The Growth of the Medieval City

From Late Antiquity to the Early Fourteenth Century

David M Nicholas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582299061
• eBook ISBN: 9781317885498
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The first part of David Nicholas's massive two-volume study of the medieval city, this book is a major achievement in its own right. (It is also fully self-sufficient, though many readers will want to use it with its equally impressive sequel which is being published simultaneously.) In it, Professor Nicholas traces the slow regeneration of urban life in the early medieval period, showing where and how an urban tradition had survived from late antiquity, and when and why new urban communities began to form where there was no such continuity. He charts the different types and functions of the medieval city, its interdependence with the surrounding countryside, and its often fraught relations with secular authority. The book ends with the critical changes of the late thirteenth century that established an urban network that was strong enough to survive the plagues, famines and wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

PART ONE

Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

CHAPTER ONE

The Urban Legacy of Antiquity

The Roman and the medieval city

Although many medieval cities developed on sites previously inhabited by the Romans, ‘continuity’ is often more apparent than real. Important functional differences distinguish the Roman city from its medieval successor. Most large Roman cities were political and military capitals, more consumers than producers of goods and services that exploited the rural environs to which they were linked juridically and socially. The Roman urban elites lived mainly off the rental income of their rural estates rather than trade or industry. As late as the sixth century the emperor Justinian imported enough Egyptian grain to Constantinople to feed 600,000 people.¹

The medieval city, by contrast, was a marketplace for its hinterland and produced manufactured goods. The distinction is overdrawn, for the Roman cities produced manufactured items and re-exported goods that were not sold on its own local market, while only the greatest medieval cities developed much export manufacturing. Industrial activity was centring increasingly in the cities by the fourth century, as government regulation increased and the rural areas became dangerous. Furthermore, although the Roman cities were consumers, they were not parasitic, for all provided important functions of demand, manufacture, governance and protection in exchange for the goods that they used. Although long-distance trade was dominated by luxury raw materials such as precious stones, spices, metals and particularly fine cloth, even such utilitarian items as pottery were sold far from their place of manufacture. The long-distance trade of the Roman Empire was voluminous and varied enough to help support the large number of small cities.²

Throughout the Middle Ages the cities of the Mediterranean basin had closer ties to their rural environs than did most in the north. The Greek and Roman cities were actually city-states, but the Romans, following Greek practice, separated the central area (urbs) from the rest of the city by a tiny wall, which delimited a pomerium that was sacred to the gods. Full Roman citizenship was initially enjoyed only by residents of the urbs, which was the ceremonial, religious and governmental city, while military assemblies were held outside it in the fora.³

Organic and planned cities

The cities of antiquity, like those of the Middle Ages, developed in two basic but not mutually exclusive forms. Older settlements developed gradually and organically, often on hilltops, with curved streets that sometimes did not intersect. Both Athens and Rome (Plan 1) were easily defended hilltop fortifications surrounded by farm villages that eventually merged. The Athenian agora and the Roman forum were at the foot of the main hill and between the hills repectively. The forum began as a cemetery in a swampy valley, but it had been drained and converted to a field for assemblies by the seventh century BC. Both agora and forum quickly became the major markets of the city. While the agora was usually triangular, a characteristic that it shared with some early medieval markets that developed just outside fortifications, most Roman fora were rectangular, with a temple and a covered basilica at opposite ends. While the acropolis (high city), the famous hilltop citadel of Athens, became peripheral as the city developed at its base, the seven hills of Rome remained the centre of the ancient city.⁴

But the ancients also became sophisticated city planners. The Etruscans probably learned planning from the Greeks, who were founding settlements with rectangular street plans in Sicily by the seventh century BC. They passed their knowledge on to the Romans.⁵ Like the Etruscans, the Romans used two main streets: an east–west axis (the decumanus) and a secondary north-south artery (the cardo), that intersected at the centrally located forum. This gave their foundations a nucleus that the often square Greek plans lacked. While the Greeks normally destroyed preexisting settlements before building new cities, the Romans preferred to reconstruct older cities, always making the plans more rectangular. A planned newer area was characteristically linked by rectangular streets to an unplanned older core that gradually became more regular as the Romans built fora and aqueducts and paved streets. Thus the original settlement was frequently not at the centre of the Roman city; Pompeii is a famous example. The Romans divided their cities into quarters that began at the intersection of the two main streets. The intersection of side streets created rectangular blocks called ‘islands’ (insulae).⁶

