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It zs an attempt to expound, in a general way, the economic awakening and the birth of urban civili- , zation in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. The bibliography placed at the end of the vol- ume will permit the reader, who may be interested in the subject discussed herein, to inform himself more precisely of the details and to verify my as- sertions. It would be obviously impossible, in a general outline such as this, to go into particulars or take up exceptions and anomalies, and still more so to give way to controversy. Here, then, will be found only a synthesis, the result of long years of study and research. It ¢s particularly gratifying to me to see this book published by the Press of a University which showed me so cordial a sympathy during the war, and to whichI am very happy to dedicate the work asa mark of my. profound gratitude. II. III. LY; Vv. VI. VII. VIII. Contents THE MEDITERRANEAN 1 THE NINTH CENTURY MAbomt (hualgnyors CITY ORIGINS THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE THE MERCHANT CLASS THE MIDDLE CLASS MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS CITIES AND EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION BIBLIOGRAPHY 56 78 109 135 174 221 245 MEDIEVAL CITIES Chapter I The Mediterranean HE Roman Empire, at the end of the third century, had one outstanding general char- acteristic: it was an essentially Mediter- ranean commonwealth. Virtually all of its territory lay within the watershed of that great land-locked sea; the distant frontiers of the Rhine, the Danube, the Euphrates and the Sahara, may be regarded merely as an advanced circle of outer defences pro- tecting the approaches. The Mediterranean was, without question, the bulwark of both its political and economic unity. Its very existence depended on sea mastery. With- out that great trade route, neither the government, nor the defence, nor the administration of the orbis © romanus would have been possible. As the Empire grew old this fundamentally maritime character was, interestingly enough, not only preserved but was still more sharply defined. When the former inland capital, Rome, was aban- doned, its place was taken by a city which not only 2 MEDIEVAL CITIES served as a capital but which was at the same tiv an admirable port—Constantinople. The Empire’s cultural development, to be sure, had clearly passed its peak. Population decreased, the spirit of enterprise waned, barbarian hordes commenced to threaten the frontiers, and the in- creasing expenses of the government, fighting for its very life, brought in their train a fiscal system which more and more enslaved men to the State. | Nevertheless this general deterioration does not — seem to have appreciably affected the shipping of the Mediterranean. It continued to be active and well-sustained, in marked contrast with the grow- ing apathy that characterized the continental pro- — vinces.. Trade continued to keep the East and the West in close contact with each other. There was © no interruption to the intimate commercial relations _ between those diverse climes bathed by one and | the same sea. Both manufactured and natural prod- ucts were still extensively dealt in: textiles from © Constantinople, Edessa, Antioch, and Alexandria; | wines, oils and spices from Syria; papyrus from Egypt; wheat from Egypt, Africa, and Spain; and wines from Gaul and Italy. There was even a © reform of the monetary system based on the gold © solidus, which served materially to encourage com- ; mercial operations by giving them the benefit of © . i THE MEDITERRANEAN __. a an excellent currency, universally adopted as an _ instrument of exchange and as’a means of quoting ces. Of the two great regions of the Empire, the East _and the West, the first far surpassed the second, both in superiority of civilization and in a much _ higher level of economic development. At the be- _ ginning of the fourth century there were no longer _ of the export trade was in Syria and in Asia Minor, and here also was concentrated, in particular, the | textile industry for which the whole Roman world was the market and for which Syrian ships were the carriers. The commercial prominence of the Syrians is one of the most interesting facts in the history of the Lower Empire.* It undoubtedly contributed largely to that progressive orientalization of so- ciety which was due eventually to end in Byzan- tinism. And this orientalization, of which the sea was the vehicle, is clear proof of the increasing im- portance which the Mediterranean acquired as the ageing Empire grew weak, gave way in the North | 1P. Scheffer-Boichorst, “Zur Geschichte der Syrer im Abend- lande,” Mittheilungen des Instituts fur Odcestereichische Ge- schichtsforschung, 1885, Vol. VI, p. 521; L. Bréhier, “Les colonies d’Orientaux en Occident au commencement du Moyen-age,” | Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 1903, Vol. XII. _ any really great cities save in the East. The center © 4 MEDIEVAL CITIES beneath the pressure of the barbarians, and con- tracted more and more about the shores of this in- land sea. The persistence of the Germanic tribes in striv- ing, from the very beginning of the period of the invasions, to reach these same shores and to settle there is worth special notice. When, in the course of the third century, the frontiers gave way for the first time under their blows, they poured south- ward in a living flood. The Quadi and the Marco- -manni invaded Italy; the Goths marched on the Bosphorus; the Franks, the Suevi, and the Van- dals, who had crossed the Rhine, pushed on unhesi- tatingly towards Aquitaine and Spain. They had no thought of merely colonizing the provinces they coveted.“Their dream was rather to settle down, themselves, in those happy regions where the mild-— ness of the climate and the fertility of the soil were matched by the charms and the wealth of au : zation. : This initial attempt produced nothing more per- manent than the ruins which remained as its re- sult. Rome was still strong enough to drive the in- vaders back beyond the Rhine and the Danube. For a century and a half she succeeded in restrain- ing them, but at the cost of exhausting her armies and her finances. THE MEDITERRANEAN 5 More and more unequal became the balance of power. The assaults of the barbarians grew more relentless as their increasing numbers made the ac- quisition of new territory more imperative, while the decreasing population of the Empire made a successful resistance constantly less possible. De- spite the extraordinary skill and determination with which the Empire sought to stave off disaster, the outcome was inevitable. _ At the beginning of the fifth century, all was over. The whole West was invaded. Roman prov- inces were transformed into Germanic kingdoms. The Vandals were installed in Africa, the Visigoths in Aquitaine and in Spain, the Burgundians in the Valley of the Rhone, the Ostrogoths in Italy. 7 This nomenclature is significant. It includes only Mediterranean countries, and little more is needed to show that the objective of the conquer- ors, free at last to settle down where they pleased, was the sea,—that sea which for so long a time the Romans had called, with as much affection as pride, mare nostrum. Towards the sea, as of one accord, they all turned their steps, impatient to settle along its shores and to enjoy its beauty. If the Franks did not reach the Mediterranean at their first attempt, it is because, having come too late, they found the ground already occupied. But 6 MEDIEVAL CITIES they too persisted in striving for a foothold there. — One of Clovis’s earliest ambitions was to conquer Provence, and only the intervention of Theodoric kept him from extending the frontiers of his king- dom as far as the Cote d’Azur. Yet this first lack of success was not due to discourage his successors. A quarter of acentury later, in 536, the Franks made good use of Justinian’s offensive against the Ostro- soths and wrung from their hard-pressed rivals the grant of the coveted territory. It is interesting to see how consistently the Merovingian dynasty tended, from that date on, to become in its turn a Mediterranean power. Childebert and Clotaire, for example, ventured upon an expedition beyond the Pyrenees in 542, which, however, proved to be ill-starred. But it was Italy in particular that aroused the cupidity of the Frankish kings. They formed an alliance, first with — the Byzantines and then with the Lombards, in the hope of setting foot south of the Alps. Repeatedly thwarted, they persisted in fresh attempts. By 539, Theudebert had crossed the Alps, and the territories which he had occupied were reconquered by Narses in 553. Numerous efforts were made in 584-585 and from 588 to 590 to get possession anew. The appearance of the Germanic tribes on the shore of the Mediterranean was by no means a crit- THE MEDITERRANEAN y; ical point marking the advent of a new era in the history of Europe. Great as were the consequences which it entailed, it did not sweep the boards clean nor even break the tradition. The aim of the invad- ers was not to destroy the Roman Empire but to settle there and enjoy it. By and large, what they preserved far exceeded what they destroyed and what they brought that was new. It is true that the kingdoms they established on the soil of the Empire made an end of the latter in so far as being a State in Western Europe. From a political point of view the orbis romanus, now strictly localized in the East, lost that ecumenical character which had made its frontiers coincide with the frontiers of Christianity. The Empire, however, was far from being estranged to the lost provinces. Its civiliza- tion there outlived its authority. By the Church, by ‘language; by a superiority of institutions and law, it prevailed over the conquerors. In the midst of the troubles, the insecurity, the misery and the an- archy which accompanied the invasions there was naturally a certain decline, but even in that de- cline there was preserved a physiognomy still dis- tinctly Roman. The Germanic tribes were unable, and in fact did not want, to do without it. They barbarised, but they did not consciously germanise. Nothing is better proof of this assertion than 8 MEDIEVAL CITIES the persistence in the last days of the Empire— from the fifth to the eighth century—of that mari- time character pointed out above. The importance of the Mediterranean did not grow less after the period of the invasions. The sea remained for the Germanic tribes what it had been before their ar- rival—the very center of Europe, the mare nostrum. The sea had had such great importance in the po- litical order that the deposing of the last Roman Emperor in the West (476) was not enough in itself to turn historical evolution from its time- honored direction. It continued, on the contrary, to develop in the same theater and under the same influences. No indication yet gave warning of the end of the commonwealth of civilization created by the Empire from the Pillars of Hercules to the Aegean Sea, from the coasts of Egypt and Africa to the shores of Gaul, Italy and Spain. .In spite of the invasion of the barbarians the new world con- served, in all essential characteristics, the physiog- nomy of the old. To follow the course of events _ from Romulus Augustulus to Charlemagne it is ~ necessary to keep the Mediterranean constantly in view.” _ All the great events in political history are un- 2H. Pirenne, “Mahomet et Charlemagne,” Revue belge de philo- logie et d’histoire, 1922, Vol. I, p. 77. THE MEDITERRANEAN 9 folded on its shores. From 493 to 526 Italy, gov- erned by Theodoric, maintained a hegemony over all the Germanic kingdoms, a hegemony through which the power of the Roman tradition was per- petuated and assured. After Theodoric, this power was still more clearly shown. Justinian failed by but little of restoring imperial unity (527-565). Africa, Spain, and Italy were reconquered. The Mediterranean became again a Roman lake. By- - zantium, it is true, weakened by the immense effort she had just put forth, could neither finish nor even preserve intact the astonishing work which she had accomplished. The Lombards took North- ern Italy away from her (568) ; the Visigoths freed themselves from her yoke. Nevertheless she did not abandon her ambitions. She retained, for a long time to come, Africa, Sicily, Southern Italy. Nor did she loose her grip on the West—thanks to the sea, the mastery of which her fleets so securely held that the fate of Europe rested at that moment, more than ever, on the waves of the Mediter- ranean. What was true of the political situation held* equally well for civilization. It seems hardly nec- essary to recall that Boéthius (480-525) and Cas- siodorus (477-c.562) were Italians as were St. Benedict (480-534) and Gregory the Great (59o- 10 MEDIEVAL CITIES 604), and that Isidorus of Seville (570-636) was a Spaniard. It was Italy that maintained the last schools at the same time that she was fostering the — spread of monachism north of the Alps. It was in Italy, also, that what was left of the ancient cul- ture flourished side by side with what was brought forth anew in the bosom of the Church. All the strength and vigor that the Church possessed was concentrated in the region of the Mediterranean. There alone she gave evidence of an organization and spirit capable of initiating great enterprises. An interesting example of this is the fact that Chris- tianity was brought to the Anglo-Saxons (596) from the distant shores of Italy, not from the neighboring shores of Gaul. The mission of St. Augustine is therefore an illuminating sidelight on the historic influence retained by the Mediter- — ranean. And it seems more significant still when we recall that the evangelization of. Ireland was due to missionaries sent out from Marseilles, and that the apostles of Belgium, St. Amand (689- — 693) and St. Remade (¢. 668), were Aquitanians. * A brief survey of the economic development of Europe will give the finishing touch to the sub- — stantiation of the theory which has here been put — forward. That development is, obviously, a clear- . cut, direct continuation of the economy of the THE MEDITERRANEAN 11 Roman Empire. In it are rediscovered all the lat- ter’s principal traits and, above all, that Mediter- ranean character which here is unmistakable. To be sure, a general let-down in social activity was apparent in this region as in all others. By the last days of the Empire there was a clearly marked de- cline which the catastrophe of the invasions natur- ally helped accentuate. But it would be a decided mistake to imagine that the arrival of the Germanic tribes had as a result the substitution of a purely agricultural economy and a general stagnation in trade for urban life and commercial activity.* The supposed dislike of the barbarians for towns * is an admitted fable to which reality has given the lie. If, on the extreme frontiers of the Empire, cer- tain towns were put to the torch, destroyed and pillaged, it is none the less true that the immense majority survived the invasions. A statistical sur- vey of cities in existence at the present day in France, in Italy and even on the banks of the Rhine and the Danube, gives proof that, for the most part, these cities now stand on the sites where rose the Roman cities, and that their very names are often but a transformation of Roman names. 3A. Dopsch, Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen der euro- paischen Kulturentwicklung, Vienna, 1920, Vol. II, p. 527, takes issue strongly with the opinion that the Germanic invasions put an end to Roman civilization. i =v Ser 12 MEDIEVAL CITIES . The Church had of course closely patterned the religious districts after the administrative districts of the Empire. As a general rule, each diocese cor- responded to a ¢évétas. Since the ecclesiastical or- canization suffered no change during the era of the Germanic invasions, the result was that in the new kingdoms founded by the conquerors it preserved intact this characteristic feature. In fact, from the / beginning of the sixth century the word cévitas took the special meaning of “episcopal city,” the center of the diocese. In surviving the Empire on which it was based, the Church therefore contrib- uted very largely to the safeguarding of the exist- ence of the Roman cities. But it must not be overlooked, on the other hand, that these cities in themselves long retained a con- siderable importance. Their municipal institutions did not suddenly disappear upon the arrival of the Germanic tribes. Not only in Italy, but also in Spain and even in Gaul, they kept their decuriones a corps of magistrates provided with a judicial and administrative authority, the details of which are not clear but whose existence and Roman origin is a matter of record.* They continued, likewise, 4N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, La monarchie franque, p. 236; A. Dopsch, of: ci#., Vol. II, ki: E. Mayer, Deutsche und fran- + tps zosische Verfassungsgeschichte, Leipzig, 1899, Vol. I, p. 296. Se ee THE MEDITERRANEAN 13 the office of the defensor cévitatis, and the practice of committing to writing the authentic laws found in the gesta municipalia. It is also well established that these cities were the centers of an economic activity which itself was a survival of the preceding civilization. Each city was the market for the surrounding countryside, the winter home of the great landed proprietors of the neighborhood and, if favorably situated, the center of a commerce the more highly developed in proportion to its nearness to the shores of the Medi- terranean. A perusal of Gregory of Tours gives ample proof that in the Gaul of his time there was still a professional merchant class residing in the towns. He cites, in some thoroughly characteristic passages, those of Verdun, Paris, Orleans, Cler- mont-Ferrand, Marseilles, Nimes, and Bordeaux, and the information which he supplies concerning them is all the more significant in that it is brought into his narrative only incidentally.’ Care should of course be taken not to exaggerate its value. An equally great fault would be to undervalue it. Cer- | tainly the economic order of Merovingian Gaul was founded on agriculture rather than on any ' other form of activity. More certainly still this had 5 See Historia Francorum, edit. B. Krusch, Book IV, sec. 43; Book VI, sec. 45; Book VIII, secs. 1, 33; Book III, sec. 34. 