CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

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THE MEDIEVAL CITY
for much of the Middle Ages by its city-states. The same tended to happen
in Germany, where urban independence, in the absence of a strong
central authority, came to be emphasized at the expense of feudal control.
There was a tendency, especially in Italy, for the city’s control of its
immediate hinterland to be extended until the city-state had become a
far more extensive territorial state. In this way the duchies of Florence,
Ferrara, Mantua, and others were formed, as well as the urban republics
of Genoa and Venice, which both displayed a ravenous appetite for
neighboring territory.
PLANTED TOWNS
The great majority of medieval towns originated in none of these ways.
They were the conscious and deliberate creations of territorial lords, always
for their own profit. The lords might fear the pretensions of an urban
population, but they nonetheless envied the towns’ wealth and were
eager to acquire the goods they traded or produced. How then to create
a town and to harness its productive capacity for their own profit? The
answer was to create a new wave of urban foundations as territorial lords
strove to profit from urban institutions and from the urban way of life.
Their method was to grant a charter, to proclaim that future citizens were
wanted, and to declare that the conditions under which they would live
would be generous and their privileges extensive. Sufficient land would
be set aside for a town, and in some instances streets were even planned
and “burgage” or building plots delimited for the anticipated settlers.
There were always footloose people. Many had made good their escape
from manorial villages, and others had never known the constraints of
the manorial economy. Such were attracted by the prospect of urban living
and the relative freedom this offered. And so plots were taken up and
an urban community gradually took shape. No incipient town could have
prospered without a market, to which peasants of the neighborhood could
bring their surplus products for sale and where they might obtain the few
goods ranging from salt to cooking pots which they could not make themselves.
A fair might also be allowed, held less frequently than the market
but attracting traders from very much farther afield and dealing in
more unusual goods. These towns are sometimes termed planted towns to
distinguish them from the organic towns, which had grown up spontaneously.