer reviews of the urban experience elsewhere from Baltic to Balkans. The result is the most wide-ranging and up-to-date study of its multifaceted subject. It is a formidable achievement.

Chapter One
The Medieval City at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century¹

Cities, markets and trade before 1200

During the three centuries after the millennium the European city developed as a type and in a regional pattern that would remain essentially fixed politically until the rise of national capitals in the modem period, and economically until the Industrial Revolution, albeit with some important structural changes in the late Middle Ages. The concentration of cities in 1600, with northern Italy, the German Rhineland and the Baltic, and the Low Countries as the major foci and London and Paris overshadowing the urban development of the other centres of England and France, was almost exactly the same then as in 1300. The only exceptions were the growth during the sixteenth century of Madrid and Amsterdam from small places, Antwerp from a major city to a great city, the late medieval growth of Munich and particularly Nuremberg, and the decline of the lesser Italian centres.

The cities of early medieval Europe had developed on a Roman base with a structure of bishoprics superimposed on it. The episcopal organisation was principally late Roman, although in England it came in the seventh century and in Germany east of the Rhine it was Carolingian. Virtually all of these pre-urban nuclei housed a bishop, who was often the secular town lord, other priests and a smaller number of monks. Some housed a lay prince and his entourage in addition to or instead of the bishop. The demand market created by these wealthy consumers attracted some long-distance trade in luxury goods that catered to the ecclesiastical and lay princely courts, as well as artisans and local merchants. The capital base of these settlements was thus created by longdistance trade, almost entirely importing luxury goods. The population base, by contrast, was created by local trade and artisanry, providing utilitarian goods for the residents of the court but also for the traders who catered to them. There is little evidence in the north before the late tenth century of specifically urban elites or governments. In Italy, by contrast, which had stronger ties to Roman patterns of urbanisation, the official and landholding character of the urban elites remained strong, and the organs of civil government developed more quickly than in northern Europe. Evidence of local and long-distance trade centring in the cities of the north, and of mainly local trade around those of Italy, increases in the tenth century and quickens substantially in the eleventh.

While the tenth-century city was primarily ecclesiastical and political, and was almost exclusively a consumer of goods and services, its essential character changed in the eleventh and particularly twelfth centuries. It became an economic agglomeration that not only consumed, but also produced exportable industrial goods and provided important services of reconsignment of basic necessities as well as of luxuries. The major urban industries that produced for more than a site-based constituency at this stage involved working imported wool into fine cloth. This in turn necessitated importing wool and dyes from a wide supply area. Once the network for these exchanges had been created, first by direct contact between northern and Mediterranean merchants and more systematically by the Champagne fairs in the twelfth century, more goods joined textiles in long-distance trade. Some new towns were founded that eventually became major cities, but most urban plantations remained villages in an economic sense, as the available market for urban services eventually became saturated.

The growth of trade in raw materials and in luxuries from the east, and the interregional trade in fine woollens made in the cities naturally led to the increasing importance of merchants in urban society, but there is still little evidence of artisans except as producers for the courts of bishop and prince. As the cities became less seigniorial and their social structures more complex, their lords, who were more bound to the rural world, gave them charters that granted a limited right to manage their own internal affairs, usually through a council chosen by the citizenry. Particularly in France the grant of liberties sometimes came through the formation of a sworn association of the inhabitants, called a commune, which negotiated with the lord. If the first city government grew out of the lord’s court, as happened in the Low Countries and Germany, the magistrates were usually called scabini (French échevins, German Schöffen, Flemish schepenen). If it evolved from the sworn association of the commune, the councillors were more often called ‘sworn persons’ (jurés). In England, where the communal movement was much weaker than on the continent, they were ‘aldermen’, officers of the ward associations that comprised the city. Citizens were originally all members of the sworn association of the community or all landholders, but citizenship became increasingly restricted, particularly in the thirteenth century. Although we cannot say much about urban government in the north in the twelfth century beyond the fact that councils led it, in Italy the cities were already developing specialised services, several boards within what had initially been a single city council composed of consuls, and an independent financial competence.

