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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18<br />
THE MEDIEVAL CITY<br />
managed only by sending it downriver to the next town. Congestion led<br />
to the building of multistoried houses of wood that were both highly unstable<br />
and very flammable (see pp. 39–40). Towns, last, never solved the<br />
problems of street crime and maintaining adequate policing. All these<br />
matters are examined in greater detail in later chapters of this book.<br />
How many cities and towns were there in the continent of Europe<br />
when, about 1500, the Middle Ages drew to a close? It will be argued in<br />
Chapter 3 that they must have numbered two to three thousand or more.<br />
Each was unique, differing from all the others in its physical qualities,<br />
economic development, and institutions of government. All the larger<br />
cities have been the subjects of major books, and a history could be written<br />
for each of them. A short book about the <strong>medieval</strong> <strong>city</strong> can look only<br />
at those features that were common to most if not all of them. It is impossible<br />
in so short a space to delve into their peculiarities and idiosyncrasies.<br />
It is not possible even to mention by name all those of greater<br />
size and importance. What follows is necessarily a model showing what<br />
it was like to live and do business in a <strong>medieval</strong> <strong>city</strong>.<br />
NOTES<br />
1. Aristotle, <strong>The</strong> Politics, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge Texts in the History<br />
of Political Thought (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University<br />
Press, 1988), p. 3.<br />
2. In England the term <strong>city</strong> originally denoted a town that was also the seat<br />
of a bishop, that is, a “cathedral town.” It is now an honorific title conferred by<br />
the government. A common convention is to reserve the term <strong>city</strong> for the largest<br />
and most important settlements.<br />
3. <strong>The</strong> dividing line between the empire in the West and that in the East<br />
ran from the river Danube upstream from Beograd southward through Bosnia to<br />
the Adriatic Sea. <strong>The</strong> Eastern or Byzantine Empire claimed authority over all<br />
lands lying to the east of this line.<br />
4. Ernst Kitzinger, “A Survey of the Early Christian Town of Stobi,”<br />
Dumbarton Oaks Papers, no. 3 (1946): 81–162.<br />
5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford and New York: Oxford<br />
University Press, 1998), p. 463.<br />
6. Norman John Greville Pounds, <strong>The</strong> Medieval Castle in England and Wales:<br />
A Social and Political History (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University<br />
Press, 1990), pp. 207–15.