CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

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THE MEDIEVAL CITY
mans replaced them with towns of classical type on nearby but less defensible
sites. In England the stupendous Iron Age fort Maiden Castle
was replaced, though without a siege, by the low-lying city of Durnovaria,
the modern Dorchester in the county of Dorset.
The second phase in the history of European urbanization began in
classical Greece, though it owed much to earlier developments in the
Middle East, and was continued in Roman Italy, Spain, Gaul, and even
Britain. In the view of Aristotle the city or polis was created when those
who inhabited the villages within a small, discrete area agreed to pool
their resources and come together to form an urban community. This
process they called synoecism. In reality, however, it was probably less simple
than Aristotle’s model suggests. The need for protection played an
important part, as it was also to do in most subsequent urban developments.
The configuration of Greece, with its many small coastal plains,
each of them suited for a city-state, also contributed to the growth of
towns. There were hundreds of poleis in the Greek world, reaching from
the western Mediterranean to Anatolia and Cyprus. Some, like Athens
and Corinth in Greece and Syracuse in Sicily, grew to be too large to be
supported by their own small territories and developed overseas trade to
supply their populations, but hundreds remained, even during the period
of high Greek civilization, small and self-sufficient. Most fell under the
control of the Athenian or Delian League after the Persian wars of the
early fifth century b.c.e. They paid tribute to the league for their common
defense against the Persians. These payments were recorded on marble
tablets set up in the agora or central square of Athens and show both
how numerous these cities were and how small. It was, however, characteristic
of all of them that citizens took an immense pride in their respective
cities and adorned them with temples, theaters, and public
places. Aristotle claimed that urban living was the natural way of life for
civilized human beings, a view of the city reaffirmed many times from
that age to this.
Urbanization spread from Greece to Sicily and from Sicily up the Italian
peninsula to Rome and beyond. The Roman legions carried the idea
of the city to most of western Europe until Roman civilization had become
as much a matter of living in and beautifying the city as Greek civilization
had been. The Roman city was generally larger than the Greek
city. The Romans saw the city as an instrument of civilization, as a means
of taming the wild barbarians whom they had incorporated into their em-