CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

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