14 MEDIEVAL CITIES already been the case under the Roman Empire. But this does not preclude the fact that inland traffic, the import and export of goods and mer- chandise, was carried on to a considerable extent. It was an important factor in the maintenance of society. An indirect proof of this is furnished by the institution of market-tolls (eloneum). Thus were called the tolls set up by the Roman admin- istration along the roads, in the ports, at bridge crossings, and elsewhere. The Frankish kings let them all stay in force and drew from them such copious revenues that the collectors of this class of taxes (feloneariz) figured among the number of — their most useful functionaires. The continued commercial activity after the disappearance of the Empire and, likewise, the survival of the towns that were the centers thereof and the merchants who were the instruments, is ex- ' plained by the continuation of Mediterranean ~~ trade. In all the chief characteristics it was the same, from the fifth to the eighth centuries, as it had been just after Constantine. If, as is probable, the decline was the more rapid after the Germanic invasions, it remains none the less true that there is presented a picture of uninterrupted intercourse between the Byzantine East and the West domin- ated by the barbarians. By means of the shipping ere ee — ae THE MEDITERRANEAN LAN which was carried on from the coasts of Spain and Gaul to those of Syria and Asia Minor, the basin — of the Mediterranean did not cease, despite the political subdivisions which it had seen take place, to consolidate the economic unity which it had shaped for centuries under the imperial common- wealth. Because of this fact, the economic organi- * zation of the world lived on after the political transformation. In lack of other proofs, the monetary system of the Frankish kings would alone establish this truth convincingly. This system, as is too well known to make necessary any lengthy consideration here, was purely Roman or, strictly speaking, Romano- Byzantine. This is shown by the coins that were minted: the solidus, the tréens, and the denarius— that is to say, the sow, the thérd-sou and the denier. It is shown further by the metal which was em- ployed: gold, used for the coinage of the solédus and the ¢réens. It is also shown by the weight which was given to specie. It is shown, finally, by the effigies which were minted on the coins. In this connection it is worth noting that the mints con- tinued for a long time, under the Merovingian kings, the custom of representing the bust of the Emperor on the coins and of showing on the reverse of the pieces the Victoréa Augusti and that, carry- —a 16 MEDIEVAL CITIES ing this imitation to the extreme, when the Byzan- tines substituted the cross for the symbol of that victory they went and did the same. Such extreme servility can be explained only by the continuing influence of the Empire. The obvious reason was the necessity of preserving, between the local cur- rency and the imperial currency, a conformity which would be purposeless if the most intimate re- lations had not existed between Merovingian com- merce and the general commerce of the Mediter- ranean. In other words, this commerce continued to be closely bound up with the commerce of the Byzantine Empire. Of such ties, moreover, there are abundant proofs and it will suffice to mention merely a few of the most significant.” It should be borne in mind, first of all, that at the start of the eighth century Marseilles was still the great port of Gaul. The terms employed by Gregory of Tours, in the numerous anecdotes in which he happens to speak of that city, make it seem a singularly animated economic center.’ A very active shipping bound it to Constantinople, 6 M. Prou, “Catalogue des monnaies mérovingiennes de la Biblio- théque Nationale de Paris,” with an Introduction by H. Pirenne, “Un contraste économique. Mérovingiens et Carolingiens,” Revue belge de philologie et a’ histoire, 1923, Vol. II, p. 225. 7 Historia Francorum, edit. B. Krusch, Book IV, sec. 43; Book V, sec. 5; Book VI, secs. 17, 24; Book IX, sec. 22. See also Gregory the Great, Epzstolae, I, 45. LE ee ee THE MEDITERRANEAN 19 to Syria, Africa, Egypt, Spain and Italy. The tiles, wine and oil—were the basis of a regular im- _ port trade. Foreign merchants, Jews and Syrians _ for the most part, had their residence there, and _ their nationality is itself an indication of the close relations kept up by Marseilles with Byzantium. Finally, the éxtraordinary quantity of coins which _ were struck there during the Merovingian era gives _material proof of the activity of its commerce.* The population of the city must have comprised, aside from the merchants, a rather numerous class _ of artisans.” In every respect it seems, then, to have accurately preserved, under the government of the _ Frankish kings, the clearly municipal character of - Roman cities. The economic development of Marseilles natur- ally made itself felt in the hénterland of the port. Under its attraction, all the commerce of Gaul was oriented toward the Mediterranean. The most important market-tolls of the Frankish kingdom were situated in the neighborhood of the town at Fos, at Arles, at Toulon, at Sorgues, at Valence, 8M. Prou, op. cit, P. 300. It is impossible, in fact, not to infer that at Marseilles there was a class of artisans at least as important as that which still existed at Arles in the middle of the sixth century. See F. Kiener, Verfassungsgeschichte der Provence, Leipzig, 1900, p. 29. 18 MEDIEVAL CITIES at Vienne, and at Avignon”. Here is clear proof that merchandise landed in the city was expedited to the interior. By the course of the Rhéne and of the Saone, as well as by the Roman roads, it reached the North of the country. The charters are still in existence by which the Abbey of Corbie (Depart- ment of Pas-de-Calais) obtained from the kings an exemption from tolls at Fos on a number of com- modities, among which may be remarked a sur-— prising variety of spices of eastern origin, as well as papyrus.”* In these circumstances it does not seem unwarranted to assume that the commercial activity of the ports of Rouen and Nantes, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, as well as of Quen- tovic and Duurstede, on the shores of the North Sea, was sustained by the ramifications of the ex- port traffic from far-off Marseilles. But it was in the South of the country that this effect was the most appreciable. All the largest cities of Merovingian Gaul were still to be found, as in the days of the Roman Empire, south of the Loire. The details which Gregory of Tours sup- plies concerning Clermont-Ferrand and Orleans show that they had within their walls veritable 10 Marcuffi Formulae, edit. K. Zeumer, No. I, p. 102. 11], Levillain, Examen critique des chartes mérovingiennes et carolingiennes de l’abbaye de Corbie, Paris, 1902, pp. 220, 231, 235. This treats of the market-tolls of Fos, near Aix-en-Provence. THE MEDITERRANEAN 19 colonies of Jews and Syrians, and if it was so with those towns which there is no reason for leliev- ing enjoyed a privileged status, it must have been so also with the much more important centers such -as Bordeaux or Lyons. It is an established fact, moreover, that Lyons still had at the Carolingian era a quite numerous Jewish population.” Here, then, is quite enough to support the con- clusion that Merovingian times knew, thanks to the continuance of Mediterranean shipping and the intermediary of Marseilles, what we may safe- ly call a great commerce. It would certainly be an error to assume that the dealings of the oriental merchants of Gaul were restricted solely to articles of luxury. Probably the sale of jewelry, enamels and silk stuffs resulted in handsome profits, but this would not be enough to explain their number ‘and their extraordinary diffusion throughout all the country. The traffic of Marseilles was, above all else, supported by goods for general consump- tion such as wine and oil, spices and papyrus. These commodities, as has already been pointed out, were regularly exported to the North. The oriental merchants of the Frankish Empire were virtually engaged in wholesale trade. Their 12 See the letters of Agobard in Monumenta Germaniae historica, Vol. V, p. 184. ‘ L | es a . Ce, ee A 20 MEDIEVAL CITIES boats, after being discharged on the quays of Mar- seilles, certainly carried back, on leaving the shores | of Provence, not only passengers but return freight. | Our sources of information, to be sure, do not tell | ‘much about the nature of this freight. Among the possible conjectures, one of the most likely is that it probably consisted, at least for a good part, in human chattels—that is to say, in slaves. Traffic in slaves did not cease to be carried on in the Frankish Empire until the end of the ninth cen- tury. The wars waged against the barbarians of Saxony, Thuringia and the Slavic regions provided a source of supply which seems to have been abund- ant enough. Gregory of Tours speaks of Saxon slaves belonging to a merchant of Orleans,’* and it is a good guess that this Samo, who departed in the first half of the seventh century with a band of companions for the country of Wends, whose king he eventually became, was very probably nothing more than an adventurer trafficking in slaves."* And it is of course obvious that the slave trade, to which the Jews still assiduously applied themselves in the ninth century, must have had its origin in an earlier era. 13 Historia Francorum, edit. B. Krusch, Book IIT, sec. 46. 147, Goll, “Samo und die karantanischen Slaven,” Mittheilun- gen des Instituts fiir Oesterreichische Geschichtsforschung, Vol » D. 443. | THE MEDITERRANEAN ZA If the bulk of the commerce in Merovingian Gaul was to be found in the hands of oriental merchants, their influence, however, should not be exaggerated. Side by side with them, and according to all indications in constant relations with them, are mentioned indigenous merchants. Gregory of Tours does not fail to supply information con- cerning them, which would evidently be more voluminous if it had not been brought into his narrative only incidentally. He shows the King consenting to a loan to the merchants of Verdun, whose business prospers so well that they soon find themselves in a position to reimburse him.” He mentions the existence in Paris of a domus nego- tiantum—that is to say, apparently, of a sort of market or bazaar.’ He speaks of a merchant profiteering during the great famine of 585 and getting rich.’ And in all these anecdotes he is dealing, without the least doubt, with professionals and not with merely casual buyers or sellers. The picture which the commerce of Merovin- sian Gaul presents is repeated, naturally, in the other riparian Germanic kingdoms of the Mediter- nf r ' ranean—among the Ostrogoths of Italy, among u Historia Francorum, edit. B. Krusch, Book III, sec. 34. Tbid., Book VIII, sec. 33. 7 [bia pepo: VI, sec. 45. 22 MEDIEVAL CITIES the Vandals of Africa, among the Visigoths of Spain. The Edict of Theodoric contained a quanti- ty of stipulations relative to merchants. Carthage continued to be an important port in close relations with Spain, and her ships, apparently, went up the coast as far as Bordeaux. The laws of the Visigoths mentioned merchants from overseas.” | In all of this is clearly manifest the vigorous continuity of the commercial development of the Roman Empire after the Germanic invasions. They did not put an end to the economic unity of an- tiquity. By means of the Mediterranean and the relations kept up thereby between the West and the East, this unity, on the contrary, was preserved with a remarkable distinctiveness. The great in- land sea of Europe no longer belonged, as before, to a single State. But nothing yet gave reason to predict that it would soon cease-t6 have its time-— honored importance. Despite the transformations which it had undergone, the new world had not lost the Mediterranean character of the old. On the shores of the sea was still concentrated the bet- _ ter part of its activities. No indication yet gave © warning of the end of the commonwealth of civ- 18 A. Dopsch,Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen der euro- | paischen Kulturentwicklung, Vol. II, p. 432; F. Dahn, Uber Handel und Handelsrecht der Westgothen Bausteine, Berlin, 1880, Vol. II, p. 301. THE MEDITERRANEAN a ilization, created by the Roman Empire from the Pillars of Hercules to the Aegean Sea. At the be- - ginning of the eighth century, anyone who sought to look into the future would have been unable to discern any reason for not believing in the con- tinuance of the old tradition. - Yet what was then natural and reasonable to predict was not to be realized. The world-order which had survived the Germanic invasions was not able to survive the invasion of Islam. It is thrown across the path of history with the elemental force of a cosmic cataclysm. Even in the lifetime of Mahomet (571-632) no one could have imagined the consequences or prepared for them. Yet the movement took no more than fifty years to spread from the China Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing was able to withstand it. At the first blow, ‘it overthrew the Persian Empire (637-644). It took from the Byzantine Empire, in quick succes- sion, Syria (634-636), Egypt (640-642), Africa (698). It reached into Spain (711). The resistless advance was not to slow down until the start of the eighth century, when the walls of Constan- tinople on the one side (713) and the soldiers of Charles Martel on the other (732) broke that great enveloping offensive against the two flanks of 24 MEDIEVAL CITIES But if its force of expansion was exhausted, it had none the less changed the face of the world. Its sudden thrust had destroyed ancient Europe. I]t had put an end to the Mediterranean commor- wealth in which it had gathered its strength. The familiar and almost “family” sea which once united all the parts of this commonwealth — was to become a barrier between them. On all its shores, for centuries, social life, in its fundamental characteristics, had been the same; religion, the same; customs and ideas, the same or very nearly so. The invasion of the barbarians from the North | had modified nothing essential in that situation. But now, all of a sudden, the very lands where civilization had been born were torn away; the Cult of the Prophet was substituted for the Chris- tian Faith, Moslem law for Roman law, the Arab tongue for the Greek and the Latin tongue. The Mediterranean had been a Roman lake; it now became, for the most part, a Moslem lake. From this time on it separated, instead of uniting, the East and the West of Europe. The tie which — was still binding the Byzantine Empire to the Ger- manic kingdoms of the West was broken. L ie, ~“ Chapter II The Ninth Century HE tremendous effect the invasion of Islam had upon Western Europe has not, perhaps, been fully appreciated. unlike greet hak Had igeone ‘before. Fineien the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and finally the Ro- mans, Western Europe had always received the cultural stamp of the East. It had lived, as it were, by virtue of the Mediterranean; now for the first time it was forced to live by its own resources. The center of gravity, heretofore on the shore of the Mediterranean, was shifted to the North. As a re- \ sult the Frankish Empire, which had so far been playing only a minor réle in the history of Europe, , | was to become:the arbiter of Europe’s destinies. There is obviously more than mere coincidence in the simultaneity of the closing of the Mediter- ranean by Islam and the entry of the Carolingians on the scene. There is the distinct relation of cause and effect between the two. The Frankish Empire was fated to lay the foundations of the Europe of the Middle Ages. But the mission which it fulfilled had as an essential prior condition the overthrow 26 MEDIEVAL CITIES of the traditional world-order. The Carolingians would never have been called upon to play the part they did if historical evolution had not been turned aside from its course and, so to speak, “de- Saxoned” by the Moslem invasion. Without Islam, the Frankish Empire would probably never have existed and Charlemagne, without Mahomet, would be inconceivable.’ “This is made plain enough by the many con- trasts between the Merovingian era, during which the Mediterranean retained its time-honored his- torical importance, and the Carolingian era, when that influence ceased to make itself felt. These con- trasts were in evidence everywhere: in religious sentiment, in political and social institutions, in literature, in language and even in handwriting. From whatever standpoint it is studied, the civili- zation of the ninth century shows a distinct break with the civilization of antiquity. Nothing would be more fallacious than to see therein a simple con- tinuation of the preceding centuries. The coup d’état of Pepin le Bref was considerably more than the substitution of one dynasty for another. It marked a new orientation of the course hitherto followed by history. At first glance there seems 1H. Pirenne, “Mahomet et Charlemagne,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 1922, Vol. I, p. 86 RE a ae ae = " Ba 8. cent THE NINTH CENTURY 27 reason to believe that Charlemagne, in assuming the title of Roman Emperor and Augustus, wished to restore the ancient tradition. In reality, in set- ting himself up against the Emperor of Constan- tinople, he broke that tradition. His Empire was Roman only insofar as the Catholic Church was Roman. For it was from the Church, and the Church alone, that came its inspiration. The forces which he placed at her service were, moreover, forces of the North. His principal collaborators, in religious and cultural matters, were no longer, as they had previously been, Italians, Aquitanians, or Spaniards; they were Anglo-Saxons—a St. Boniface or an Alcuin—or they were Swabians, like Einhard. In the affairs of the State, which was now cut off from the Mediterranean, southerners played scarcely any role. The Germanic influence com- menced to dominate at the very moment when the Frankish Empire, forced to turn away from the Mediterranean, spread over northern Europe and pushed its frontiers as far as the Elbe and the mountains of Bohemia.” 2 The objection may be raised that Charlemagne conquered in Italy the kingdom of the Lombards and in Spain the region included between the Pyrenees and the Ebro. But these thrusts towards the south are by no means to be explained by a desire to dominate the shores of the Mediterranean. The expeditions against the Lombards were provoked by political causes and especially by the alliance with the Papacy. The expedition in 28 MEDIEVAL CITIES In the field of economics the contrast, which the Carolingian period shows. to Merovingian times, is especially striking.* In the days of the Merovin- gians, Gaul was still a maritime country and trade- and traffic flourished because of that fact. The Em- pire of Charlemagne, on the contrary, was essen- ° tially an inland one. No longer was there any com- munication with the exterior; it was a closed State, a State without foreign markets, living in a condi- tion of almost complete isolation. To be sure, the transition from one era to the other was not clear-cut. The trade of Marseilles did not suddenly cease but, from the middle of the seventh century, waned gradually as the Moslems advanced in the Mediterranean. Syria, conquered by them in 633-638, no longer kept it thriving with her ships and her merchandise. Shortly afterwards, Egypt passed in her turn under the yoke of Islam (638-640), and papyrus no longer came to Gaul. © A characteristic consequence is that, after 677, the royal chancellory stopped using papyrus.* The im- Spain had no other aim than the establishing of a solid fron- tier against the Moslems. 3 H. Pirenne, “Un contraste économique. Mérovingiens et Caro- lingiens,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 1923, Vol. II, BD. 223) * Imports, however, had not completely ceased at that date. The last reference we know to the use of papyrus in Gaul is in 737; see M. Prou, Manuel de paléographie, 3rd edit., p. 17. In Italy, it was continued to be used up to the eleventh century; see THE NINTH CENTURY 29 portation of spices kept up for a while, for the monks of Corbie, in 716, believed it useful to have ratified for the last time their privileges of the ton- lieu of Fos.’ A half century later, solitude reigned in the port of Marseilles. Her foster-mother, the sea, was shut off from her and the economic life of the inland regions which had been nourished through her intermediary was definitely extin- cuished. By the ninth century Provence, once the \. richest country of Gaul, had become the poorest.” More and more, the Moslems consolidated their domination over the sea. In the course of the ninth century they seized the Balearic Isles, Corsica, Sar- dinia, Sicily. On the coasts of Africa they founded new ports: Tunis (698-703) ; later on, Mehdia to the south of this city; then Cairo, in 973. Palermo, where stood a great arsenal, became their principal base in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Their fleets sailed it in complete mastery ; commercial flotillas transported the products of the West to Cairo, whence they were redispatched to Bagdad, or pirate fleets devastated the coasts of Provence and Italy and A. Giry, Manuel de diplomatique, p. 494. It was imported there either from Egypt or, more probably, from Sicily (where the Arabs had introduced its manufacture) by the shipping of the _ Byzantine cities of the South of the Peninsular, or by that of Venice, which will be discussed in chap. 111. 