4

THE URBAN REVOLUTION:
THE COMMUNES

The rise of the cities in Europe in the tenth and twelfth centuries marked a turning point in the history of the West – and, for that matter, of the whole world.

Towns had prospered and proliferated in the Greco-Roman world, but the decline of the Empire brought with it their ruin. In a letter dated AD381 Ambrose, bishop of Milan, described the towns of central Italy as “semi-rut arum urbium cadavera” – remains of half-ruined cities. If some urban centers survived, their role was simply that of headquarters of religious and/ or military administrations. In the primitive world of the Dark Ages, the city was an anachronism.

The areas of Europe which had been part of the Roman Empire most certainly experienced a process of economic decline which became more obvious and severe during the fifth century of our era. Outside the Empire, in the northern part of Europe, there had been nothing in the way of towns and little in the way of industry and commerce; after the fall of the Empire, the north slowly but surely improved its relative position, partly because of more active contacts with the south. Consequently, the startling contrast which had sharply divided the north and the south in Roman times diminished. On the other hand, the Muslim invasion loosened the ties which had linked southern Europe with North Africa and the Near East. In Roman times, there had been two separate worlds: the Mediterranean world and the northern world. In the seventh century, the Mediterranean world split in two, and the impoverished European half tied itself more closely to the northern part of the subcontinent. Bound by a common religious creed, Europe emerged in embryo.

It was a poor and primitive Europe, a Europe made up of countless rural microcosms – the largely self-sufficient manors, whose autarchy was part cause and part consequence of the decline in trade. Society was dominated by a spirit of resignation, suspicion, and fear of the outside world. People withdrew into the economic isolation of the manors just as they sought spiritual isolation in the monasteries.

The arts, education, trade, production, and the division of labor shrank and withered. The use of money almost completely disappeared. The population was small, production meager, and poverty extreme. Social structures were primitive. There were those who prayed, those who fought, and those who labored. Prevailing values reflected a brutal and superstitious society – fighting and praying were the only respectable activities, and those who fought did so in order to rob, and those who prayed did so superstitiously. Laborers were regarded as despicable serfs. The encroaching forests were inhabited by wild animals and, according to popular imagination, by gnomes, fairies, witches, and goblins. In this depressed and depressing world, the rise of cities between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries represented a new development which changed the course of history.

More than forty years ago, the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne formulated a general theory to explain the rise of cities in the various parts of Europe.1 Pirenne attempted to accommodate very different developments within a single model, and no one can deny that the model is both ingenious and thought-provoking. Yet Pirenne failed, and he did so essentially because he focused on the outward form of the phenomenon instead of examining its inner nature. The theory of the portus, which spread out, absorbed the original fortified feudal nucleus, and eventually gave birth to the new urban unit, is valid for the Low Countries and northern France, but does not fit the facts for other parts of western Europe.

According to Edith Ennen, three areas must be distinguished in western Europe: (a) Italy, Spain, and southern France, where towns, however impoverished, continued to exist throughout the Dark Ages; (b) England, northern France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, the Rhinelands, southern Germany, and Austria, all regions in which Roman urban life substantially disappeared with the fall of the Empire but in which, nevertheless, medieval towns bear the stamp of Roman activity; and (c) northern Germany and Scandinavia, where the Roman urban tradition had no significant impact whatsoever.²

The trouble with subdivisions of this kind is that they can be endlessly multiplied. In southern Europe, which Ennen considered a unit, distinctions could be made between northern and southern Italy. Significant differences can easily be identified between northern Italy and Spain: in northern Italy, the lesser nobility played an essential part in the urban movement;³ in Spain, the urban movement cannot be understood apart from the movement of Reconquista and the Arab tradition.

These differences, however, do not undermine the unity of a sociocultural and economic movement which had common roots, whether it took the form of a revival of an ancient Roman town or of the formation of a new town around a fort, a monastery, or an imperial palace. Such unity cannot be sought in forms which are bound to vary from place to place: it must be sought in the substance of the development.

At the root of urban growth was a massive migratory movement. Towns grew because their populations grew. But the urban population did not grow naturally. Fertility in urban centers was never appreciably higher than mortality: urban population grew because of an influx of people from rural areas.

