The Early Modern City 1450-1750

Christopher R. Friedrichs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317901846
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

A pioneering text which covers the urban society of early modern Europe as a whole. Challenges the usual emphasis on regional diversity by stressing the extent to which cities across Europe shared a common urban civilization whose major features remained remarkably constant throughout the period. After outlining the physical, political, religious, economic and demographic parameters of urban life, the author vividly depicts the everyday routines of city life and shows how pitifully vulnerable city-dwellers were to disasters, epidemics, warfare and internal strife.

PART ONE

The City in Context

CHAPTER ONE

Boundaries and Buildings

For much of the seventeenth century, Paris was the largest city in Europe. Almost half a million people lived and worked in Paris, said their prayers in the city’s churches and chapels, elbowed their way through its old crowded streets, or promenaded down its new esplanades. Some Parisians slept out of doors or died miserably in one of the city’s great charity hospitals. Others spent their days in the salons of aristocratic hôtels, talking of the latest news from Fontainebleau or Versailles. Most Parisians lived and laboured in the high houses that lined the city’s countless streets. All of them knew that they dwelt in one of the great urban centres of Europe.¹

Zell am Harmersbach was also a city. Prettily situated on a stream in the German Black Forest, Zell never had more than a thousand inhabitants. The community was poorer in early modern times than some of the surrounding agricultural villages; prosperous peasants ignored with impunity their obligation to pay taxes which the city was supposed to collect. Yet there was no doubt of the community’s urban credentials, for Zell enjoyed the confirmed and recognized status of a Free and Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire.²

Zell was an extreme case, of course – but so was Paris. Few cities in early modern Europe were quite as small as the urban hamlet on the Harmersbach, and few were as large as Paris. These two cities, however, suggest the full range of sizes within which European cities fell.

Demographic information of the kind we take for granted today is not available for the early modern era; the first national censuses of the modern type were undertaken only after the late eighteenth century. Through the painstaking collation of local records, however, historians have been able to arrive at reliable estimates of population for many towns and cities. According to one recent estimate, in the year 1500 there were over 150 cities in western and central Europe with populations of 10,000 or more; by 1750 there were over 250 cities of that size.³ But there were also thousands of smaller urban communities. It is always difficult to draw the exact dividing-line between cities and towns on the one hand and mere markets and villages on the other.⁴ Certainly population was not the only factor. To many people in early modern Europe, what really distinguished a city or town from other communities was not its size or function but its possession of specific political and economic privileges. Cities as small as Zell were rare, but Europe was dotted with urban places of only 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants which were still true cities, with political privileges and economic activities that clearly distinguished them from the neighbouring villages.

The populations of cities rarely remained constant. A few cities declined during the early modern period. The great Spanish city of Toledo, for example, dropped from about 50,000 in 1600 to less than half as much a hundred years later. But the general trend was strongly in the other direction, for taken as a whole the early modern era was an epoch of considerable urban growth.⁵ A few cities of metropolitan rank emerged. The greatest city in Europe in 1500 was probably Naples, with a population of about 150,000. By the early seventeenth century Naples had been overtaken by Paris, but then Paris in turn was overtaken by London, whose population reached almost 700,000 in 1750.⁶ The great metropolitan centres had a huge social and cultural impact on other communities. According to one famous estimate, one out of every six adults in seventeenth-century England lived in London at some point in his or her life.⁷ Yet there were only a few cities of such magnitude. By one count in 1750 some 3 million people in western or central Europe lived in 16 cities with more than 80,000 inhabitants – but almost 6 million lived in 245 cities whose population fell between 10,000 and 80,000.⁸ Millions more lived in thousands of smaller cities and towns. Even after three centuries of urban growth, cities of small to medium size still harboured the vast majority of European town-dwellers.

To be sure, the inhabitants of all cities still made up only a small portion – something like 15 per cent – of the total European population in early modern times. But the impact of cities was enormous. Tens of thousands of villagers migrated to cities every year; millions more had at least intermittent contact with urban life through markets, fairs and temporary employment. Few Europeans lived more than a day’s walk from some city or other. Even those villagers – and they must have been few – who had never set foot in a city were affected by administrative and economic structures organized and controlled by people in the nearest urban centre. Cities were important to almost every European.

I

Most people, no matter where they live, know intuitively what a city is. Yet formally to define the term is notoriously difficult. Few theorists can claim to have improved on the observation made by Max Weber, awkward though it may sound in English: ‘The many definitions of the city have only one element in common: namely that the city consists simply of a collection of one or more separate dwellings but is a relatively closed settlement’.⁹ This, after all, is how people first experience the city: long before they become conscious of its distinct economic or administrative functions, they perceive the city as a physical place, an assembly of buildings and other structures which differ in character, in size, and above all in the density of their concentration from what would be found in smaller communities. So before we can explore how men and women actually lived in European cities of the early modern era, we must know something of the physical environment in which they lived out their lives.