5 See chap. 1, Note 11. 6 F. Kiener, Verfassungsgeschichte der Provence, p. 31. 30 MEDIEVAL CITIES put towns to the torch after they had been pillaged and their inhabitants captured to be sold as slaves. In 889 a band of these plunderers even laid hold of Fraxinetum (the present Garde-Frainet, in the Department of the Var) not far from Nice, the garrison of which, for nearly a century, had sub- jected the neighboring populace to continual raids and menaced the roads which led across the Alps from France to Italy.’ The efforts of Charlemagne and his successors to protect the coasts from Saracen raiders were as impotent as their attempts to oppose the invasions of the Norsemen in the North and West.) The hardihood and seamanship of the Danes and Nor- wegians made it easy for them to plunder the” coasts of the Carolingian Empire during the whole of the eleventh century. They conducted their raids not only from the North Sea, the Channel, and the Gulf of Gascony, but at times even from the Mediterranean. Every river which emptied into these seas was, at one time or another, ascend- — ed by their skilfully constructed barks, splendid specimens whereof, brought to light by recent ex- — cavations, are now preserved at Christiania. Peri- 7A. Schulte, Geschichte des mittelalterlichen Handels und Ver- kehrs zwischen Westdeutschland und Italien, Leipzig, 1900, Vol. Il, p. 59. f THE NINTH CENTURY 31 odically the valleys of the Rhine, the Meuse, the Scheldt, the Seine, the Loire, the Garonne and the ‘Rhone were the scene of systematic and persistent pillaging.* The devastation was so complete that, in many cases indeed, the population itself disap- peared. And nothing is a better illustration of the essentially inland character of the Frankish Em- pire than its inability to organize the defence of its coasts, against either Saracens or Norsemen. For that defence, to be effective, should have been a naval defence, and the Empire had no fleets, or hastily improvised ones at best.” Such conditions were incompatible with the ex- istence of a commerce of first rate importance. The ~ historical literature of the ninth century contains, it is true, certain references to merchants (erca- tores, negociatores),° but no illusion should be cherished as to their importance. Compared to the number of texts which have been preserved from 8 W. Vogel, Die Normannen und das frankische Reich, Heidel- berg, 1906. 9 Charles de la Ronci€re, “Charlemagne et a civilisation mari- time au IX® siécle,” Le Moyen-dge, 1897, Vol. X, p. 201. 10 A, Dopsch, Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung bee Karolingerzeit, Vol. II, pp. 180 #f., has, with very great erudition, cited a number of them. We must, however, bear in mind that many among them belong to the Merovingian period and that many others are far from having the significance which he attributes to them. See also J. W. Thompson, “The Commerce of France in the Ninth Century,” The Journal of Political Economy, 1915, Vol. XXIII, p. 857. ; ee ene en een + oe 32 MEDIEVAL CITIES that era, these references are extremely rare. The capitularies, those regulations touching upon every phase of social life, are remarkably meagre in so far as applies to commerce. From this it may be assumed that the latter played a role of only sec- ondary, negligible importance. It was only in the North of Gaul that, during the first half of the ninth century, trade showed any signs of activity. The ports of Quentovic (a place now vanished, near Etaples in the Department of Pas-de-Calais) and Duurstede (on the Rhine, southwest of Utrecht) which under the Merovingian Monarchy were already trading with England and Denmark, seem to have been centers of a widely extended shipping. It is a safe conjecture that because of them the river transport of the Friesians along the Rhine, the Scheldt and the Meuse enjoyed an im- portance that was matched by no other region dur- ing the reigns of Charlemagne and his successors. The cloths woven by the peasants of Flanders, and which contemporary texts designate by the name ~ of Friesian cloaks (pallia fresonica),* together with the wines of Rhenish Germany, supplied to 11H. Pirenne, “Draps de Frise ou draps de Flandre?” Vzertel- cee fiir Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 1909, Vol. VII, p. 308. THE NINTH CENTURY an that river traffic the substance of an export trade which seems to have been fairly regular up to the day when the Norsemen took possession of the ports in question. It is known, moreover, that the deniers coined at Duurstede had a very extensive circulation. They served as prototypes for the old- est coins of Sweden and Poland,” evident proof that they early penetrated, no doubt at the hands of the Norsemen, as far as the Baltic Sea. Attention may also be called, as having been the substance of a rather extensive trade, to the salt industry of -Noirmoutier, where Irish ships were to be seen.”® Salzburg salt, on the other hand, was shipped along the Danube and its affluents to the interior of the Empire.** The sale of slaves, despite the _ prohibitions that were laid down by the sovereigns, was carried on along the western frontiers, where _ the prisoners of war taken from among the pagan _ Slavs found numerous purchasers. _ The Jews seem to have applied themselves par- ticularly to this sort of traffic. They were still numerous, and were found in every part of Fran- cia. Those in the South of Gaul were in close rela- 12M. Prou, Catalogue des monnaies carolingiennes de la Biblio- théeque Nationale, p. 10. BW. Vogel, Die Normannen und das frankische Reich, p. 62. ae laria segam Francorum, edit. A. Boretius, Vol. II, p. 250. 34 MEDIEVAL CITIES tions with their coreligionists of Moslem Spain, to whom they are accused of having sold Christian children.” It was probably from Spain, or perhaps also from Venice, that these Jews obtained the spices and the valuable textiles in which they dealt. However, the obligation to which they were sub- jected of having their children baptised must have caused a great number of them to emigrate south of the Pyrenees at an early date, and their com- mercial importance steadily declined in the course | of the ninth century. As for the Syrians, they were no longer of importance at this era.** | It is, then, most likely that the commerce of Carolingian times was very much reduced. Ex- cept in the neighborhood of Quentovic and Duur- stede, it consisted only in the transport of indis- pensable commodities, such as wine and salt, in the prohibited traffic of a few slaves, and in the barter, through the intermediary of the Jews, of a small | number of products from the East. Of a regular and normal commercial activity, of steady trading carried on by a class of professional 15 See the letter. of Agobard, cited chap. 1, Note 12. 16 The ingenious demonstration of Mr. J. W. Thompson to prove the contrary, in his work cited in Note 10 above, raises philological difficulties which prevent our adopting it. The Greek ie of the work Capfi, upon which it is based, cannot be ac- cepted. ee EE ee - THE NINTH CENTURY 35 merchants, in short, of all that constitutes the very essence of an economy of exchange worthy of the name, no traces are to be found after the closing off of the Mediterranean by the Islamic invasion. The great number of markets (mercatus), which were to be found in the ninth century, in no way contradicts this assertion. They were, as a matter of fact, only small local market-places, instituted for the weekly provisioning of the populace by means of the retail sale of foodstuffs from the country. As a proof of the commercial activity of the Carolingian era, it would be equally beside the point to speak of the existence of the street occu- pied by merchants (vicus mercatorum)™ at Aix- la-Chapelle near the palace of Charlemagne, or of similar streets near certain great abbeys such as, for example, that of St. Riquier. The merchants with whom we have to do here were not, in fact, professional merchants but servitors charged with the duty of supplying the Court or the monks. They were, so to speak, employees of the seignorial household staff and were in no respect merchants. There is, moreover, material proof of the eco- nomic decline which affected Western Europe from 17 Imbart de la Tour, “Des immunités commerciales accordées aux églises du VIII* au IX° siécle,” Etudes d'histoire du Moyen- age, dediées a Gabriel Monod, Paris, 1896, p. 71. ; {- - '~ i: dl “I ~_ J enti 26 MEDIEVAL CITIES the day when she ceased to belong to the Mediter- | ranean commonwealth. It is furnished by the re- | form of: the monetary system, initiated by Pepin le Bref and completed by Charlemagne. That re- form abandoned gold coinage and substituted sil- ver in its place. The so/édus which had heretofore, conforming to the Roman tradition, constituted the basic monetary unit, was now only nominal money. The only real coins from this time on were the silver deniers, weighing about two grams, the metallic value of which, compared to that of the dollar, was approximately eight and one-half cents." The metallic value of the Merovingian gold sol¢dus being nearly three dollars, the im- portance of the reform can be readily appreciated. Undoubtedly it is to be explained only by a pro- digious falling off of both trading and wealth. If it is admitted, and it must be admitted, that the reappearance of gold coinage, with the florins of Florence and the ducats of Venice in the thir- - teenth century, characterised the economic renais- sance of Europe, the inverse is also true: the aban- doning of gold coinage in the eighth century was the manifestation of a profound decline. It is not enough to say that Pepin and Charlemagne wished | 18 M. Prou, Catalogue des monnaies carolingiennes de la Biblio- theque Nationale, p. xlv. THE NINTH CENTURY to remedy the monetary disorder of the last days of the Merovingian era. [[t would have been quite possible for them to find a remedy without giving up the gold standard. They gave up the standard, obviously, from necessity—that is to say, as a result of the disappearance of the yellow metal in Gaul. And this disappearance had no other cause than the interruption of the commerce of the Mediter- ranean.) The proof of this is given by the fact that Southern Italy, remaining in contact with Con- stantinople, retained like the latter a gold stand- ard, for which the Carolingian sovereigns were forced to substitute a silver standard.) The very light weight of their denéers, moreover, testifies to the economic isolation of their Empire. It is in- conceivable that they would have reduced the monetary unit to a thirtieth of its former value if there had been preserved the slightest bond be- tween their States and the Mediterranean regions where the gold so/édus continued to circulate. | But this is not all. The monetary reform of the | ‘ninth century not only was in keeping with the general impoverishment of the era in which it took place, but with the circulation of money which _was noteworthy for both lightness and inadequa- cy. In the absence of centers of attraction suffi- ciently powerful to draw money from afar, it re- MEDIEVAL CITIES maineu, so to speak, stagnant. Charlemagne and his successors in vain ordered that denzers should be coined only in the royal mints. Under the reign of Louis the Pious, it was necessary to give to cer- tain churches authorization to coin money, in view of the difficulties, under which they labored, of ob- taining cash. From the second half of the ninth century on, the authorization to establish a mar- ket was almost always accompanied by the authori- zation to establish a mint in the same place.”” The State could not retain the monopoly of minting coins. It was consistently frittered away. And that is again a manifestation, by no means equivocal, of the economic decline. History shows that the better commerce is sustained, the more the mone- tary system is centralized and simplified. The dis- persion, the variety, and in fact the anarchy which it manifests as we follow the course of the ninth century, ends by giving striking confirmation to. the general theory here put forward. There have been some attempts to attribute to Charlemagne a farseeing political economy. This is to lend him ideas which, however great we sup- pose his genius to have been, it is impossible for him to have had. No one can submit with any 19 M. Prou, Catalogue des monnaies carclmngernmms de la Pit theque Nationale, p. 1xi. THE NINTH CENTURY ‘likelihood of truth that the works which he com- ‘menced in 793, to join the Rednitz to the Altmuhl and so establish communication between the Rhine and the Danube, could have had any other purpose than the transport of troops, or that the wars against the Avars were provoked by the desire to ‘open up a commercial route to Constantinople. The stipulations, in other respects inoperative, of the capitularies regarding coinages, weights and measures, the market-tolls and the markets, were ‘intimately bound up with the general system of “regulation and control which was typical of Caro- -lingian legislation. The same is true regarding the “measures taken against usury and the prohibition enjoining members of the clergy from engaging in ro) oo oD business. Their purpose was to combat fraud, dis- order and indiscipline and to impose a Christian morality on the people. Only a prejudiced point of view can see in them an attempt to stimulate the economic development of the Empire. | } | | | We are so accustomed to consider the reign of Charlemagne as an era of revival that we are un- consciously led to imagine an identical progress in all fields. Unfortunately, what is true of literary > culture, of the religious State, of customs, insti- tutions and statecraft is not true of communica _ tions and commerce/ Every great thing that Charle- | ? n - 4 * ze ‘+ La i oo VI DIEVAL CITIES magne accomplished was accomplished either by his military strength or by his alliance with the Church. For that matter, neither the Church nor _ arms could overcome the circumstances in virtue of | which the Frankish Empire found itself deprived — of foreign markets. It was forced, in fact, to ac-_ commodate itself to a situation which was inevi- — tably prescribed.| History is obliged to recognize that, however brilliant it seems in other respects, the cycle of Charlemagne, considered from an economic viewpoint, is a cycle of regression4 . _The financial organization of the Frankish Em- pire makes this plain. It was, indeed, as rudimen- tary as could be. The poll tax, which the Merovin- gians had preserved in imitation of Rome, no longer existed.” The resources of the sovereign — consisted only in the revenue from his demesnes, in the tributes levied on conquered tribes and in the booty got by war. The market-tolls no longer contributed to the replenishment of the treasury, thus attesting to the commercial decline of the period. They were nothing more than a simple ex- tortion brutally levied in kind on the infrequent merchandise transported by the rivers or along the _roads."y The sorry proceeds, which should have 20G, Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 2nd edit., 1885, | Vol. IV, p. 112. 21 Thid., p. $4. THE NINTH CENTURY 41 served to |eep up the bridges, the docks and the highways, were swallowed up by the functionaries who collected them/The ssi dominici, created to supervise their administration, were impotent in abolishing the abuses which they proved to exist because the State, unable to pay its agents, was likewise unable to impose its authority on them. It was obliged to call on the aristocracy which, ° thanks to their social status, alone could give free services. But in so doing it was constrained, for lack of money, to chose the instruments of power from among the midst of a group of men whose most evident interest was to diminish that power. The recruiting of the functionaries from among the aristocracy was the fundamental vice of the Frankish Empire and the essential cause of its dis- solution, which became so rapid after the death of Charlemagne. Surely, nothing is more fragile than that State the sovereign of which, all-powerful in theory, is dependent in fact upon the fidelity of his independent agents. The feudal system was in embryo in this con- tradictory situation. The Carolingian Empire would have been able to keep going only if it had possessed, like the Byzantine Empire or the Em- pire of the Caliphs, a tax system, a financial con- trol, a fiscal centralization and a treasury provid- 42 MEDIEVAL CITIES ing for the salary of functionaries, for pv >lic works, and for the maintenance of the army and the navy. The financial impotence which caused its downfall was a clear demonstration of the impossibility it encountered of maintaining a political structure on an economic base which was no longer able to support the load. _ \That economic base of the State, as of society, was from this time on the landed proprietor. Just as the Carolingian Empire was an inland State without foreign markets, so also was it an essential- _ ly agricultural State. The traces of commerce which — were still to be found there were negligible. There _ was no other property than landed property, and _ no other work than rural work.) As has already been stated above, this predominance of agriculture was no new fact. It existed in a very distinct form in the Roman era and it continued with increasing strength in the Merovingian era.\As early as the close of antiquity, all the West of Europe was covered with great demesnes belonging to an aris- tocracy the members of which bore the title of sen- _ ators (senatores). More and more, property was | - disappearing in a transformation into hereditary _ - tenures, while the old free farmers were themselves ‘| undergoing a transformation into “cultivators” (colon) attached to the soil from father to son. _ THE NINTH CENTURY 43 The Germanic invasions did not noticeably alter | this state of things./We have definitely given up the notion of imagining the Germanic tribes in the light of a democracy of peasants, all on an equal footing. Social distinctions were very great among them when they invaded the Empire. They comprised a minority of the wealthy and a majori- ty of the poor. The number of slaves and half-free (ite) was considerable.” The arrival of the invaders in the Roman prov- inces brought with it, then, no overthrow of the existing order. The newcomers preserved, in adapt- ing themselves thereto, the status which they found to exist. Many of the invaders received from the King or acquired by violence or by marriage, or otherwise, great demesnes which made them the equals of the “senators.” The landed aristocracy, far from disappearing, was on the contrary invig- orated by new elements. | !The disappearance of the small free proprietors continued. It seems, in fact, that as early as the start of the Carolingian period only a very small number of them still existed in Gaul. Charlemagne 22W. Wittich, Die Grundherrschaft in Nordwestdeutschland, Leipzig, 1896; H. Pirenne, “Liberté et proprieté en Flandre du IX° au XII® siécle,” Bulletin de l’Académie Royale de Belgique, Classe des lettres, 1906; H. Van Werveke, “Grands propriétaires en Flandre au VII° et au VIII® siécle,” Revue belge de philologie et @histoire, 1923, Vol. I, p. 321. 44 MEDIEVAL CITIES in vain took measures to safeguard those who were left.