The cities became focal points of more or less clearly defined local regions. This process went furthest in Italy, where the bishop as lord of the town and its surrounding countryside (contado) frequently led warfare with rival cities and developed a strength in the rural regions that was passing to the city governments even as early as the late eleventh century. During the twelfth and particularly thirteenth centuries the Italian city governments subjugated the contado. This process also aided the cities’ efforts to control the local nobles who held both rural castles and towers in the cities and used both to wage warfare against their families’ enemies. Control of the contado often took the form of economic exploitation in the thirteenth century, as some cities taxed the rural communities more heavily than the city, tried to hinder immigration, and forced peasants of the contado to provide grain at below-market prices to the by then overpopulated areas within their walls.

Although commercial wealth was becoming more important, social status and often political rights such as control of the municipal councils continued as before to be tied to landownership, most strongly in Italy but also in most north European cities. The norm in the eleventh century was for landowning families to use their city residences and contacts to expand into commerce, but the reverse process more often occurred in the twelfth and particularly thirteenth centuries, as persons who gained wealth through trade bought land in the city and then increasingly in the rural environs as a means of gaining social status and political influence. Immigration to the cities quickened, and some newcomers benefited through the urban charters by gaining legal emancipation from the bonds of serfdom, although this element of citizenship was not as universally applicable as was once thought. Many of the leaders of the older German cities, indeed, were descended from families of ministeriais, the serfs who had elevated their standing by serving the local bishop or secular lord through controlling his castle or particularly his mint. By 1200 this landowning elite had made itself into a patriciate. It was by no means closed, but it controlled the burgeoning offices of city government. The earliest guilds in the cities were utterly unlike those that we commonly associate with the medieval city. Initially they were composed almost entirely of merchants and/or of landowners — the evolution of guilds of landowners into guilds of merchants can be documented most convincingly in England — but most cities of Italy and some in the north also had craft organisations by the twelfth century. Particularly in England and the Low Countries the merchant guilds are often hard to distinguish from the formal city governments. This bond becomes even more symbiotic in the thirteenth century. The merchant guilds that controlled Saint-Omer and Ghent are particularly famous.

Except in England, whose cities declined after the Norman conquest of 1066, urban populations expanded tremendously during the central Middle Ages, in many cases doubling between 1000 and 1200 and doubling again during the thirteenth century. This growth was accompanied by a progressive enclosure within the main wall of the city of suburban settlements that had developed outside the late Roman and early medieval walls. With the expansion of their walls, the cities became important as military strong points for their princes but also became better able to resist them. As the walls were extended, the first walls became internal but were not tom down, creating fortified sectors within the cities. Urban populations became more diverse, with a large artisan population producing for a market that was increasingly driven by the establishment of intercity networks of trade. Craftsmanship was less centred than before on the demand generated by princely courts.

With the physical expansion of the central Middle Ages, the centre of gravity within the cities shifted. While a single market had generally sufficed through the tenth century, multiple markets with specialised functions developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to handle the trade generated by the burgeoning resident population. Although local conditions determined the shape and location of the new markets, the main market of many cities was an open space just outside the earliest fortification, at its intersection with the first suburb to be walled. The street plans, often inchoate in the early Middle Ages except for the planned burhs of King Alfred of Wessex, became more regular in the areas enclosed later, some of which suggest genuine urban planning. This process culminated in the thirteenth century in the attempts of several Italian cities to use property vacated by confiscation during the political quarrels to straighten and widen streets and establish an imposing city centre dominated by public buildings.