The most distinctly urban feature of the early modern city was the outer wall. Even villages could have churches, marketplaces, public buildings and houses – but by and large only a city would have a wall. To be sure, not every city had a wall, and not every walled community was a city. But the correlation was remarkably high. It is hard for people today to capture any sense of the size and ubiquity of city walls in early modern Europe. Only a few European cities – mostly small ones – still have their walls intact. Far more often, just a few metres of the old wall still visible behind modern houses or a gate tower hindering the traffic on a busy street will receive the visitor’s fleeting notice on his or her way to the cathedral or museum. Yet in early modern times, the wall was almost a city’s dominant architectonic feature.

Indeed, the term ‘wall’ is hardly sufficient to suggest the size and solidity of urban fortifications. The basic wall system for almost any city was a product of the middle ages, but throughout the early modern era urban fortifications were lavishly expanded and strengthened. Many cities, already girdled by one massive wall, received an additional perimeter of bastions linked by new walls in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.¹⁰ Access to the city was possible only through perpetually guarded gates, many of which were surmounted by high towers from which watchmen could survey the flow of traffic for miles in any direction.

City walls obviously had a military function. A walled city was almost impossible to take by storm; an enemy army would normally have to negotiate its way into the city or initiate a siege, hoping to starve the inhabitants into submission. But the wall had other functions as well, for the system of fortifications had come into being largely to give city officials some control over the flow of goods and people in and out of their community. Access to the city was deliberately made difficult. Consider, for example, how travellers had to enter Frankfurt am Main in the seventeenth century. Arriving, say, from the southwest, they would first enter a fenced enclosure. Passing the pikeman posted there, they then took a wooden bridge across the city’s outer moat and went through a stone gate into the bastion ring. Turning sharply left, the travellers continued along the bastion wall, past numerous soldiers, till they reached the, next wooden bridge. After crossing the second moat, they went through yet another small stone gateway. Now at last they stood before one of the actual gate towers of Frankfurt, where of course a watchman stood to ask questions or check papers. Permitted to pass through the great arched entry of the gate tower, the travellers were finally inside the city itself and free to go about their business.¹¹

Of course the system of control was far from flawless. On busy days the throng of people, animals and vehicles coursing through the gates might be difficult to regulate, and many an unwelcome visitor was able to slip through. Schemes to control the traffic more tightly were liable to backfire. When an outbreak of bubonic plague was reported in the environs of Barcelona in 1650, the authorities’ usual concerns about unwanted beggars and untaxed goods were compounded by their added fear of infected travellers. To maintain a closer watch on arrivals, the officials closed all but two of the city gates – but, as a contemporary diarist reported, ‘as the Angel Gate is so narrow and so many carts and mules and people had to enter, there was little room for the guards, and it became so crowded that it was easier to break the rules’. Within a few days, the other gates were reopened.¹²

In actual fact, walls offered little protection from the seemingly endless stream of unwelcome vagrants who drifted from the countryside into the cities. But the importance of the walls was as much psychological as practical. In 1634 the magistrates of Nîmes in southern France became alarmed when it appeared that some small walls around the city might be torn down to provide building materials for an aqueduct. Painting a grim falling-dominoes scenario, the magistrates warned that this small act of plunder would lead, step by step, to the depopulation of the whole city,

inasmuch as the little walls serve as a reinforcement for the big walls, so that once they have been torn down indubitably the big walls will collapse and by those means the city … will be exposed to entry by every sort of person and the clergy, magistrates, merchants and other inhabitants will be unable to stay.¹³

Not every city had a wall, nor did every city that had one maintain it carefully. In England, which had not experienced a foreign invasion for centuries, city walls were often neglected – though their importance was quickly rediscovered during the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. A few cities, of course, had no need of walls at all. The most spectacular case of an unwalled city was Venice, which lay on a group of islands far out in the Venetian lagoon, defended from all attacks by one of the greatest navies in Europe. Other cities might have benefited from fortifications but had never been granted permission to construct any. Debrecen, whose population of about 10,000 made it the largest urban centre in early modern Hungary, was technically only a market rather than a city until 1693 – and it was surrounded by a fence, not a proper wall. The merchants of Debrecen were the richest town-dwellers in Hungary, but their unprotected community, located in a perpetually tense border region, was vulnerable to ceaseless financial demands from regional princes and marauding soldiers.¹⁴

Some cities lost their walls for political reasons. The English town of Gloucester, for example, was forced to tear down its wall in the 1660s as a result of having supported the wrong side in the recent civil war.¹⁵ Similarly, when Louis XIV seized control of the Alsatian town of Colmar in 1673, he ordered that the city’s fortifications be destroyed. Bitter citizens complained that the city was now ‘open to all to come and go, like a village’, or had become nothing more than an ‘urban village’ itself. But the king’s purpose was to assert the power of his regime, not to undermine the routine control of goods and travellers; within a few years a new, smaller wall was erected.¹⁶ Indeed, throughout the seventeenth century the conquest of a city was as likely to lead to a strengthening of its fortifications as it was to lead to the opposite. After conquering the Flemish town of Lille in 1667, for example, Louis XIV immediately ordered the construction of a massive citadel conne...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A Note to the Reader
• Introduction A Way of Living
• Part One The City in Context
• Part Two The City as a Social Arena
• Part Three The City in Calm and Crisis
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Map: Europe in 1600
• Index