“"| The need of protection inevitably made them turn to the more powerful individuals to whose patronage they subordinated their persons and their possessions. | | /\ Large estates, then, kept on being more and _ more generally in evidence after the period of the ‘invasions. The favor which the kings showed the Church was an additional factor in this develop- ment, and the religious fervor of the aristocracy had the same effect. Monasteries, whose number mul- tiplied with such remarkable rapidity after the seventh century, were receiving bountiful gifts of land. Everywhere ecclesiastical demesnes and lay demesnes were mixed up together, uniting not only cultivated ground, but’ woods, heaths and waste-lands. | The organization of these demesnes remained in conformity, in Frankish Gaul, with what it had been in Roman Gaul. It is clear that this could not have been otherwise. The Germanic tribes had no motive for, and were, furthermore, incapable of, substituting a different organization. It consisted, in its essentials, of classifying all the land in two groups, subject to two distinct forms of gov- ernment. The first, the less extensive, was directly 23 Capitularia regum Francorum, edit. A. Boretius, Vol. I, p. 125. rs to a | Ne eee eee eeEeEeEEeee THE NINTH CENTURY 45 exploited by the proprietor; the second was di- vided, under deeds of tenure, among the peasants. | Each of the vzllae of which a demesne was com- posed comprised both seignorial land (ferra do- minicata) and censal land, divided in units of cul- tivation (ansus) held by hereditary right by manants or villeins (7zanentes, villanz) in return for the prestation of rents, in money or in kind, and statute-labor.”* | As long as urban life and commerce flourished, the great demesnes had a market for the disposal of their produce. There is no room for doubt that during all the Merovingian era it was through them that the city groups were provisioned and that the merchants were supplied. But it could not help be otherwise when trade disappeared and therewith the merchant class and the municipal population. The great estates suffered the same fate as the Frankish Empire. Like it, they lost their markets. The possibility of selling abroad existed no longer because of the lack of buyers, and it be- 24 The registry of rents of the Abbot Irminon is the principal source of knowledge of this organization. The prolegomena of -Guérard in the edition which he issued in 1844, should, however, be read. One should also consult, on this point, the famous Capitulare de Villis. K. Gareis has issued a good commentary: Die Landguterordnung Karls des Grossen, Berlin, 1895. On the recent controversies over the import and the date of the Capitu- lare, see M. Bloch, “L’origine et la date du Capitulare de Villis,” Revue Historique, 1923, Vol. CXLIII, p. 40. — or’ 46 MEDIEVAL CITIES came useless to continue to produce more than the indispensable minimum for the subsistence of the men, proprietors or tenants, living on the estate. _For an economy of exchange was substituted an ~ economy of consumption.| Each demesne, in place of continuing to deal with the outside, constituted from this time on a little world of its own. It lived by itself and for itself, in the traditional immobili- . ty of a patriarchal form of government. The ninth , century is the golden age of what we have called the closed domestic economy and which we might call, with more exactitude, the economy of no mar- \ kets. f This economy, in which production had no other aim than the sustenance of the demesnial group and which in consequence was absolutely foreign to the idea of profit, can not be considered as a nat- ural and spontaneous phenomenon. It was, on the contrary, merely the result of an evolution which forced it to take this characteristic form. The great proprietors did not give up selling the prod- 25 Certain authors have believed that demesnial products were PM for sale. See, for example, F. Keutgen, Amter und unfte, Jena, 1903, p. 58. It is a fact that in certain, exceptional ' cases and, for example, in times of famine, selling took place. | Butasa general rule there was certainly no selling. The texts alleged to prove the contrary are too few in number and too \anblssoe to carry conviction. It is evident that the whole — onomy of the demesnial system of the late Middle Ages i is in flagrant opposition to this idea of profit. a THE NINTH CENTURY 47 ucts of their lands of their own free will; they stopped because they could not do otherwise. Cer- tainly if commerce had continued to supply them regularly with the means of disposing of these products abroad, they would not have neglected to profit thereby.|They did not sell because they , could not sell, and they could not sell because mar- | kets were wanting. The closed demesnial organi- zation, which made its appearance at the beginning of the ninth century, was a phenomenon due to compulsion. That is merely to say that it was an abnormal phenomenon, | This can be most effectively shown by compar- ing the picture, which Carolingian Europe pre- sents, with that of Southern Russia at the same eras | We know that bands of sea-faring Norsemen, that is to say of Scandinavians originally from Sweden, established their domination over the Slavs of the watershed of the Dnieper during the course of the ninth century. These conquerors, whom the conquered designated by the name of Russians, naturally had to congregate in groups in 26 For what follows, consult: N. Rostovtzeff, Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, Oxford, 1922; V. L. P. Thomsen, The Relations between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia and the Origin of the Russian State, Oxford, 1877; V. O. Kluchevsky, A History of Russia, New York, 1911, Vol. I, p. 77; I. M. Kulischer, Jstoria ' Russkoi torgovlt, Petrograd, 1923, D'S: ate 48 MEDIEVAL CITIES order to insure their safety in the midst of the pop- ulations they had subjected. For this purpose they built fortified inclosures, called gorods in the Slavic tongue, where they set- tled with their princes and the images of their gods. The most ancient Russian cities owe their origin to these entrenched camps. There were such camps at Smolensk, Suzdal and Novgorod; the most important and the most civilized was at Kiev, the prince of which ranked above all the other princes. The subsistence of the invaders was as- sured by tributes levied on the native population.) | \It was therefore possible for the Russians to live off the land, without seeking abroad to sup- plement the resources which the country gave them in abundance. They would have done so, without doubt, and been content to use the prestations of their subjects if they had found it impossible, like their contemporaries in Western Europe, to com- municate with the exterior. But the position which they occupied must have early led them to practise an economy of exchange. | \ Southern Russia was placed, as a matter of fact, between two regions of a superior civilization. To the east, beyond the Caspian Sea, extended the Caliphate of Bagdad; to the south, the Black Sea THE NINTH CENTURY 49 bathed the coasts of the Byzantine Empire and pointed the way towards Constantinople. ‘The bar- barians felt at once the effect of these two strong _ centers of attraction. To be sure they were in the highest degree energetic, enterprising and adven- turous, but their native qualities only served to turn circumstances to the best account. Arab mer- chants, Jews, and Byzantines were already fre- quenting the Slavic regions when they took posses- sion, and showed them the route to follow. They themselves did not hesitate to plunge along it un- der the spur of the love of gain, quite as natural to primitive man as to civilized. The country they occupied placed at their dis- posal products particularly well suited for trade with rich empires accustomed to the refinements of life. _Its immense forests furnished them with a quantity of honey, precious in those days when sugar was still unknown, and furs, sumptuousness in which was a requisite, even in southern climes, of luxurious dress and equipment. | Slaves were easier still to procure and, thanks to the Moslem harems and the great houses or Byzantine workshops, had a sale as sure as it was remunerative. Thus as early as the ninth century, while the Empire of Charlemagne was kept in 1so- 50 MEDIEVAL CITIES , lation after the closing of the Mediterranean, \ Southern Russia on the contrary was induced to sell her products in the two great markets which exercised their attraction on her. The paganism of the Scandinavians of the Dnieper left them free of the religious scruples which prevented the Chris- tians of the West from having dealings with the Moslems. Belonging neither to the faith of Christ /nor to that of Mahomet, they only asked to get | rich, in dealing impartially with the adepts of the ‘one or the other.) The importance of the trade which they kept up as much with the Moslem Empire as with the Greek, is made clear by the extraordinary number of Arab and Byzantine coins discovered in Russia : \/ ~ WV a en and which mark, like a golden compass needle, the direction of the commercial routes. \In the region of Kiev they followed to the south | j Ar § y the course of the Dnieper, to the east the Volga, and to the north the direction marked by the Western Dvina or the lakes which abut the Gulf of Bothnia. Information from Jewish or Arab travellers and from Byzantine writers fortunately supplements the data from archaeological records. It will suf- fice here to give a brief résumé of what Constan- tine Porphyrogenetus reports in the ninth centu- fi or i <. aed. ee -—-- — THE NINTH CENTURY gl ry.’ He shows the Russians assembling their boats at Kiev each year after the ice melts. Their flotilla slowly descends the Dnieper, whose numerous cat- aracts present obstacles that have to be avoided by dragging the barks along the banks. The sea once reached, they sail before the wind along the coasts towards Constantinople, the supreme goal of their long and perilous voyage. There the Russian mer- chants had a special quarter and made commercial treaties, the oldest of which dates back to the ninth century, regulating their relations with the popu- lation. Many of them, seduced by its attractions, settled down there and took service in the Imperial Guard, as had done, before that time, the Germans in the legions of Rome. |The City of the Emperors (C'zarograd) had for the Russians a fascination the influence of which has lasted across the centuries. It was from her that they received Christianity.(957-1015) ; it_was from. her t her that. they borrowed their art, their writ- ing, ag, the u use of money and a good part.of their ad- ‘ministrative organization. Nothing more is needed to demonstrate the role played by Byzantine com- 27 De administrando imperio (written about 950). For this text the excellent commentary of V. L. P. Thomsen, of. cit., should be consulted. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AG LIBRARY 52 MEDIEVAL CITIES merce in their social life. It occupied so essential a place therein that without it their civilization would remain inexplicable. To be sure, the forms in which it is found are very primitive, but the im- portant thing is not the forms of this traffic; it is the effect it had. | Among the Russians of the late Middle Ages it actually determined the constitution of society. By striking contrast with what has been shown to be the case with their contemporaries of Carolin- gian Europe, not only the importance but the very idea of real estate was unknown to them. Their notion of wealth comprised only personal property, of which slaves were the most valuable. They were not interested in land except in so far as, by their control of it, they were able to appropriate its products. And if this conception was that of a class of warrior-conquerors, there is but little doubt that it was held for so long because these warriors were, at the same time, merchants. We might, inciden- tally, add that the concentration of the Russians in the gorods, motivated in the beginning by mili- tary necessity, is itself found to fit in admirably with ie at needs. An organization created by barbarians for the purpose of keeping conquered populations under the yoke was well adapted to the sort of life which theirs became after they gave _ a THE NINTH CENTURY 53 heed to the economic attraction of Byzantium and _ Bagdad. (Their example shows that a society does not necessarily have to pass through an agricultur- al stage before giving itself over to commerce. Here commerce appears as an original phenom- enon. And if this is so, it is because the Russians instead of finding themselves isolated from the outside world like Western Europe were on the contrary pushed or, to use a better word, drawn into contact with it from the beginning. Out of _ this derive the violent contrasts which are disclosed in comparing their social state with that of the Carolingian Empire: in place of a demesnial aris- tocracy, a commercial aristocracy; in place of serfs attached to the soil, slaves considered as instru- _ ments of work; in place of a population living in the country, a population gathered together in towns; in place, finally, of a simple economy of consumption, an economy of exchange and a reg- ular and permanent commercial activity. That these outstanding contrasts were the result of circumstances which gave Russia markets while _ depriving the Carolingian Empire of them, history _ clearly demonstrates.|The activity of Russian trade _ was maintained, indeed, only as long as the routes _ to Constantinople and Bagdad remained open be- fore it. It was not fated to withstand the crisis er 54 MEDIEVAL CITIES : : which the Petchenegs brought about in the elev- | enth century. The invasion of these barbarians along the shores of the Caspian and the Black Seas | brought in their train consequences identical to those which the invasion of Islam in the Mediter- | ranean had had for Western Europe in the eighth | eRe | Just as the latter cut the communications be- | tween Gaul and the East, the former cut the com- munications between Russia and her foreign mar- kets. And in both quarters, the results of this | interruption coincide with a singular exactitude. In Russia as in Gaul, when means of communication — disappeared and towns were depopulated and the | populace forced to find on the ground the means | of their subsistence, a period of agricultural econo- _ my was substituted for a period of commercial” economy. Despite the differences in details, it was the same picture in both cases. The regions of the | South, ruined and troubled by the barbarians, gave _ way in importance to the regions of the North. Kiev fell into a decline as Marseilles had fallen, .and the center of the Russian State was removed ' to Moscow just as the center of the Frankish State, with the Carolingian dynasty, had been removed ‘sto the watershed of the Rhine. And to end by mak- /. ing the parallel still more conclusive, there arose, | THE NINTH CENTURY 55 in Russia as in Gaul, a landed aristocracy, and a demesnial system was organized in which the im- possibility of exporting or of selling forced produc- tion to be limited to the needs of the proprietor and his peasants. | So, in both cases, the same causes produced the same_effects.\But they did not produce them at the same date. Russia was living by trade at an era when the Carolingian Empire knew only the de- mesnial régime, and she in turn inaugurated this! form of government at the very moment when Western Europe, having found new markets, broke away from it. We shall examine further how this break was accomplished. a the moment to have proved, by the example of Russia, Yi the theory that the economy of the e Carolingian era era was not the result of an internal ere on butmos but must be attributed to the closing of the Mediter of the Mediterranean _ | by islam ay eR tec, : OI A St EERE eX: NN A NO Chapter III City Origins __ A_N interesting question is whether or not cities existed in the midst of that essentially agri- cultural civilization into which Western Europe had developed in the course of the ninth century. The answer depends on the meaning given to the -¥. word “city.” If by it is meant a locality the popu- * lation of which, instead of living by working the — soil, devotes itself to commercial activity, the an- swer will have to be “No.”’ The answer will also be in the negative if we understand by “city” a community endowed with legal personality and _ possessing laws and institutions peculiar to itself.) \On the other hand, if we think of a city as a center of administration and as a fortress, it is clear that the Carolingian period knew nearly as many cities as the centuries which followed it must have known. That is merely another way of saying that the cities which were then to be found were without two of the fundamental attributes of the cities of _ the Middle Ages and of modern times—a middle- *. class population and a communal organization. Primitive though it may be, every stable society feels the need of providing its members with cen- | \ CITY ORIGINS ters of assembly, or meeting places. Ubservance of religious rites, maintenance of markets, and po- ~ litical and judicial gatherings necessarily bring about the designation of localities intended for the assembly of those who wish to or who must par- ticipate therein, | Military needs have a still more positive effect. - Populations have to prepare refuges where will be - found momentary protection from the enemy in case of invasion. War is as old as humanity, and the construction of fortresses almost as old as war. The first buildings erected by man seem, indeed, to have been protecting walls. Even today, there is hardly a barbaric race among whom this tendency is not found and, as far back as we may go in the past, the situation remains the same. The acropoles of the Greeks, the oppida of the Etruscans, the Latins, and the Gauls, the durgen of the Germans, the gorods of the Slavs, like the kraals of the Negroes of South Africa, were in the beginning no _ more than places of assembly and, especially, shel- _ ters. Their plan and their construction depended _ naturally upon the conformation of the terrain and upon the building materials at hand. But the gen- eral arrangement of them was everywhere the _ same. It consisted of a space, square or circular in _ shape, surrounded by ramparts made of trunks of De | a ihe MEDIEVAL CITIES . | rees, or mud or blocks of stone, protected by a moat and entered by gates. In short, it was an en- closure./And it is an interesting fact that the words which in modern English and in modern Russian (town and gorod) designate a city, originally des- jae Ge an enclosure.) ~\In ordinary times, these enclosures remaihed y aoet The people resorted to them only on the oc- casion of religious or civic ceremonies, or when war constrained them to seek refuge there with their herds. But, little by little with the march of civili- zation, their intermittent animation became a con- tinuous animation. Temples arose; magistrates or chieftains established their residence; merchants and artisans came to settle. What first had been only an occasional center of assembly became a city, the administrative, religious, political and economic center of all the territory of the tribe whose name it customarily took. | [This explains why, in many societies and partic- ularly in classic antiquity, the political life of the cities was not restricted to the circumference of _ their walls. The city, indeed, had been built for the tribe, and every man in it, whether dwelling — within or without the walls, was equally a citizen thereof}/Neither Greece nor Rome knew anything analogous to the strictly local and particularist ~ 2 rs A m . < a i y Re A, Sl ae CITY ORIGINS bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages. |The life of the city was blended with the national life. The law of the city was, like the religion itself of the city, common to all the people whose capital it was and , who constituted with it a single autonomous re- public. (The municipal system, then, was identified in antiquity with the constitutional system. And when Rome extended her dominioncover all the Medi- terranean world, she made it the basis of the ad- ministrative system of her Empire.’ This system withstood, in Western Europe, the Germanic inva- 3 sions.’ Vestigial but thoroughly definite relics of it were still to-be found i an.Gaul, in Spain, in Africa, and in Italy,. long after’ the fifth century. Little by little, however, thevncteasing: weakness of social organization did away*with, mést of its character- istic features. By the eighth century, neither the decuriones, nor the gesta municipalia, nor the de-. fensor civitatis were longer in existence.