CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

16
THE MEDIEVAL CITY
southwestern France. Their motives were at least as political as they were
economic, and the security of the English-held territory against other feudal
lords was probably foremost in their minds. These towns, or
“bastides,” as they were called, resembled the Anglo-Saxon “burhs” of
the ninth and tenth centuries in that their purpose was largely defensive
and that some never succeeded in developing a significant commercial
role and so reverted to fortified villages.
The most significant area of town foundation was central and eastern
Europe north of the river Danube. Here there had never been any Roman
towns to focus later urban growth, and few settlements had emerged in
response to the needs of defense and commerce. The region was thinly
peopled, and its development awaited settlers. These came from the tenth
century onward in the form of immigrants mainly from the German lands
between the rivers Rhine and Elbe. German lords from the west had conquered
the land, but land without people was valueless. The lords therefore
conducted a campaign to recruit settlers. It was like the populating
of the American West during the middle years of the nineteenth century.
According to Helmold, a twelfth-century chronicler, Adolf, count
of Schauenburg, had acquired wide lands in what is today the north German
province of Mecklenburg, and “[a]s the land was without inhabitants,
he sent messengers into all parts, namely, to Flanders and Holland,
to Utrecht, Westphalia, and Frisia, proclaiming that whosoever were in
straits for lack of fields should come with their families, and receive a
very good land,—a spacious land, rich in crops. ...An innumerable multitude
of different peoples rose up at this call and they came with their
families and their goods into the land of Wagria [Holstein and Mecklenburg].”
8
The newcomers laid out fields and planted towns which focused the
business of their respective districts. The dates of rural settlement may
be obscure, but the towns can be securely dated from their foundation
charters. We can thus trace this wave of urban settlement as it spread
from western Germany, where towns first appeared, to the basin of the
Vistula, and from the Vistula into the wastes of Lithuania, Belorus, and
Ukraine. Most of these towns were small and served only to exchange
the products of urban crafts for the surplus grain and animals of the countryside.
A few stood out as the centers of a long-distance trade, visited
by merchants from much of Europe. They handled the animals driven