CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

8
THE MEDIEVAL CITY
Bosporus, the waterway linking the Black Sea with the Mediterranean
and separating Europe from Asia, and was impregnable to invaders
whether by land or by sea. Byzantium continued to be the seat of authority
within the eastern empire, providing a home for both secular and
spiritual leaders. But in most of the eastern empire in Europe, urbanism
declined or even disappeared. Only in its Asiatic provinces, in Syria and
Egypt, Galatia and Cappadocia, did urbanism retain some vitality. And
much of the small volume of trade that continued to circulate in the
Mediterranean Sea and western Europe emanated from these regions.
The third urban revolution occupied much of the Middle Ages and is
the primary subject of this book. Urbanism had not wholly disappeared
during the centuries following the decline of the empire in the West.
Some cities survived as human settlements, and a few became the tribal
seats of government for the invading peoples. But their commercial and
industrial life had been drained, and they had to be rebuilt slowly. By the
end of the Middle Ages a vast number of cities and towns had emerged,
varying greatly in size, in mode of origin, and degree of specialization.
Counting them is an impossible task because the boundary between town
and village was often vague and uncertain. In central Europe alone their
number must have run into the thousands.
This was an age when society was organized feudally. Land was held
by territorial lords in return for service—in government or in war—to
their king. Under them were subtenants who held smaller units of land
again in return for service to their masters. There may have been more
separate, social layers before the servile underclass, which lived by actually
cultivating the soil, was reached. The social structure was in reality
very much more complex than this short definition suggests. There were
classes that were neither wholly slave nor wholly free. Beside those who
were adscripti glebae—“bound to the soil”—were others who were free in
respect of all except their masters. There were what have been called “degrees
of unfreedom.” But the general social trend was upward; more and
more of the underclass became free. By the end of the Middle Ages there
were, in effect, no more unfree peasants in the land of England, but they
survived in central Europe; in Romania and Russia there remained serfs
until the 1860s. It was from these peoples that, in one way or another,
the earliest medieval towns were populated. Once the bonds of serfdom
were relaxed the peasant might move to the city hoping to become lost
in its anonymity. There was a saying that Stadt Luft macht frei—“the air