| At the same time the thrust of Islam in the Mediter- ranean, in making impossible the commerce which up to now had still sustained a certain activity in the cities, condemned them to an inevitable de-X cline. But it did not condemn them to death. Cur- tailed and weakened though they were, they sur- 1 See above, chap. I. So MEDIEVAL CITIES vived. Their social function did not altogether dis- appear. In the agricultural social order of the time, they retained in spite of everything a fundamental importance. It is necessary to take full count of the role they played, in order to understand what was to befall them later. | As has been stated above, the Church had based its diocesan boundaries on the boundaries of the Roman cities.” Held in respect by the barbarians, it therefore continued to maintain, after their oc- cupation of the provinces of. the Empire, the mu- nicipal system upon which it had been based. The _, dying out of trade and the exodus of foreign mer- ~*\) chants had no influence on the ecclesiastical organi- \. zation, The cities where the bishops resided became poorer and less populous without the bishops them- selves feeling the effects. On the contrary, the “more that general prosperity declined, the more their power and their influence had a chance to — _ assert itself. Endowed with a prestige which was ' the greater because the State had disappeared, sus- | tained by donations from their congregations, and _ partners with the Carolingians in the governing of _\ society, they were in a commanding position by virtue of, at one and the same time, their moral 2 See above, chap. 1. CITY ORIGINS | 61 authority, their economic power, and their political activity. | When the Empire of Charlemagne foundered, their status, far from being adversely affected, was made still more secure. The feudal princes, who had ruined the power of the Monarchy, did not touch that of the Church, for its divine origin protected it from their attacks. They feared the bishops who could fling at them the terrible weap- on of excommunication. They revered them as the supernatural guardians of order and justice. In the midst of the anarchy of the tenth and eleventh , centuries the ascendancy of the Church Aare therefore, unimpaired, and it appeared to merit that good fortune., To combat the plague of the private wars which the Crown was now incapable of repressing the bishops organized in their dioceses the institution of the “Truce Fomts0d,. This prestige of the bishops naturally lent to their places of residence—that is to say, to the old- Roman cities—considerable importance. It is high- ly probable that this was what saved them, In the economy of the ninth century they no longer had any excuse for existence. In ceasing to be commer- cial centers they must have lost, quite evidently, 3 On this institution, see L. Huberti, Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte der Gottesfrieden und Landfrieden, Ansbach, 1892. } 62 MEDIEVAL CITIES the greatest part of their population, |/The mer- chants who once frequented them, or dwelt there, disappeared and with them disappeared the urban character which they had still preserved during the Merovingian era}{Lay society no longer had the least use for them) Round about them the great demesnes lived their own life. There is no evidence that the State, itself constituted on a purely agri- cultural basis, had any cause to be interested in their fate. (Ie is quite characteristic, and quite il- luminating, that the palaces (palatia) of the Caro- lingian princes were not located in the towns, They were, without exception, in the country, in the de- mesnes of the dynasty: at Herstal, at Jupille, at Meersen in the valley of the Meuse; at Ingelheim in that of the Rhine; at Attigny in that of the Seine; and so on. The fame of Aix-la-Chapelle should not lead to any illusion as to the character of that locality. The resplendency in which it temporarily gloried under Charlemagne was due only to its fortune in being the favorite residence of the Emperor. After the reign of Louis the Pious, it fell back into in- significance. It was to become a real city only four centuries later. \ The State, on its part, in exercising administra- tive powers could contribute in no way to the con- — | CITY ORIGINS 63 ~ tinued existence of the Roman cities. The countries which formed the political districts of the Empire were without their chief-towns, just as the Empire itself was without a capital.’The counts, to whom the supervision of them was entrusted, did not set- tle down in any fixed spot. They were constantly travelling about their districts in order to preside over judicial assemblies, to levy taxes, and to raise _ troops.\The centers of their administrations were | not their places of residence but their persons.)It) was therefore of little importance whether they | \ had or did not have their domicile in a town. Re- | cruited from among the great proprietors of the re- / sion, they were, after all, most accustomed to live on their estates. Their chateaux, like the palaces of the Emperors, were customarily in the country.’ On the contrary, the immobility which ecclesi- astical discipline enforced upon a bishop perma- nently held him to the city where was established the see of his particular diocese. Though they had lost their function in civil administration, the cities therefore continued to serve as the key points in megious administration. Each diocese comprised the territory about the city which contained its is particularly true for Northern Europe. In Southern id in Italy, on the contrary, where the Roman munici- anization had less completely disappeared, the counts or- 64 MEDIEVAL CITIES cathedral, and kept in constant touch with it. The change in meaning of the word cévitas from the beginning of the ninth century throws interesting light on this point. It became synonymous with the bishopric and the episcopal city. The phrase civitas Paristensis was used to designate the diocese of Paris as well as the city of Paris itself, where - the bishop had his residence. ‘Chus under this double connotation was preserved the memory of the an- cient municipal system adopted by the Church for her own ends. In short, what happened in the empoverished and depopulated Carolingian towns is a striking parallel of what, in a rather more important thea- ter, happened at Rome itself when, in the course of the fourth century, the Eternal City had ceased to be the capital of the world. In leaving it for Ra- venna and then for Constantinople, the emperors abandoned it to the Pope. What it no longer was in the government of the State, it continued to be In the government of the Church. \The imperial city became the » pontifical city. Its historical prestige enhanced that of the successor of St. Peter. Isolated, he seemed the greater, and he became at the same time more powerful. Men now saw only him; in the absence of the old rulers, men now obeyed only him. By continuing to dwell CITY ORIGINS 65 in Rome, he made it hzs Rome, just as each bishop made the city where he dwelt hés city. | During the last days of the Lower Empire, and still more during the Merovingian era, the power of the bishops over the city populace consistently increased. They had profited by the growing dis- organization of civil society to accept, or to arro- gate to themselves, an authority which the inhab- itants did not take pains to dispute with them, and which the State had no interest in and, moreover, no means of denying them. The privileges which the clergy began to enjoy after the fourth century, in the matters of jurisdiction and taxes, enhanced still further their status. It became more conspicu- ous through the granting of charters of immunity which the Frankish kings issued in their favor. By virtue of these the bishops were freed from the in- _ terference of the counts in their ecclesiastical de- - _ mesnes. They were invested from that time on— the eighth century—with a complete seigniory over their people and their lands. To the ecclesiast- ical jurisdiction over the clergy which they already had was added lay jurisdiction, entrusted to a tri-v _ bunal, created by them, whose principal seat was _ fixed, naturally, in the town where ie! had their residence. When the disappearance of trade, in the ninth cE a a ee 66 MEDIEVAL CITIES century, annihilated the last vestiges of city life ‘ and put an end to what still remained of a mu- nicipal population, the influence of the bishops, already so extensive, became unrivalled. Hence- ' forward the towns were entirely under their con- trol. In them were to be found, in fact, practically Gate inhabitants dependent more or less directly pon the Church. ‘Though no precise information is available, it is, nevertheless, possible to conjecture as to the nature of this population. It was composed of the clerics of the cathedral church and of the other churches grouped nearby; of the monks of the monasteries which, especially after the ninth century, came to be established, sometimes in great numbers, in the see of the diocese; of the teachers and the students of the ecclesiastical schools; and finally, of ser- vitors and artisans, free or serf, who were indis- pensable to the needs of the religious group and to the daily existence of the clerical agglomeration.) | Almost always there was to be found in the town a weekly market whither the peasants from round- about brought their produce. Sometimes, even, an_ . annual fair was held there.|At the gates a market \toll was levied on everything that came in or went out. A mint was in operation within the walls. There were also to be found there a number of CITY ORIGINS 67 keeps occupied by vassals of the bishop, by his ad- vocate or by his castellan. To all of this must be added, finally, the granaries and the storehouses where were stored the harvests from the monastical demesnes brought in, at stated periods, by the ten- ant-farmers.\At the great yearly festivals the con- » gregation of the diocese poured into the town and gave it, for several days, the animation of unaccus- tomed bustle and stir.’ | . |All this little world accepted the bishop as both its spiritual and temporal head. Religious and sec- ular authority were united or, to put it better, were blended in his person.\ Aided by a Council formed of priests and canons, he administered the city and the diocese in conformity with the precepts of Christian morality. His ecclesiastical tribune; presided over by the archdeacon, had singularly enlarged its sphere, thanks to the impotency, and still more to the favor, of the State. Not only were all the clerics subject to it in every particular, but to it also pertained jurisdiction over a number of 5 The towns of the ninth and tenth centuries have not yet been adequately studied. What is said of them here, and later, is borrowed from various passages in the capitularies as well as from certain scattered texts in the chronicles and the lives of the Saints. For the towns of Germany, unfortunately much less numerous and less important than those of Gaul, the reader should consult the interesting work of S. Rietschel, Die Civitas auf deutschem Boden bis zum Ausgange der Karolingerzeit, Leipzig, 1894. ut 68 MEDIEVAL CITIES matters affecting the laity: matters of marriage, of wills, of civil position, ete. The province of the lay court, which was presided over either by the castellan or the advocate, had profited by a similar increase in scope. After the reign of Louis the Pious its jurisdiction had been enlarged by gradual in- fringements which the more and more flagrant dis- orders of the public administration explain and justify. Those affected by the charters of immunity were not the only ones subject thereto. It seems quite certain that, at least within the actual limits of the town, everybody came under its jurisdiction and that it had been substituted, zz fact, for the jurisdiction which the count still possessed, 77 theo- ry, over the freemen.° In addition, the bishop en- joyed very loosely defined police powers, under which he supervised the markets, regulated the levying of tolls, took care of the bridges and the ramparts.\Jn short, there was no longer any field in the administration of the town wherein, whether by law or by prerogative, he did not intervene as the guardian of order, peace, and the common weal. ) thepcratic form of government had completely replaced the municipal regimen of antiquity. The ba 6 I am seeking, naturally, to characterize only the general situa- tion. I am aware that numerous exceptions must be made; but © they cannot modify the general impression which comes from an _ examination of the data available. CITY ORIGINS 69 populace was governed by its bishop and no longer asked to have even the least share in that govern- “ment. True, it sometimes happened that a disturb- “ance broke out in the town. Bishops were assailed in their palaces and sometimes even obliged to flee. But it is stretching a point to find in these events the least trace of a municipal spirit. They are ‘rather to be explained by intrigues or personal ri- valries. It would be thoroughly fallacious to consider them the precursors of the communal movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Moreover, they were very rare. Everything indicates that the episcopal administration was in general beneficent and popular. This administration, as pointed out above, was not confined to the limits of the town. It extended throughout the bishopric. The town was its center, // but the diocese was its sphere) Under it the urban population enjoyed in no particular a privileged status. [he regimen under which it lived was the regimen of the common law. The knights, the serfs, and the freemen whom it contained were distin- guished from their congeners outside only by being : grouped in one locality. Of the special laws and \. the autonomy which the bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages was to enjoy, there was not yet a single sa) ee "70 MEDIEVAL CITIES to be discovered. The word czvés (citizen) by which contemporary texts designated the inhabitant of the town was only a simple topographical appella- tion; it did not yet have legal significance.’ , \'These towns were fortresses as well as episcopal Y residences. In the last days of the Roman Empire they had been enclosed by walls as a protection against the barbarians. These walls were still in existence almost everywhere and the bishops busied themselves with keeping them up or with restoring them with the greater zeal in that the incursions of the Saracens and the Norsemen had given increas- ingly impressive proof, during the ninth century, of the need of protection. The old Roman enceintes continued, therefore, to protect the towns against new perils. i ) Their form remained, under Charlemagne, what it had been under Constantine. As a general rule, it took the shape of a rectangle surrounded by ram- parts flanked by towers and communicating with the outside by gates, customarily to the number of four. The space so enclosed was very restricted and the length of its sides rarely exceeded four to five hundred yards.* Moreover, it was far from being 7S. Rietschel, Die Civitas auf deutschem Boden bis zum Aus- gange der Karolingerzett, p. 93- 8 A. Blanchet, Les enceintes romaines de la Gaule, Paris, 1907. eo CITY ORIGINS 71 ntirely built up; between the houses cultivated ‘fields and gardens were to be found. The outskirts (suburbium ), which in the Merovingian era still | extended beyond the walls, had disappeared, Thanks to their defences, the towns could almost _always victoriously oppose the assaults of the in- _vaders from the north and the south. It will suf- fice here to recall the famous siege of Paris by the Norsemen in 885. | The episcopal cities naturally served as a refuge for the populations of their neighborhood upon “ the approach of the barbarians. There monks came, even from very far away, to seek an asylum, as did, for example, those from St. Vaast in 887 at Beau- vais and those from St. Quentin at Laon.” In the midst of the insecurity and the disorders which imparted so lugubrious a character to the. second half of the ninth century, it therefore fel to the towns to fulfill a true mission of protection. They were, in every sense of the word, the ram- parts of a society invaded, under tribute, and ter- tTorized. Soon, from another cause, they were not to be alone in filling that rdle. | It is obvious that the anarchy of the ninth cen- ©L. Halphen, Paris sous les premiers Capétiens, Paris, 1909, p. 5. 17. H. Labande, Histoire de Beauvais et de ses institutions communales, Paris, 1892, p. 7; W. Vogel, Die Normannen und das frainkische Reich, Heidelberg, 1906, p. 271. 72 MEDIEVAL CITIES tury hastened the inevitable decomposition of the Frankish State, ‘The counts, who were the biggest proprietors of they districts, profited by existing | conditions to 5A to themselves a complete autonomy, to make of their office an hereditary | estate, to combine in their hands, with the private powers they exercised over their own demesnes, the | public powers which were delegated to them, and | finally to amalgamate under their domination, in | a single principality, all the counties they could lay hold of.| The Carolingian Empire was thus par- celled out, after the middle of the ninth century, into a number of territories subject to as many local dynasties, and attached to the Crown only by the V fragile bond of feudal homage. The State was too feeble to resist this disintegration. It was accom- plished, unquestionably, by means of violence and abominable perfidies. Nevertheless it was, on the whole, beneficial for society. In seizing power, the princes forthwith accepted the obligations it im- posed. Their most evident interest was to defend and protect the lands and the people who had be- come their lands and their people. They did not fail in a task which a purely selfish concern for personal power had imposed upon them. As their power grew and was consolidated, they became more and more preoccupied with giving their prin- ; g 4 i wer —- - — os —_ Nee aE CITY ORIGINS 73 cipalities an organization capable of guaranteeing public order and peace;) in | The first need which was manifest was that of defence, as much against the Saracens or the Norse- men as against the neighboring princes. Fortresses, therefore, sprang up Bee ncte at the beginning of the ninth century. "| “Contemporary texts give them the most eee names,: castellum, castrum, oppidum, urbs, municipium;}the most usual and in any case the most technical of these appellations is that of burgus, a word borrowed from the Ger- man by the Latin of the Lower Empire and which is preserved in all the modern languages: burg, borough, bourg, borgo.” ; |Of these burgs of the late Middle Ages no trace however, fortunately make it possible to form a fairly accurate picture of them. They were walled ) ihren aa 4 sy ' remains in our day. The sources of information, enclosures of somewhat restricted perimeter, cus- ’ tomarily circular in form and surrounded by a moat.|In th the center was to be found a strong-tower 11 Before the arrival of the Norsemen, there were not any, or hardly any, fortified localities outside of the episcopal cities. Hariulphe, Chronique de labbaye de Saint-Riquier, edit. F. Lot, Paris, 1894, p. 118. 12 On the meaning of these words, see K. Hegel, Newes Archiv der Gesellschaft fir altere deutsche Geschichtskunde, 1892, Vol. XVIII, and G. Des Marez, “Le sens juridique du mot oppidum,” Festschrift fir H. Brunner, Berlin, 1910. 