People migrate for two sets of reasons, which are not necessarily alternative: reasons of repulsion (push forces) and reasons of attraction (pull forces). Between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, the economic trend was upward in rural Europe, partly because of technological innovations, partly because of investments, and partly because of reorganization of property. But although economic conditions were generally improving, life remained essentially unpleasant for the mass of the people. Most serfs saw no means of escaping serfdom, and the lesser nobility could see no clear way of breaking the stranglehold of the establishment. It was at this point that the town came into play as an element of innovation, a place to seek one’s fortune. The town was to the people of Europe from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries what America was to Europeans in the nineteenth century. The town was the “frontier,” a new and dynamic world where people felt they could break their ties with the past, where people hoped they would find opportunities for economic and social advancement, and where there would be ample reward for initiative, daring, and hard work. “Stadtluft machts frei” (Town air makes one free) it was said in German towns. It was not only that the serf, having escaped from the countryside, found legal freedom in the towns, but that the whole social atmosphere there was open to ambition and talent, whether the town-dweller was a member of the lesser feudal nobility, or a merchant, or a craftsman. In the city, labor had an intrinsic dignity and all honest callings were granted respect. This is not to say, however, that city democracy was egalitarian and total. Any claim to absolute equality would have seemed a revolt against the very order of things laid down by God himself. Concern with rank and status prevailed from the early days in the medieval city, and it later became an obsession at the time of the Renaissance.

As father Salimbene da Parma explicitly reported in his Chronicle (Cronaca, ed. G. Scalia, Bari, 1966, pp. 937–38), whereas in France (and, we might add, in Germany and in England too) the nobility remained entrenched in their country castles in a position of more or less overt hostility toward the emerging cities, in northern Italy many members of the feudal nobility, perceiving the new direction in which history was moving, while not abandoning their castles in the countryside, took up residence in the cities and built palaces and towers that gave Italian cities a singularly feudal aspect – even at the physical level.

At the beginning of the urban development in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the citizenry, in its struggle for autonomy and independence, did not feel strong enough to challenge the establishment and instead chose to seek the protection of the local bishop in whom political and administrative power were vested. In the course of time, however, as the process of economic development strengthened the business and professional classes, they found they could no longer endure the pre-eminent position enjoyed by the nobility and the bishop. There ensued a series of very complex and lengthy struggles from which the merchant and professional classes emerged victorious. The cities became the seats and centers of the power of the triumphant bourgeoisie.

Urban society grew and developed in sharp contrast with the surrounding countryside. The walls of a town had both a practical purpose and a symbolic significance: they represented the boundary between two cultures locked in conflict. It was this conflict which gave the medieval city its unmistakable character and made the urban movement of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries the turning point of world history.

Towns had existed in ancient Egypt, as in the classical world of Greece and Rome. In the Middle Ages, towns existed in China as well as in the Byzantine Empire. But the cities of medieval and Renaissance Europe were quite different from the towns of other areas and times. In the towns of the classical world, as in the towns of China and the Byzantine Empire, merchants, professionals, and craftsmen never achieved a socially prominent position. Even when they acquired wealth, they still acquiesced in an inferior social position. The rural ideals of the upper classes permeated the whole society; and as the landed gentry dominated both the countryside and the towns, socially as well as politically and culturally, powerful elements of cohesion obliterated the differences between the urban and the rural worlds. The town was not an organism in itself but rather an organ within the broader context of an urban-rural continuum.