Virtually all Roman cities had schools, and the larger ones had libraries. Streets were generally paved after Julius Caesar’s time, and the large centres had pavements. The central government built aqueducts. The public baths and the fora were places of meeting and exchange. The cities had police and regulated the supply and price of food. The amphitheatres provided entertainments for the masses, but they were generally built outside the walls for security reasons and linked to the central city by a main street.⁷ Even in the fourth century, when Rome had long passed its peak, the city had at least twenty-eight libraries, eight bridges, eleven public baths and 856 private baths, 290 granaries and warehouses and forty-six brothels. Although Rome had fewer than 1,800 single-family houses this late, it had more than 44,000 tenements that were dispersed in all parts of the city except in the Palatine and imperial forum areas, intermingled with the mansions of the aristocrats. They ranged from tiny shacks to solidly constructed buildings four and more storeys high. Most had businesses on the ground floor and residences above.⁸

Augustan Rome (Plan 1), with a population estimated at between 700,000 and one million, was the only megalopolis in the west. Its street plan, which at its greatest extent had 85 km of road, was an irregular maze. Most streets were footpaths or could accommodate only one cart at a time. The central city had only two viae (streets on which two carts could pass each other), on opposite sides of the main forum, although the outlying areas had twenty. All streets ended at the complex of public buildings and temples on the Capitoline and Palatine hills. Augustus (27 BC–AD 14) did considerable building, and succeeding emperors enlarged the main forum and added mausolea, theatres, temples and fora in their own honour. Nero reconstructed much of the central city after the fire of AD 64, widening streets and standardising building heights. Rome reached its maximum development in the second century. Later emperors embellished but made no fundamental changes until Constantine’s reconstruction in the fourth century.⁹

An imperial ‘prefect of the city’ administered the capital, which was formally divided into fourteen administrative districts. Smaller neighbourhood associations based on streets were the scene of family feuds that presaged the vicious fighting of medieval Rome. Streets were named after prominent families, buildings or the trades practised in them. As in the medieval city, the central areas generally had the greatest wealth and the highest prestige, while the outlying areas and suburbs were poorer. Thus while basic necessities were available in neighbourhoods, power was concentrated at the city centre.¹⁰

ROMAN URBANISATION IN THE EARLY EMPIRE

City types and public administration

The Romans had various terms that we translate as ‘city’. Colonies for army veterans were at the top of the administrative hierarchy, followed by municipia, which came directly under the provincial governments. The civitas was originally third in status. In the Mediterranean regions of the Empire civitates amounted to subdivisions of provinces, but in Gaul and Britain they were tribal capitals that became nuclei of Roman administration. But the colonies were predicated on the Roman practice of giving bonuses in land to veterans, which Augustus replaced with cash payments. Thus except in Britain, where the four colonies remained military in nature, the Romans began designating some existing communities as ‘colonies’, particularly those with a large number of Roman settlers. By the third century the original distinctions were completely blurred, and civitas became the normal term for the city and its rural environs. The urbs was the densely populated chief place of the civitas.¹¹

The imperial government tried to standardise urban administration. Virtually all cities were ruled by councils, usually of one hundred curiales or decurions who served for life. So little was the economy of the Roman city based on trade that until the fifth century all civitates required decurions to own a large amount of land. Thus the city rulers actually spent much of their time on country estates. The chief administrators were ‘two men’ (duoviri), assisted by aediles, who administered markets and public services, and quaestors, who handled finances. The most serious problem of the Roman cities was their lack of a stable financial base. Some owned public land and realised a small income from ground rents on it, but few had the authority to levy direct taxes. Some collected customs at the borders of the civitas. The cities raised most of their revenue from market tolls, licence fees, sales taxes, and monopolies on strategic commodities, especially salt, which they leased to tax farmers called ‘publicans’. The publicans were so corrupt that the decurions collected most taxes by Augustus’ period. During the second century the central government appointed ‘curators of the city’ to supervise finances. They soon became the chief magistrates.¹²

The beginnings of urbanisation in Roman Gaul

The enormous demand market of Rome drew much of the productive capacity of the Empire toward Italy. Although there were several large cities in the east, Rome stifled the growth of provincial urban centres in western Europe, few of which ever had populations as high as 20,000.¹³

Except for Cologne, most Roman colonies for veterans were on or near the Rhône river south of its junction with the Saône. Farther north and east Augustus established a frontier along the Rhine and Danube rivers, studded with military centres that doubled as trading posts. The Romans frequently built on Celtic or even Greek sites. The Celts seem to have f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps and Plans
• Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Part One: Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
• Part Two: The Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
• Part Three: The Maturing of Medieval Urbanisation, c. 1190–c. 1270
• Part Four: A Half-Century of Crisis
• Glossary
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Maps and Plans
• Index