74 MEDIEVAL CITIES and a keep, the last redoubt of defence in case of attack. A permanent garrison of knights (mdéétes castrenses) Was kept stationed there. This was placed under the orders of a castellan (castel- lanus).'The prince had a home (dovzs) in each of the burgs of his territory where he stayed with his retinue in the course of the continual changes of residence which war or administerial duties forced upon him. Very often a chapel, or a church flanked by the buildings necessary to house the clergy, raised its belfry above the battlements of the ram- part. Sometimes there were also to be found by the side of it quarters intended for the judicial assem- blies whose members came, at fixed periods, from outside to assemble in the burg. Finally, what was never lacking were a granary and cellars where was kept, to supply the necessities of a siege should the case arise and to furnish subsistence to the prince during his stays, the produce of the neighboring demesnes which he held. [Prestations in kind levied on the peasants of the district assured the subsist- ence of the garrison, on its part. The upkeep of the © walls devolved upon these same peasants who were compelled to do the work by statute labor. Although from country to country the picture, — 13 H. Pirenne, “Les villes flamandes avant le XII° siécle,” An- nales de l’Est et du Nord, 1905, Vol. I, p. 12. 4 | CITY ORIGINS 75 which has just been drawn, naturally differed in details, the same essential traits were to be found everywhere. The similarity between the bouwrgs of Flanders and the Jdoroughs of Anglo-Saxon Eng- land is a striking one.” And this similarity unques- tionably proves that the same needs brought in their train like results everywhere. As can be easily seen, the burgs were, above all, military a to this original func- tion was early added that of being administrative” centers, {The castellan ceased to be solely the com- mandant of the knights of the castral garrison. The prince delegated to him financial and juridical authority over a more or less extensive district , round about the walls of the burg and which took, by the tenth century, the name of castellany. The castellany was related to the burg as the bishopric was related to the town. In case of war, its inhab- itants found there a refuge; in time of peace, there / 14F, W. Maitland, Township and Borough, 1898. The reader should also compare the burgs of the West with those built in the tenth century as a defence against the Slavs, along the Elbe and the Saale, by Henry the Fowler. D. Schafer, “Die Milites agrarii des Witukinds,” Abhandlungen der Berliner Akademie, 1905, p. 572. For the social réle of the burgs, we restrict ourselves to citing the following text which seems to be thoroughly char- acteristic ; it had to do with the founding in 996 of Cateau- Cambrésis : “ut esset obstaculum latronibus praesidiumque lber- tatis circum et circa rusticanis cultoribus.’ “Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium,” Monumenta Germaniae historica, Vol. VII, p. "450. 76 MEDIEVAL CITIES they repaired to take part in the assemblies of justice or to pay off the prestations to which they _, /were subject; /Nevertheless bitte did not show '/ the slightest urban character Its population com- | prised, aside from the knights and the clerics who made up its essential part, only men employed in | their service and whose number was certainly of very little importance. ‘It was a fortress popula- tion; it was not a city populationY |Neither com- \ merce nor industry was possible or even conceiv- . able in such an environment. It produced nothing of itself, lived by revenues from the surrounding country, and had no other economic role than that _of a simple consumer.| "It is therefore a safe conclusion that the period which opened with the Carolingian era knew cities | neither in the social sense, nor in the economic sense, nor in the legal sense of that word. The — .|, towns and the burgs were merely fortified places h ‘and headquarters of administration. Their inhab- | | itants enjoyed neither special laws nor institutions of their own, and their manner of living did not — distinguish them in any way from the rest off 1} yi society. | | “Commercial and industrial activity were com- | pletely foreign to them. In no respect were they | out of key with the agricultural civilization of their | n | | | | ee CITY ORIGINS 77 times. The groups they formed were, after all, of trifling importance. It is not possible, in the lack of reliable information, to give an exact figure, but everything indicates that the population of the burgs never consisted of more than a few hundred men and that that of the towns probably did not ” pass the figure of two to three thousand souls. | _The towns and the burgs played, however, an tial role in the history of cities. They were, so to speak, the stepping-stones thereto.| Round about their walls cities were to take shape after the eco- nomic renaissance, whose first symptoms appeared in the course of the tenth century, had made itself manifest. Wy Ba, Chapter IV The Revival of Commerce / lay HE end of the ninth century was the moment / when the economic development of Western Europe that followed the closing of the Mediter- ranean was at its lowest ebb. It was also the mo- ment when the social disorganization caused by the raids of the barbarians and the accompanying political anarchy reached a maximum,// | The tenth century, if not an era of recovery, was at least an era of stabilization and relative peace. The surrender of Normandy to Rollo (912) marked in the West the end of the great Scandi- navian invasions, while in the East Henry the Fowler and Otto I checked and held the Slavs along the Elbe and the Hungarians in the valley of the Danube (934, 955). At the same time the feudal system, which had definitely displaced the monarchy, was established in France on the débris of the old Carolingian order. In Germany, on the contrary, the somewhat later development of so- ciety enabled the princes of the House of Saxony to resist the encroachments of the lay aristocracy. On their side they had the powerful influence of the bishops and used it to restore the ascendancy of THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE 79 the Monarchy. In assuming the title of Roman _ Emperor, they laid claim to the universal authority which Charlemagne had exercised. If all this was not accomplished without bitter conflicts, nevertheless it was decidedly productive of good. Europe ceased to be overrun by ruthless _ hordes. She recovered confidence in the future, and, with that confidence, courage and ambition. _ The date of the renewal of a cooperative activity: on the part of the people might well be ascribed to the tenth century. At that date, likewise, the social — authorities began once more to acquit themselves” in the role which it was their place to play. From now on, in feudal as well as in episcopal principal- ities, the first traces could be seen of an organized effort to better the condition of the people. The prime need of that era, hardly rising above an- archy, was the need of peace, the most fundamen- tal and the most essential of all the needs of society. The first Truce of God was proclaimed in 980. ra Private wars, the greatest of the plagues that har- assed those troubled times, were energetically com- bated by the territorial counts in France and by the prelates of the imperial Church in Germany. _Dark though the prospect still was, the tenth tentury nevertheless saw in outline the picture 80 MEDIEVAL CITIES which the eleventh century presents. The famous legend of the terrors of the year 1000 is not devoid, in this respect, of symbolic significance.\It is doubt- less untrue that men, expected the end of the world in the year 100 0. Yet the century which came in at that date is characterized, in contrast with the preceding one, by a recrudescence of activity so marked that it could pass for the vigorous and joy- ful awakening of asociety long oppressed by a | nightmare of anguish, In every demesne was to be seen the same burst of energy and, for that matter, Vv of optimism, The Church, revivified by the Cluni- sian reform, undertook to purify herself of the ' abuses which had crept into her discipline and to shake. off the bondage in which the Emperors ‘ held her. A mystic enthusiasm, of which she was the inspiration, animated her congregations and | launched them upon the heroic and grandiose en- terprise of the Crusades which brought Western Christianity to grips with Islam. The military | spirit of feudalism led her to initiate and to suc- ceed in epic undertakings. Norman knights went to battle with Byzantines and Moslems in South- . ern Italy, and founded there the principalities out — of which was later to arise the Kingdom of Sicily _ other Normans, with whom were associated ‘fly \\ings and Frenchmen from the North, conqr THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE Sik, N England under the leadership of Duke William. | South of the Pyrenees the Christians drove before them the Saracens of Spain; Toledo and Valencia / fell to their hands (1072-1 109 i //Such undertakings testify not only to energy and ) vigor of spirit; they testify also to the health of society. They would have obviously been impos- J sible without that native strength which is one of the characteristics of the eleventh century. The fecundity of families seemed, at this date, to be as general among the nobility as among the peasants. Younger sons abounded everywhere, feeling them- selves crowded for room on their natal soil and eager to try their fortunes abroad. Everywhere were to be met adventurers in search of gain or work. [he armies were full of mercenaries, “Cote- relli” or “Brabantiones,” letting their services to whoever wished to employ them. From Flanders and Holland bands of peasants were setting out, by the beginning of the twelfth century, to drain the Mooren on the banks of the Elbe. In every part _ of Europe arms were offered in superabundant _ quantity and this is undoubtedly the explanation of the increasing number, from then on, of great reclamation projects in clearing land and diking Mf streams. m It does not appear that, from the Roman era to 82 MEDIEVAL CITIES the eleventh century, the area of cultivated land had been perceptibly increased. Save in the Ger- manic countries, the monasteries had hardly alter- ed, in this respect, the existing situation. They were almost always established on old estates and did ‘nothing to decrease the extent of the woods, the heaths and the marshes contained within their de- mesnes. But it was quite a different matter when once the increase of population permitted these unproductive terrains to be put to good use.| Just about the year 1000 there began a period of recla- ¥ mation which was to continue, with steady in- ) crease, up to the end of the twelfth century. Europe ‘ “colonized”’ herself, thanks to the increase of her \ inhabitants. The princes and the great proprietors turned to the founding of new towns, where flocked the “‘younger sons” in quest of lands to cultivate.” The great forests began to be cleared. In Flanders appeared, about 1150, the first pol- ders.” (A “polder” is diked land, reclaimed from the sea.) The Order of the Cistercians, founded in 1098, gave itself over at once to reclamation pro- jects and the clearing of the land. » Pat 1 Qn the increase in population during the eleventh century, see Lambert de Hersfeld, Annales, edit. O. Holder-Egger, Hanover, 1894, p. 121; “Suger,” Recueil des Historiens de la France, Vol. XII, p. 54; Herman de Tournai, Monumenta Germaniae his- torica, Vol. XIV, p. 344. 2H. Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, Vol. I, 4th edit., pp. 148, 300. THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE 83 It is easy to see that the increase in population and the burst of renewed general activity of which it was both cause and effect, operated from the very first to the benefit of an agricultural economy. But this condition should, before long, have had_its effect upon trade as well./The eleventh century, in fact, brings us face to face with a real commercial revival. This revival received its impetus from two centers of activity, one located in the south and the other in the north: Venice on one side and the Flemish Coast on the other.|And this is merely an- other way of saying that\it was the result of an ex- ternal stimulus.) The contact with foreign trade, maintained at these two points, first caused it to appear and spread. Quite likely it could have come about in some other way. Commercial activity might have been revived by virtue of the trend of general economic life. The fact is, however, that. this wasn’t the case. Just|as the trade of the West disappeared with the shutting off of its foreign markets, just so it was renewed when these markets "were reopened. _\\ | sey 7 Venice, whose effect was felt from the very first, has a well-recognized and singular place in the eco- _ nomic history of Europe. Like Tyre, ‘Venice shows an exclusively commercial character. Her first in- habitants, fleeing before the approach of the Huns, « it eee ———— a MEDIEVAL CITIES Ane Goths and the Lombards, had sought (in the fifth and sixth centuries) a refuge on the barren islets of the lagoons at Rialto, at Olivolo, at Spina- lunga, at Dorsoduro.* To exist in these marshes / they had to tax their ingenuity and to fight against, Nature herself. Everything was wanting: even drinking water was lacking. But the sea was enough for the existence of a folk who knew how to manage _things,![Fishing and the preparation of salt sup- plied an immediate means of livelihood to the Ve- netians. They were able to procure wheat by ex- changing their products with the inhabitants of the neighboring shores.) Trade was thus forced upon them by the very conditions under which they lived, And they had the energy and the genius to turn to profit the un- limited possibilities which trade offered them. By | the eighth century the group of islets they occupied was already thickly populated enough to become — ‘’ the see of a special diocese.// \ At the date when the city was founded, all Italy | still belonged to the Byzantine Empire. Thanks to — a her insular situation, the conquerors who succes- — sively overran the Peninsula—first the Lombards, — 3. M. Hartmann, “Die wirtschaftlichen Ravedee Ve Vierteljahrschrift fiir Social- und Wirtschaftsgeshichte, 190¢ Vol. II. ’ THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE 85 _ then Charlemagne, and finally, still later, the Ger- _man emperors—were not successful in their at- tempts to gain possession. She remained, therefore, under the sovereignty of Constantinople, thus forming at the lower end of the Adriatic and at the foot of the Alps an isolated outpost of Byzantine civilization, (While Western Europe was detaching herself from the East, she continued to be part of of it. And this circumstance is of capital import- -ance. The consequence was that Venice did not cease to gravitate in the orbit of Constantinople. Across the waters, she was subject to the attrac- tion of that great city and herself grew great un- der its influence. : |_Constantinople, even in the eleventh century, \ appears not only as a great city, but as the greatest \ city of the whole Mediterranean basin. Her popu--* lation was not far from reaching the figure of a million inhabitants, and that population was sin- -gularly active.* She was not content, as had been the population of Rome under the Republic and the Empire, to consume without producing. She gave herself over, with a zeal which the fiscal sys- 4A. Andréadés, De la population de Constantinople sous les empereurs byzantins, Rovigo, 1920. An economic history of Con- stantinople is still lacking. For want of something better, L. Brentano, Die byzantinische Volkswirtschaft, Leipzig, 1917, may be consulted. 86 MEDIEVAL CITIES tem shackled but did not choke, not only to trading but to industry.| For Constantinople was a great port and a first-rate manufacturing center as well as a political capital. Here were to be found every manner of life and every form of social activity. Alone, in the Christian world, she presented a pic- ture analogous to that of great modern cities with all the complexities, all the defects but also with all the refinements of an essentially urban civiliza- tion,|\An uninterrupted shipping kept her in touch with the coasts of the Black Sea, Asia Minor, Southern Italy, and the shores of the Adriatic. Her fleets of war secured to her the mastery of the sea, without which she would not have been able to live. As long as she remained powerful, she was able to maintain, in the face of Islam, her do- minion over all the waters of the Eastern Medi- terranean.| It is easy to understand how Venice profited by her alliance with a world so different from the European West. To it she not only owed the pros- perity of her commerce, but from it she first learned those higher forms of civilization, that perfected technique, that business enterprise, and that polit- ical and administrative organization w’iich gave her a place apart in the Europe of the Middle Ages. By the eighth century she was devoting herself THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE 87 _with greater and greater success to the provision- ing of Constantinople. Her ships transported thither the products of the countries which were contiguous to her on the east and the west: wheat and wine from Italy, wood from Dalmatia, salt from the lagoons, and, in spite of the prohibitions | | { | of the Pope and the Emperor himself, slaves which she easily secured among the Slavic peoples of the shores of the Adriatic. Thence they brought back, in return, the precious fabrics of Byzantine manu- facture, as well as spices which Asia furnished to Constantinople. By the tenth century the activity of the port had already attained extraordinary pro- portions.’ And with the extension of trade, the love of gain became irresistible. No scruple had any weight with the Venetians.| Their religion was a religion of business men. It mattered little to them that the Moslems were the enemies of Christ, if business with them was profitable. After the ninth century they began more and more to frequent Aleppo, Cairo, Damascus, Kairwan, Palermo. Treaties of commerce assured their merchants a privileged status in the markets of Islam. | By the start of the eleventh century, the power of Venice was making as marvellous progress as her 5R. Heynen, Zur Entstehung des Kapitalismus in Venedig, Stuttgart, 1905, p. 15. 88 MEDIEVAL CITIES wealth. Under the Doge Pietro II Orseolo, she cleared the Adriatic of the Slavic pirates, subjected Istria and had at Zara, Veglia, Arbe, Trau, Spala- to, Curzola, and Lagosta settlements or military establishments. John the Deacon extols the splen- dor and the glory of Venetia Aurea, and Guglielmo of Apuleia vaunts the city “rich in money, rich in men,” and declares that ‘‘no people in the world are more valorous in naval ane more skilful in the art of guiding ships on the sea.’ It was inevitable that the ant: economic movement, of which Venice was the center, should be communicated to the countries of Italy from which she was separated only by the lagoons. There she obtained the wheat and wine which she either consumed herself or exported, and she naturally sought to create there a market for the eastern mer- chandise which her mariners unloaded in greater and greater quantity on the quays by the Po. Shé entered into relations with Pavia, which was not long in being animated by her infectious activity.° She obtained from the German emperors the right to trade freely first with the nearby cities and then with all Italy, as well as the shipping monopoly for all goods arriving in her port. 6 R. Heynen, op. cit., p. 23. THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE 89 In the course of the tenth century Lombardy was inspired, by her example, with commercial life. Trade rapidly spread from Pavia to the neigh- boring cities. All of them made haste to share in the traffic of which Venice had given them the out- standing example and which it was to her interest to stimulate among them. The spirit of enterprise developed in one place after another. It was not only products of the soil which kept the commercial relations with Venice flourishing. Industry was already commencing to appear. Early in the eleventh century, for example, Lucca turned to. the manufacture of cloths and kept at it until much later. Probably a great many more details would be known about the beginnings of this economic revival in Lombardy if our sources of information were not so deplorably meagre.’ Preponderant as the Venetian influence had been ‘in Italy, it did not make itself felt there exclusive- ly. The South of the Peninsula beyond Spoleto and Benevento was still, and so remained until the ar- rival of the Normans in the eleventh century, under the power of the Byzantine Empire. Bari, Taren- tum, Naples and above all Amalfi, kept up rela- tions with Constantinople similar to those of Ven- 7K. Schaube, Handelsgeschichte der romanischen Volker, p. 61. aici 90 MEDIEVAL CITIES ice. They were very active centers of trade and, no more than Venice, did not hesitate to traffic with Moslem ports.° \ Their shipping was, naturally, fated to find com- petitors sooner or later among the inhabitants of the coastal towns situated further to the north. And, in fact, after the beginning of the eleventh century we see first Genoa, then Pisa soon after, turning their attention to the sea,|In 93 5 the Sara- cen pirates had again pillaged Genoa. But the mo- ment was approaching when she was in her turn to take the offensive. There could be no question of her concluding commercial arrangements, as had Venice or Amalfi, with the enemies of her Faith. The mystic, excessive scrupulousness of the West in religious matters did not permit it, and too many hates had accumulated in the course of the cen- turies. The sea could be opened up only by force of arms. \In 1015-16 an expedition was undertaken by Genoa, in cooperation with Pisa, against Sardinia. Twenty years later, in 1034, they got possession for a time of Bona on the coast of Africa; the Pisans, on their part, victoriously entered the port of Palermo in 1062 and destroyed its arsenal. 8 W. von Heyd, Histoire du commerce du Levant au Moyen-age, Vol. I, p. 98. THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE gl _In 1087 the fleets of the two cities, encouraged by Pope Victor III, attacked Mehdia.” All these expeditions were due as much to religious enthu- siasm as to the spirit of adventure. With a quite different viewpoint from that of the Venetians, the Genoese and the Pisans considered themselves sol- * diers of Christ and of the Church, opponents of | Islam. They believed they saw the Archange Gabriel and St. Peter leading them into battle with the Infidels, and it was only after having massacred the “priests of Mahomet” and pillaged the mosque of Mehdia that they signed an advantageous treaty of commerce. The Cathedral of Pisa, built after this triumph, admirably symbolized both the mys- ticism of the conquerors and the wealth which their shipping was beginning to bring to them. Pillars and precious marble brought from Africa served to decorate it—it seems as if they had wished to attest by its splendor the revenge of Christianity upon the Saracens whose opulence was a thing of scandal and of envy. Those, at least, are the senti- ments which an enthusiastic contemporary poem rani 9 W. von Heyd, of. cit., p. 1213; K. Schaube, of. cit., Dp. 49. 10 EF. Du Meéril, Poésies populaires latines du Moyen-age, Paris, 1847, P. 239. 2s MEDIEVAL CITIES Unde tua in aeternum splendebit ecclesia Auro, gemnis, margaritis et pallits splendida* Before the counterattack of Christianity, Islam thus gave way little by little) The launching of the first Crusade (1096)..marked its definite recoil. In 1097.a-Genoese fleet sailed towards Antioch, bring- ing to the Crusaders reinforcements and supplies. Two years later Pisa sent out vessels “under the orders of the Pope” to deliver Jerusalem. From — that time on the whole Mediterranean was opened, or rather reopened, to western shipping. As in the Roman era, communications were fe- ‘Stablished from one end to the other of that essentially | European errewummmanig 104 MEDIEVAL CITIES do not seem to have had the same importance. Hardly any mention was made of them, with the exception of Rouen, naturally in close contact with England, and, further south, Bordeaux and Ba- yonne whose development was much slower. As for the interior of France and Germany, they were af- fected only very slightly by the economic move- ment which little by little spread in that direction, either coming up from Italy or coming down from othe Netherlands. “| It was only in the twelfth century that, gradual- . ly but definitely, Western Europe was transformed. ‘The economic development freed her from the tra- ditional immobility to which a social organization, depending solely on the relations of man to the soil, had condemned her. Commerce and industry did not merely find a place alongside of agricul- ture; they reacted upon it. Its products no longer served solely for the consumption of the landed proprietors and the tillers of the soil; they were brought into general circulation, as objects of bar- ter or as raw material. The rigid confines of the demesnial system, which had up to now hemmed in all economic activity, were broken down and the whole social order was patterned along more flexible, more active and more varied lines. As in antiquity, the country oriented itself afresh on the THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE 105 city. Under the influence of trade the old Roman cities took on new life and were repopulated, or mercantile groups formed round about the military burgs and established themselves along the sea coasts, on river banks, at confluences, at the junc- tion points of the natural routes of communica- tion. Each of them constituted a market which exercised an attraction, proportionate to its im- portance, on the surrounding country or made it- self felt afar. Large or small, they were-to be-met everywhere ; __one was to be found, on the average, in every five square leagues of land. They had, in fact, become indispensable to society. They had introduced into it a division of labor which it could no longer do without. Between them and the country was estab- lished a reciprocal exchange of services. An in- creasingly intimate solidarity bound them to- gether, the country attending to the provisioning of the towns, and the towns supplying, in return, articles of commerce and manufactured goods. The physical life of the burgher depended upon the peasant, but the social life of the peasant depend- ed upon the burgher. For the burgher revealed to him a more comfortable sort of existence, a more refined sort, and one which, in arousing his desires, multiplied his needs and raised his standard of liv- ~ “esas: ne a » 106 MEDIEVAL CITIES ing. And it was not only in this respect that the rise of cities strongly stimulated social progress. It made no less a contribution in spreading through- out the world a new conception of labor. Before this it had been serf; now it became free, and the consequences of this fact, to which we shall return, were incalculable.| Let it be added, finally, that the economic revival of which the twelfth century saw the flowering revealed the power of capital, , and enough will have been said to show that pos- sibly no period in all history had a more profound effect upon humanity, \ Invigorated, transformed and launched upon the route of progress, the new Europe resembled, in_short, more the ancient Europe than the Europe of Carolingian times. For it was out of antiquity that she regained that essential characteristic of be- ing a region of cities.|And if, in the political or- ganization, the role of cities had been greater in antiquity than it was in the Middle Ages, in return their economic influence in the latter era greatly exceeded what it had ever been before. (Generally speaking, great mercantile cities were telatively rare in the western provinces of the Roman Empire. Aside from Rome herself, there were scarcely any at all except Naples, Milan, Marseilles and Lyons. Nothing of the sort was then in existence which anid THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE 107 might be comparable to what were, at the begin- ning of the tenth century, ports like Venice, Pisa, Genoa or Bruges, or centers of industry such as Milan, Florence, Ypres, and Ghent. In Gaul, in fact, the important place held in the twelfth cen- tury by ancient cities such as Orleans, Bordeaux, Cologne, Nantes, Rouen, and others, was much su- perior to what they had enjoyed under the Em- perors. Finally, the extension of the economic de- velopment of medieval Europe went well beyond the limits it had reached in Roman Europe. In- stead of halting along the Rhine and the Danube, it overflowed widely in Germany and reached as far as the Vistula. Regions which had been trav- elled over, at the beginning of the Christian era, only by infrequent traders in amber and furs and which seemed as inhospitable as the heart of Africa might have seemed to our ancestors, now burgeoned with cities. The Sound, which no Roman trading vessel had ever crossed, was animated by the con- “tinual passage of ships. They sailed the Baltic and the North Sea as they had sailed the Mediter- ranean. There were almost as many ports on the shores of the one as on the shores of the other. From two quarters, trade made use of the re- sources which Nature had placed at its disposal. It dominated the two inland seas which between them — Oem ey ee SOR ARH Wares a tg al ) THE MERCHANT CLASS 121 up in return merchandise which it took care to dis- _ pose of in places where the demand was the great- Bile. est and where might be realized, in consequence, ‘ the largest profits. At the end of several years this el prudent custom of buying cheap and selling dear made of Godric a very rich man. It was then that, moved by grace, he suddenly renounced the life he had led until then, turned over his possessions to the poor, and became a hermit.~ The story of St. Godric, if we eliminate from it _ the mystic ending, was that of a great many others. | It shows, with the utmost clearness, how a man, _ starting with nothing, was able in a relatively short _ time to amass considerable capital. Circumstances _ and luck probably contributed largely to the mak- ing of his fortune.JBut the essential cause of his success, and the contemporary biography to which _ we owe the account lays abundant stress thereon, _ was intelligence, or rather business sense.’ Godric “seems to have been a shrewd calculator gifted with 9“Sic itaque puerilibus annis simpliciter domi transactis, caepit adolescentior prudentiores vitae vias excolere et documenta secu- laris providentiae sollicite et exercitate perdicere. Unde non agriculturae delegit exercitia colere, sed potius quae sagacioris animi sunt rudimenta studuit, arripiendo exercere. Hinc est quod mercatoris aemulatus studium, coepit mercimoniu frequentare negotium, et primitus in minoribus quidem et rebus preti in- ferioris, coepit lucrandi officia discere; postmodum vero paula- tim ad majoris preti emolumenta adolescentiae suae ingenia pro- movere.” Libellus de Vita S. Godrici, p. 25. 122 MEDIEVAL CITIES that commercial instinct which it is not altogether rare to meet, in every age, among enterprising na- tures T he quest of profit guided all his actions and in him can be easily recognized that famous “capi- talistic spirit” (spéritus capitalisticus) which some would have us believe dates only from the Renais- sance. It is preposterous to submit that Godric carried on his business only to provide for his daily needs. In place of hoarding in the bottom of some chest the money he gained, he used it only to main- tain and extend his trading. It is not employing too modern an expression to say that the profits he realized were put to work as fast as possible to aug- ment his revolving capital/For that matter, it is” somewhat surprising to observe that the conscience of this future monk was completely free of all re- ligious scruple. His zeal in searching out for every commodity the market where it would produce the maximum profit was in flagrant opposition to the disapproval with which the Church looked upon every kind of speculation, and to the economic doctrine of “fair price.’’”° The fortune of Godric is not to be explained 10“Quz comparat rem ut illam ipsam integram et immutatam dando lucretur, ille est mercator qui de templo Dei ejicitur.” Decretum I, dist. 88, c. 11. For the viewpoint of the Church in matters of trade, see F. Schaube, Der Kampf gegen den Zins- wucher, ungerechten Preis und unlauteren Handel im Mittel- alter, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1905. THE MERCHANT CLASS 123 merely by business ability./In a society still as . crude as that of the eleventh century, private ini- tiative could succeed only by having recourse to association. Too many perils threatened the wan- dering existence of the merchant not to impose on him first of all the fundamental necessity of form- ing in groups for the sake of common defence. Still other motives impelled him to unite with his fel- lows. At fairs and markets, should a dispute arise, he found in them favorable witnesses, or bondsmen who would be security for him in a court of justice. In common with them he was able to buy at whole- sale merchandise which, left to his own resources, he would have been unable to get. His credit was increased by the collective credit of which he sup- plied a part, and thanks thereto he was able more easily to come out on top in competition with his rivals. The biography of Godric informs us in its own very words that from the day when its hero associated himself with a band of merchants his fortunes took their upward turn. In taking this step | he merely conformed to custom. Trade in the late Middle Ages was known only in that primitive form of which, the caravan is the characteristic manifestation. Maritime or land trade was possible only by grace of the mutual assurance an associa- tion inspired in its members, of the discipline which a 124 MEDIEVAL CITIES it imposed upon them, of the regulations to which it subjected them. And this feature was always in evidence. Boats sailed only when assembled in flotillas, just as merchants travelled the country only in bands. Security existed for them only if . cuaranteed by force, and force was the consequence offcollectivity. // J It would béa complete mistake to see in the merchant associations, of which traces may be_ found in the tenth century, a peculiarly German phenomenon. It is true that the terms which were used to designate them in the north of Europe— gild and hanse—came originally from Germany. But this habit of cooperating is to be found every- where in economic life and, whatever may have been the differences in the details, in what was essential it was everywhere the same, because everywhere there were the same conditions which made it indispensable: /In Italy as in the Nether- lands, trade was able to expand only by coopera- tion. The fraitries, the charttés, the merchant com- pagnies of the countries of the Roman tongue were exactly analogous to the gé/ds and hanses of the German territories.” What determined the eco- 11’'We even find a similar organization in Dalmatia. See C. Jirecek, “Die Bedeutung von Raguza in der Handelsgeschichte des Mittelalters,’ Almanak der Akademie der Wissenschaften, in Wien, 1899, p. 382. 1 a ee EP THE MERCHANT CLASS 125 “nomic organization was not “national genius,” but social necessity. The primitive institutions of trade were as cosmopolitan as those of the feudal system. . {) The sources of information make it possible to ° obtain an excellent idea of the merchant troops which, beginning with the tenth century, were to be found in greater and greater numbers in Western Europe.” They should be pictured as armed bands, the members of which, equipped with bows and swords, encircled the horses and wagons loaded with bags, packs and casks. At the head of the caravan marched a standard-bearer. A chief, the Hansgraf or the Doyen, exercised his authority over the company. This latter was composed of “brothers,” bound together by an oath of fidelity. A spirit of close solidarity animated the whole group. The merchandise, apparently, was bought and sold in common and the profits divided pro rata, according to the share of each one in the association.// It seems that these companies, as a general rule, made very long journeys. It would be a decided mistake to conceive of the commerce of this era as a local commerce, strictly confined within the orbit of a regional market. It has already been seen that 12 W. Stein, “Hansa,” Hansische Geschichtsblatter, 1909, p. 53; H. Pirenne, ‘La hanse flamande de Londres,” Bulletin de Academie Royale de Belgique, Classe des lettres, 1899, p. 80. i, 126 MEDIEVAL CITIES Italian traders went as far as Paris and Flanders. At the end of the tenth century the port of London was regularly frequented by merchants from Co- logne, Huy, Dinant, Flanders and Rouen. A con- temporary text speaks of men from Verdun trading with Spain.” In the valley of the Seine, the Pari- sian hanse of river merchants was in constant rela- tions with Rouen. The biography of Godric, in chronicling his distant expeditions in the Baltic and the North Sea, at the same time throws light on those of his fellows. | ‘/It was therefore trade on a big scale or, if you | prefer a more precise term, trade over long dis- tances, that was characteristic of the economic re- vival of the Middle Ages/ Just as the shipping of Venice and Amalfi and later that of Pisa and Genoa launched forth from the very beginning on long sea voyages, so did the merchants of the Continent lead their vagabond life over wide territories.“ It is quite clear that this was for them the sole means of realizing big profits, To get high prices it was necessary to seek afar the products which were 13 H. Pigeonneau, Histoire du commerce de la France, Vol. I, p. 104. 14 See the text cited in Note 6 and add this passage from Galbert de Bruges, Histoire du meurtre de Charles le Bon, edit. H. Pirenne, p. 152, stating the grievances of the burghers against Count William of Normandy: “Nos in terra hac clausit ne nego=- clart possemus, imo quicquid hactenus possedimus, sine lucro sine negotiatione, sine acquisitione rerum consumpsimus.” THE MERCHANT CLASS V27 there found in abundance, in order to be able to re- ~ sell them later at a profit in places where their _ rarity increased their value. The more distant the journey of the merchant, the more profitable was it for hint And it is easily appreciated how the de- sire for gain was strong enough to counterbalance the hardships, the risks and the dangers of a wan- _ dering existence open to every aa ae dur- ing the winter, the merchant of the Middle Ages was continually on the road. English texts of the twelfth century picturesquely designated him un- _ der the name of piepowdrous—“dusty-foot.’”