In the Roman world, the distinction between city and country was only de facto, since Roman law did not distinguish between citizens on the grounds of their residence. In medieval Europe, by contrast, the town came to represent a separate entity. The medieval city was not just part of a larger organism, but an organism in itself, proudly autonomous and clearly separated from the surrounding countryside. Physically, the city was separated from the countryside by walls, moat, and gates. More important than that, the city was another world from a legal point of view, too. When a person passed through the gates of a city, he became subject to different laws, as when today we cross the border from one country to another. The contrast was as sharp in cultural as in economic terms. The merchants, the professionals, the craftsmen who lived in the towns did not acknowledge the control of the rural world or its cultural values; on the contrary, they evolved their own culture and their own values. The emergence of European towns in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries was not a spin-off of regional evolution. It was rather the expression of a cultural and social revolution which was based in the towns. The champions of the rural-feudal establishment were well aware of this, and they did not hide their indignation. “Communio – novum ac pessimum nomen,” commented Guibert of Nogent. And Otto of Frisingen, the uncle of Frederic Barbarossa, wrote:4

In the Italian communes they do not disdain to grant the girdle of knighthood or honorable positions to young people of inferior station, and even to workers of the vile mechanical arts, whom other peoples bar like the plague from the more respectable and honorable circles.

People living in the city came to enjoy a unique, personal status. They were “burghers.” In Flanders prior to 1100 the term burgensis is attested to in three places only (St Omer, Cambrai, and Huy). In the course of the twelfth century, this typically medieval term spread all over western Europe.

There were however striking differences between various different areas in Europe. In Italy the revolutionary character of the city was more apparent than elsewhere, not only in its dealings with baronial and ecclesiastical power but also as conflict grew with the central power of the Empire. Italian cities thus set out to attack and conquer the surrounding territory. In Germany, to further his struggle against the great feudal powers, the Emperor granted certain cities independent self-government, the right to mint their own coinage, the right to confer full citizenship on immigrants, and the right to develop their own policies. Yet German cities never dared push their privileges beyond their own walls or to launch an attack on the feudal forces that encircled them. In France the communal-citizen movement was soon tamed by the power of the monarchy. In England cities developed at a slower and less dramatic pace and assumed no or very few revolutionary characteristics. In eastern Europe, most cities arose not on the basis of their own strength but on the initiative of feudal lords in their Drang nach Osten. There were many instances when cities in eastern Germany made an effort to assert their independence, only to be subjugated later by the barons.

But apart from eastern Germany, the political and social triumph of the urban middle class, and of its peculiar sets of values, had revolutionary consequences at the economic level. The new set of values stimulated new kinds of wants, and the economic success of the new classes gave these wants the backing of considerable purchasing power. The fact that the history of the medieval city proved so different in its ultimate effects from the history of the Greek polis, the Roman urbs, or the Chinese city, was largely due to the structure of effective demand.

Surrounded by a hostile world, the people of the town felt the need for union and co-operation. Frontier people have to unite. In the feudal world, a vertical arrangement typically prevailed, where relations between men were dictated by concepts of fief and service; investiture and homage; lord, vassal, and serf. In the cities, a horizontal arrangement emerged, characterized by co-operation among equals. The gild; the confraternity; the university; and above them all, that guild of guilds, the sworn union among all burghers, the Commune, were the institutions created by the new outlook and which reflected the new ideals.

Thus, the city, whether emerging from a portus beside a feudal castle or rising again from the foundations of a Roman town, was essentially a new phenomenon: it was the core of a new society which evolved new social structures, rediscovered the state, developed a new culture and a new economy. For the surrounding rural world, the successful burgher had nothing but disdain. “La villa fa buone bestie e cattivi uomini” (the countryside produces good animals and bad men) wrote Paolo da Certaldo. Where the surrounding feudal world was too powerful for the town’s forces, as in Germany, the city remained on the defensive, sheltering behind the protection afforded by its walls, its wealth, and its artistic and economic pride. Where, as in Italy, the town developed to the point at which it could overturn the previous balance with the surrounding feudal world, it then moved to conquer the surrounding area. The events that followed bore the mark of the urban-versus-rural cultural dichotomy. The town did not create or intend to create a regional body, but asserted instead its right of conquest. The relationship between towns and their conquered territories in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries reminds one more of the relationship between European states and their colonies in the nineteenth century than of the relationship between a provincial capital and its province in our contemporary society.

With the appearance of the medieval city and the emergence of the urban bourgeoisie, a new Europe was born. Every sector of social and economic life was transformed. Sets of values, personal circumstances and relations, types of administration, education, production, and exchange, all underwent drastic transformation.

The urban revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries paved the way for the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century.