The thirteenth century until about 1270

The thirteenth century witnessed the intensification of these trends. Whether any place except Rome and Cordoba was a true city in 1000 depends upon one’s definition, but by 1200 a network of genuine cities was in place upon which most of Europe’s exportable industry and a substantial part of its trade had become centred. The chief poles of urbanisation and certainly of city independence from territorial lords were more clearly now northern Italy and Flanders and adjacent northwestern France, but Germany also had substantial cities that would grow with the deterioration of the emperors’ power in the thirteenth century. The English provincial cities, after a period of decay following the Norman conquest in the eleventh century, began growing through their role in the increasingly profitable Flemish trade, although London stagnated economically. Paris and London and its suburb Westminster were becoming the chief residences of the kings of France and England.

The fairs of Champagne reached their height in the thirteenth century as the major foci of exchange between north Italy and Flanders. But regional fairs were also scheduled to permit merchants to travel to the international clearing houses in Champagne, where banking facilities were increasingly centred. For with the tremendous expansion of international trade came a need to arrange transactions on credit, accompanied by the reciprocal development of mutually dependent trading regions.

The cities were still governed in the thirteenth century by fractious elites that were dominated by landowners who had subsidiary interests in commerce. Although commerce became increasingly important in the wealth of the landowners who dominated the councils in both northern and southern Europe during the thirteenth century, only after 1270 were many persons of purely merchant background who did not also own large amounts of land in the city councils. In Germany councils (Rate) were formed between roughly 1190 and 1220, evidently with the aid of the emperors, who hoped thereby to break the power of the older body of urban rulers, the Schöffen. In fact, the Rate and Schöffen usually shared functions, and the same families served on both boards. Membership of these oligarchical councils was often determined by heredity or cooption according to terms of the city’s charter. Thus some councils, which had begun as elites of perhaps one hundred persons, as at Rouen, gradually narrowed to a few persons who perpetuated city government in their own families. Accusations of corruption inevitably followed. In the thirteenth century membership of city councils in northern Europe was generally based on membership of a merchant guild or lineage, never on membership of an artisan organisation. In Italy it was usually by geographical sector of the city rather than an occupational affiliation. Among the major cities of the north, only London, whose council of aldermen consisted of the law-men of the wards, had geographical representation.

In places, particularly in France, whose government resulted from a sworn association breaking away from the territorial government of the town lord, the structure of multiple councils is less often found. The officeholding elite was usually distinguished legally from the rest of the population, although all were considered citizens. They imitated the nobility, including by perpetrating vendettas, and a few families managed to marry into noble lineages. Although the councillors’ social position and political privilege was still determined more by their possession of land, their wealth was being increasingly generated by trade. Although the feuds of the leading citizens made the cities dangerous and occasionally prompted intervention by the still powerful lords, in northern and southern Europe alike, they had a collective consciousness of their standing and strenuously resisted any effort of artisan organisations to penetrate the inner circles of city government. The ruling elites were always family-based and thus shared many characteristics of the landed nobility.

The northern regimes of councils seem to have used the Italian consuls of the twelfth century as their model. Yet conciliar government took different routes in north and south during the thirteenth century. One or two councils controlled most northern cities. In principle they rotated annually, although in some cities informal schemes were developed to return individuals of the proper family to office after a stated interval, during which others in the elite shared power. The change was accompanied in many cities by the council, particularly when it had consisted of scahini and as such was basically judicial in character, taking on administrative functions. The growth of public administration and finance is thus an important development in the history of the European cities during the thirteenth century. Some northern cities had mayors or burgomasters in the thirteenth century, particularly the French communes and the cities that were influenced by their law. Burgomasters are found in some German cities as early as 1174, and they were generally stronger figures than the French and English mayors, who were chiefly ceremonial officials.

In the cities of northern Italy, however, the consuls themselves, who were caught up in the endemic factionalism that would plague Italian urban politics throughout the medieval period, yielded in the early thirteenth century to the control of a single police official, the podestà or rector. The podestà was restricted in turn, particularly after popolo-dominated governments came to power in and after 1250, by the development of a myriad of councils that rotated several times during the year. This was in contrast to the annual rotation that was customary in the north and was perhaps an attempt to keep any faction in the murderous feuding from monopolising power. For both the podestà and the councils the electoral procedures were extremely complex; it was either done by lot or involved several drawings and scrutinies.

