CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

PREFACE
This book is about the city, not a specific city, nor about the city throughout
the several millennia of its existence. It is about that kind of city
which emerged in Europe from the ruins of the Roman Empire and was
transformed out of all recognition by the coming of manufacturing industries
in modern times. This was the medieval city. It possessed qualities
that distinguished it from those cities that had gone before it and
that were to come after it. It was distinct also from contemporary cities
in other parts of the world, such as those of the Middle East and south
and east Asia.
One can debate endlessly the extent of the debt—unquestionably
great—the medieval city owed to the classical cities of Greece and Rome
and also the extent—probably small—of borrowings from the Middle
East and the rest of Asia. By and large the medieval city was sui generis:
it belonged to a type that was peculiarly its own. It was a response to
conditions—social, economic, technological—that existed at the time
and were radically changed during the following centuries.
Briefly defined, a city is a nucleated settlement that must engage in
manufacturing and service occupations for the simple reason that agriculture
could neither support nor employ all of its population. Before the
city emerged, people lived in smaller settlement units—villages, hamlets,
even isolated homesteads—and had subsisted almost wholly by cultivating
their surrounding soil. Why, then, did the change occur from small
agricultural settlements to large communities in which craft industries,
the exchange of goods, and the performance of services played an increasingly
important role?
This transition was no simple process. An increase in population and