CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

Preface xxvii
ing day for their cultivation to have been profitable. Every city had thus
to import and to pay for some part of its total food consumption, and this
it could do only by making and selling goods or by performing services
for which it received a monetary reward. It can be argued that there were
cities, among them some of the largest and most important, which solved
their problem of the balance of payments by levying taxes or exacting
tribute. Foremost among them was medieval Rome, where a very high
level of consumption was maintained by the contributions of the faithful
throughout Catholic Europe. But Rome was not altogether an exception;
it can be argued that the city maintained itself by performing a
spiritual service for which it was paid, somewhat generously, by the
Church at large.
Every city and town had a range of activities we can define as “basic”
in the sense that they provided the export commodities and earned the
revenues without which the city could not continue to import foodstuffs
and industrial materials and thus preserve itself. At the same time, every
city had nonbasic industries and services, which the city provided for the
convenience of its own citizens. The baker and the butcher thus served
almost exclusively the needs of their neighbors, while the armorer or the
silversmith sold most of his wares beyond the city limits.
At the opposite end of the urban spectrum were the countless small
towns, few of them with more than a thousand inhabitants, which proliferated
in England and throughout central Europe. Here the food deficit
was supplied by the villagers of the surrounding countryside, whose carts
brought produce to their weekly markets. The town reciprocated by selling
them the common articles of everyday life that could not readily be
produced in their native villages.
This is the urban model that this book seeks to examine and exemplify.
Examples are cited of basic products and activities, since these differed
from one town to another. Their production or performance,
however, called for a complex infrastructure. Goods had to be transported,
some of them over very great distances, by a combination of ships,
wheeled vehicles, and pack animals. Warehouses were needed for their
storage and cranes for loading and unloading goods onto and off of boats.
There were contracts and bills of exchange to be drawn up, and notaries
and scriveners to prepare them. The multiplicity of currencies and the
varying rates of exchange among them raised problems and called for expert
handling. The fourteenth-century Italian merchant Francisco Bal-