The Italian cities in the thirteenth century were no longer communes with a single legal personality, as was becoming the case in northern Europe, but rather comprised various societies, consortia, ‘regions’, parish organisations, and the popolo. Most north Italian cities had a merchant association, similar to the northern merchant guilds, that controlled sales and the market and tried to control the crafts. Each of these had its own officials that in some degree pre-empted the separate officials of the communal government.

The popolo is a characteristic feature of Italian city government in the thirteenth century that has no equivalent in northern Europe. The popolo was not the ‘people’ in the modern sense of the word; it is closer to the present meaning of ‘citizenry’. Although most popolani were merchants, along with some craftsmen, the leaders were landowners who were being excluded from the offices of the commune by the elite that controlled the consulate and the office of podestà. Some knights were in the popolo. The popolo was a state within a state, beginning as a personal organisation that linked diverse social groups within the commune that had the goal of limiting violence. They developed variously from tower societies and from other military organisations that were based on the gates and regions of the city. The popolo was thus a territorial organisation, with officials chosen by district within the city, not at first a guild-based organisation. It opposed the ‘magnates’, but some magnates were also in the popolo, and some wealthy merchants were seeking magnate status by buying land in the contado, acquiring castles and having themselves dubbed knights.

Popoli were being formed in the north Italian cities by the early thirteenth century, but they generally achieved power only in the cities of Tuscany and a few of the larger cities of other regions that were not firmly controlled by lords. The popolo was also caught up in the political fighting involving pope and emperor, which produced the Guelf (papal) and Ghibelline (imperial) parties, and family factions that adopted one side because their hereditary enemies took the other. Once in power in the Tuscan cities, starting with Florence’s famous ‘first popolo in 1250, the popolo governments generally absorbed some of the other anti-magnate military societies but did not end them entirely. The popolo had its own officials who functioned alongside the earlier councils of the city but gradually limited them. They particularly restricted the podestà, who was associated with the earlier magnate regime.

The popolo governments divided the Italian cities into district-based military companies under ‘standard-bearers’. They had a council of elders who eventually would become the major council of the city, although it remained technically a council of the popolo rather than of the commune. The popolo governments are also associated with a more intense exploitation of the contado, inflicting punitive taxation on it and turning it more overtly into a source of food and industrial raw materials than before. In the meantime they fostered industry in the cities that could be exported as the city elites expanded their trade. The popolo governments also multiplied the councils and are generally associated with Guelf, anti-imperial regimes, although they did not completely exclude Ghibellines from major offices until after 1270. Their focus was against magnates rather than specifically Ghibellines; but the Ghibellines tended to become more identified with rural landholding than the Guelfs in the thirteenth century. Thus the Ghibelline = magnate equation had more validity after 1270 than before and eventually contributed to their total exclusion from the government at Florence and less completely elsewhere.

The thirteenth century thus witnessed considerable turmoil, but it was less often of merchant versus artisan than of rival factions within the elite. Even analysing these conflicts...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps and Plans
• Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1. The Medieval City at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century
• 2. Cities in Crisis: the Economic and Demographic Realignments of Urban Europe in the Later Middle Ages
• 3. The City and the Region: City-states and the Symbiosis of the Rural and Urban Economies
• 4. City Governments and Urban Conflict: Patricians and Political Guilds
• 5. Public Administration and Finance in the Later Medieval Cities
• 6. The Elites of the Later Medieval Cities
• 7. Occupational Guilds, the Middle and Lower Orders, and Poverty in the Later Medieval City
• 8. The Legal Marginals of Urban Society: Women, Children and Religious Minorities in the Later Medieval Cities
• 9. Education, Culture and Community in the Later Medieval City
• 10. The Tenor of Daily Life in the Later Medieval City
• Glossary
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Maps
• Index