CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf
CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf
CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf
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6<br />
THE MEDIEVAL CITY<br />
in others the high quality of workmanship which had once prevailed was<br />
sadly diminished.<br />
It is doubtful whether any towns in Roman Britain, with the exception<br />
of Londinium (London) and perhaps Eboracum (York), survived as<br />
functioning urban settlements. An Anglo-Saxon poem, probably written<br />
about the eighth century, described the crumbling remains of a once prosperous<br />
Roman <strong>city</strong>—probably Aquae Sulis, or Bath (see Document 1,<br />
“<strong>The</strong> Ruin”). <strong>The</strong> invaders could only marvel at the civilization of Rome<br />
and the structures it had created. It was beyond their capa<strong>city</strong> to copy<br />
them, even to keep them in good order. <strong>The</strong> decay and sometimes the<br />
disappearance of cities was a dominant feature of the decline and fall of<br />
the Roman Empire in the West. 3<br />
Yet this decay was not uniform over the whole territory of the Roman<br />
Empire. A few cities in both the East and the West survived and redeveloped<br />
into thriving centers of manufacturing and trade. This was most<br />
marked around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. <strong>The</strong> Belgian historian<br />
Henri Pirenne once argued that sea-borne trade in the Mediterranean<br />
basin survived when overland trade had declined or disappeared,<br />
because in the nature of things the ship was safe from the depredations<br />
of land-based invaders. Both Rome and Byzantium survived and even<br />
prospered during the “dark” ages that followed the end of the western<br />
Roman Empire. Venice was founded by refugees from the destruction of<br />
the Roman <strong>city</strong> Aquileia by the invading Huns. Indeed, most cities that<br />
were to dominate Italy during the late Middle Ages had survived in some<br />
diminished form from the Roman period. In France also most of the<br />
provincial capitals of Roman Gaul, though pillaged by the invaders and<br />
ruinous, nevertheless survived as inhabited places. Only in Britain and<br />
in parts of Spain were Roman cities in large measure abandoned. In the<br />
Balkan peninsula most cities—there were in fact very few—were neglected,<br />
though their ruined sites may have continued to provide some degree<br />
of protection for small agricultural communities. In the midst of<br />
modern Sofia in Bulgaria lie the scanty remains of Serdica, the Roman<br />
capital of the province Thrace. <strong>The</strong> citizens of Salona in Croatia fled to<br />
the Adriatic coast on the appearance of invaders, and there they established<br />
a more secure settlement within the walls of the huge palace the<br />
Emperor Diocletian had built for himself at Split. But most of the small<br />
towns of the Balkans merely fell to ruin and disappeared. Stobi in Mace-