! This rover, this vagabond of trade, by Ane strangeness of his manner of life must have, from the very first, astonished the agricultural society all of the customs of which he went counter to and in which no place was set aside for hint. He brought \ mobility to the midst of people attached to the \ soil; he revealed, to a world faithful to tradition and respectful of a hierarchy which fixed the rdle_ | _ and the rank of each class, a shrewd and rationalist | activity in which fortune, instead of being meas- | _ ured by social status, depended only on intelligence | £ / Fg _ 15 Charles Gross, “The Court of Piepowder,” The Quarterly’ _ Journal of Economics, 1906, p. 231. Here we have to do with the _ “extraneus mercator vel aliquis transiens per regnum, non habens certam mansionem infra vicecomitatum sed vagans, qui vocatur piepowdrous.” Ve, 128 MEDIEVAL CITIES and energy. And so it is not surprising that he gave offense,//The nobility never had anything but dis- Sac dain for these upstarts come from no one knew where, and whose insolent good fortune they could not bear. They were enraged to see them better sup- plied with money than themselves; they were hu- miliated by being obliged to have recourse, in time of trouble, to the purse of these newly rich/ Save in Italy, where aristocratic families did not hesi- tate to augment their fortunes by having an inter- est In commercial operations in the capacity of money-lender, the prejudice that it was degrading to engage in business remained deep-rooted in the heart of the feudal caste up to the time of the l'rench Revolution. jAs to the clergy, their attitude in regard to mer- chants was still more unfavorable; ‘In the eyes of the Church, commercial life was dangers to the safety of the soul./*The merchant,” says a text at- tributed to St. Jerome “can please God only with difficulty.” Trade seemed to the canonists to be form of usury. ‘They condemned profit-seeking, which they confounded with avarice. Their doc- trine of “fair price” was meant to impose a re- nouncement of economic life and, in short, an asceticism incompatible with the natural develop-— ment of the latter. Every form of speculation THE MERCHANT CLASS 129 _ seemed to them a sin. And this severity was not en- _ tirely caused by the strict interpretation of Chris- _ tian morality. Very likely, it should also be attrib- uted to the conditions under which the Church > _ existed. The subsistence of the Church, in fact, de- — + oo - pended exclusively on that demesnial organization which, as has been seen above, was so foreign to the idea of enterprise and profit. If to this be added the ideal of poverty which Clunisian mysticism | gave to religious fervor, it can be readily under- stood why the Church took a defiant and hostile attitude toward the commercial revival which must, from the very first, have seemed to it a thing _ for shame and a cause of anxiety.” /MWVe must admit, however, that this attitude was not without its benefits. It certainly resulted in preventing the passion for gain from spreading without limit; it protected, in a certain measure, the poor from the rich, debtors from creditors. ‘The scourge of debts, which in Greek and Roman an- _tiquity so sorely afflicted the people, was spared the social order of the Middle Ages, and it may _ well be that the Church contributed largely to that happy result. ‘The universal prestige it enjoyed 936 “The Life of Saint Guidon of Anderlecht,” Acta Sanctorum, Vol. IV, p. 42, speaks of the “tgnobilis mercatura” and calls a merchant who advised the saint to apply himself to it a “dzaboli minister.” 130 MEDIEVAL CITIES served as a moral check-rein. If it was not strong enough to subject the traders to the doctrine of ™ “fair price,” it was strong enough to restrain them from giving way entirely to greediness for profits. They were certainly very uneasy over the peril to which their way of living exposed their eternal salvation. The fear of the future life tormented their conscience. Many there were who, on their death beds, founded by their wills charitable insti- tutions or appropriated a part of their wealth to re- imburse sums unjustly acquired. The edifying end of Godric testifies to the inner conflict which must often have been waged in their souls, torn between the irresistible seductions of wealth and the austere prescriptions of religious morality which their pro- fession obliged them, in spite of their veneration, to violate unceasingly.” The legal status of the merchants eventually gave them a thoroughly singular place in that so- ciety which they astonished in so many respects. By virtue of the wandering existence they led, they were everywhere regarded as foreigners. No one knew the origins of these eternal travellers. Cer- tainly the majority among them were born of non- 17 An example of the conversion of a merchant quite analogous to that of Godric and at the same epoch is given by the “Vita Theogeri,” Monumenta Germaniae historica, Vol. XII, p. 457. THE MERCHANT CLASS 131 free parents, from whom they had early taken leave in order to launch upon adventures. But serf- dom was not to be presumed: it had to be proven. chants, most of whom were without doubt the sons | The law necessarily treated as a free man one who could not be ascribed to a master At. therefore came about that it was necessary to treat the mer- of serfs, as if they had always enjoyed freedom. An detaching themselves from their natal soil they had freed themselves in fact./In the midst of a so- cial organization where the populace was attached _to the land and where everyone was dependent upon a liege lord, they presented the strange pic- ture of circulating everywhere without being claimed by anyone. They did not demand freedom; _ it was conceded to them because no one could prove _that they did not already enjoy it. They acquired | It, so to speak, by usage and limitation. In short, just as agrarian civilization had made of the peas- ant a man whose normal state was servitude, trade _ made of the merchant a man whose normal condi- _ tion was liberty. From that time on, in place of be- ing subject to seignorial and demesnial jurisdic- tion, he was answerable only to public jurisdiction. Alone competent to try him were the tribunals which still kept, above the multitude of private 132 MEDIEVAL CITIES courts, the old framework of the judicial constitu- tion of the Frankish State.” Public authority at the same time took him un- der its protection. The local princes whose task it was to preserve, in their counties, peace and public order—to which pertained the policing of the high- ways and the safeguarding of travellers—extended their tutelage over the merchants./1n doing so they did nothing more than to continue the tradition of the State, the powers of which they had usurped, In that agricultural empire of his, Charleémdea himself had given careful attention to the main- tenance of the freedom of circulation. He had is- sued edicts in favor of pilgrims and traders, Jew or Christian, and the capitularies of his successors attest to the fact that they remained faithful to that policy. The emperors of the House of Saxony followed suit in Germany, and the kings of France, after they came into power, did likewise. The princes had, furthermore, every interest in attract-_ ing numerous merchants to their countries, whither they brought a new animation and where they aug- mented bountifully the revenues from the market tolls. The counts early took active measures against highwaymen, watching over the good conduct of 4 18 H. Pirenne, “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyendl age,” Revue Historique, 1895, Vol. LVII, p. 18. THE MERCHANT CLASS 133 the fairs and the security of the routes of com- -munication. In the eleventh century great progress “had been made and the chroniclers state that there were regions where one could travel with a sack full of gold without running the risk of being despoiled. On its part, the Church punished high- -waymen with excommunication, and the Truces of God, in which it took the initiative in the tenth century, protected the merchants in particular. But it was not enough that merchants be placed under the safeguard and the jurisdiction of the public authority. The novelty of their profession had further consequences, It forced a law made for a civilization based on agriculture to become more flexible and to lend itself to the fundamental needs. which were imposed upon it. Judicial procedure, with its rigid and traditional formalism, with its delays, with its methods of proof as primitive as the duel, with its abuse of the absolutory oath, with its “ordeals” which left to chance the out- come of a trial, was for the merchants a perpetual nuisance. They needed a simpler legal system, more expeditious and more equitable. At the fairs and markets they elaborated among themselves a commercial code (juzs mercatorum) of which the oldest traces may be noted by the beginning of the eleventh century.” Most probably it was intro- a 134. MEDIEVAL CITIES duced very early into the legal practice, at least for suits between merchants. It must have constituted for them a sort of personal law, the benefits of which the judges had no motive for refusing them.*” The contemporary texts which make allu- sion to it unfortunately do not make clear its terms. There is, however, no doubt but that it was a col- lection of usages born of business experience and which spread from place to place commensurately with the spread of trade itself., The great fairs whither came, periodically, merchants from divers countries and which had a special tribunal charged with the rendering of speedy justice, must have seen from the very first the elaboration of a sort of commercial jurisprudence, the same everywhere despite the differences in country, language, and national laws. | f] The merchant thus seems to have been not only a free man but a privileged man to boot. Like the cleric and the noble, he enjoyed a law of exception. Like them, he escaped the demesnial and seignorial authority which continued to bear down upon the peasants. /} } 19 Tbid., p. 30; Goldschmidt, Universalgeschichte des Handels= rechts, p. 125. 20 Alpert, “De diversitate temporum,” Monumenta Germaniae historica, Vol. IV, p. 718, speaks of merchants of Tiel “judicia | non secundum legem sed secundum voluntatem decernentes.” | Chapter VI The Middle Class N no civilization is city life evolved independ- ently of commerce and industry. Neither an- tiquity nor modern times show any exception to _ this rule. Diversity of climates, peoples or religions is as immaterial as diversity of eras. It is a rule _ which held true, in the past, in the cities of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and the Roman and Arab Em- _ pires, just as in our day it has held true in the cities of Europe, America, India, Japan, and China. ffl Ats universality is explained by exigence. A city group, in fact, can live only by importing its food- supply from outside. But with this importation must correspond, on the other hand, an exporta- tion of manufactured products constituting a coun- _terpart or countervalue. Thus is established, be- _ tween the city and the surrounding country, a close interrelation of services. Commerce and industry are indispensable to the’ maintenance of this re- ciprocal dependence ;/ without the first, to assure a steady traffic, without the second, to furnish goods _ for exchange, the city would perish.’ -1This is true, naturally, only for towns placed under normal conditions. The State has often had to maintain city populations 'much too numerous to be able to take care of their own sub- 136 MEDIEVAL CITIES This condition is obviously subject to any quan- tity of variations. Depending on time and place, sometimes commercial activity and sometimes in- dustrial activity is the dominant characteristic of a city population. In antiquity, of course, a consid- erable section of the city population was made up of landed proprietors, living either by the work- ing of or by the revenue from the lands which they owned outside. But it remains none the less true that commensurately with the development of cities, artisans and traders became more and more numerous, The rural economy, older than the ur- ban economy, continued to exist side by side with the latter; the one did not prevent the other from developing./ {The cities of the Middle Ages show a very dif- ferent picture. Commerce and industry made them what they were. They did not cease to grow under that influencej/At no era in history is there so marked a contrast as that which their social and economic organization presented to the social and economic organization of the country, IN ever before had there existed, it seems, a class of men so sistence. This, for example, was the case with Rome at the end of the Republic. But the increase of the population in Rome was - the result of political, not economic, causes. THE MIDDLE CLASS 137 _ specifically and strictly urban as was the medieval bourgeoisie.” hf. fx hat the origin of these cities is directly related, 4 an effect to its cause, to the commercial revival of which we have spoken in the preceding chapters, it is impossible to doubt. Nhe proof is to be found _in the striking correspondence which is to be noted _ between the expansion of trade and the rise of cities, Italy and the Netherlands, where commerce first showed itself, are precisely the countries where cities made their first appearance and where they developed most rapidly and vigorously, It is easy to mark how, in step with the progress of trade, towns multiplied. They appeared along all the nat- ural routes by which trade spread. They were born, so to speak, under its footsteps. They are found, at first, only along sea coasts and rivers. Then, as the commercial penetration spread, others were founded along the transverse roads which con- nected these first centers of activity with each other. The case of the Netherlands is quite typical. In 2 There were certainly in the Middle Ages numbers of localities | —— | bearing the title “city” and endowed with city franchises, of _which the inhabitants were much more occupied with agriculture | than with commerce or industry.- But in this case they were the | product of a later era. We are alluding here to the middle class as it was first constituted and as it continued to exist in the characteristic centers of city life. 138 MEDIEVAL CITIES the tenth century the earlier towns were founded on the shore of the sea or on the banks of the Meuse and the Scheldt; the intermediate region, Brabant, did not yet know them. We must wait until the twelfth century before they make their appearance on the route which lay between those two great rivers. Similar observations may be made any- where. A map of Europe on which was marked the relative importance of the commercial highways would coincide very closely with an abstract of the relative importance of the city groups. ~The towns of the Middle Ages showed an extra- ordinary variety in type. Each had a distinctive physiognomy and particular characteristics. Every one of them differed from the others just as men differ among themselves. They can, however, be classified according to certain general types. And these types themselves resemble one another in their essential traits. It is therefore not a hopeless task to try to depict, as we shall endeavor to do here, the evolution of city life in the West of Europe. Doubtless the picture will necessarily be a little too schematic, not fitting exactly any one par- ticular case but rather being the description of what is common to a whole species, an abstract of individual characteristics. Only the general out- — THE MIDDLE CLASS 139 lines will appear, as in a landscape viewed from a _ mountain top. _ The subject, however, is less complicated than would appear at first glance. It is futile, indeed, in an outline of the origin of European cities, to take count of the infinite complexity which they mani- fested. City life was developed first of all in only a quite restricted number of localities in Northern Italy, in the Netherlands, and in neighboring re- gions. It will be enough if we confine ourselves to these latter, neglecting the later developments which, whatever might be of interest in them, were actually only duplicate phenomena.* Yet in the following pages a privileged place will be accord- ed to the Netherlands. This is because that country supplies the histsrian with more abundant illumi- nation on the early days of city evolution than any other region of Western Europe. ~!/The organization of commerce in the Middle Ages, as it has been described in the preceding chap- ter, obliged the peripatetic merchants or ‘“‘mer- chant adventurers,” on whom it relied, to settle at 8 The most important towns for the study of the origins of city institutions are evidently the oldest; it is there that the middle class arose. It is a faulty method to seek to explain the latter by relying on towns of later and tardy development, such as those of Germany beyond the Rhine. 140 MEDIEVAL CITIES fixed points: In the interval between their trips and especially during the bad season which made the sea, the rivers and the roads impassable, they necessarily had to gather at certain places in the region. It was naturally in localities of which the site, by its facilities in the matter of communi- cations, lent itself best to the exigencies of trade and where they could at the same time place their money and goods in security, that the mer- chants established their residence. They therefore repaired to the towns and burgs which best met these conditions. The number of them was considerable. The site of the towns had been determined by the conforma- tion of the terrain or the direction of the -river courses—in short, by conditions of nature, which were precisely what determined the direction of trade and so steered the merchants towards them. In the same way the burgs, which had been de- signed to resist enemies or furnish a shelter to the population, were naturally built in localities par-— ticularly easy of access. It was by the same routes the invaders passed that the merchants travelled, and the result was that fortresses erected against — inet _ the former were excellently situated for attract- — _ing the latter to their walls. Thus it came about — that the first commercial Stone were formed _ ta" THE MIDDLE CLASS 141 in neighborhoods which Nature had predisposed to become—or to become again—the focal points of economic circulation.” here are apparent grounds for belief, and cer- tain historians in fact have believed, that these first agglomerations were due to the markets es- tablished in such great number beginning with the ninth century. Inviting as it seems at first glance, this opinion does not bear scrutiny. The markets of the Carolingian era were simple local markets, fre- quented by peasants from roundabout, and by a few pedlers. They had as their sole aim the pro- visioning of the towns and burgs. They were not held more than once a week and their operations were limited by the household needs of the inhab- itants, very few in number, for whose benefit they had been instituted. Markets of this sort have always existed and still exist in our own day in thousands of little towns and villages. Their at- traction was not strong enough nor widespread enough to draw and hold a mercantile population. We know, moreover, of any number of places which, although equipped with markets of this -sort, never rose to the rank of cities. Such, for ex- ample, was the case with those which the Bishop of 4H. Pirenne, “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen- age,” Revue Historique, 1895, Vol. LVII, p . 142 MEDIEVAL CITIES Cambrai and the Abbot of Reichenau established, the one in 1001 at Cateau-Cambrésis and the other in 1100 at Radolfzell. Yet Cateau and Radolfzell never were anything but insignificant localities from an economic viewpoint, and the failure of the attempts of which they were the object clearly shows that these markets were wanting in that in- fluence which one is sometimes minded to accord them.” As much might be said of the fairs (fora), and yet the fairs in contrast to the markets do not show a strictly local character; they were instituted to serve as a periodic meeting place for the profes- sional merchants, to put them in touch with each other, and to get them to gather there at fixed sea- sons. In fact, the importance of many of these fairs was very great. In Flanders those of Thourout and Messines and in France those of Bar-sur-Aube and Lagny figured among the principal centers of me- dieval trade up to near the end of the twelfth century. It may therefore seem strange that none of these localities became a city worthy of the 5H. Pirenne, “Villes, marchés et marchands au Moyen- age,’ Revue Historique, 1898,Vol. LXVII, p. 59; F. Keutgen, Untersuchungen tiber den Ursprung der deutschen Stadtver- — fassung, Leipzig, 1895; S. Rietschel, Markt und Stadt in threm rechtlichen Verhaltniss, Leipzig, 1897. THE MIDDLE CLASS 143 name. {This is because whatever activity they showed was lacking in that permanent character _ which is necessary for the fixation of trade} Mer- chants directed their steps toward them because they were situated on the great route of travel running from the North Sea to Lombardy, and _ because they enjoyed special franchises and privi- _leges there. They were points of assembly and places of exchange where buyers and sellers from _ the north and south were to be encountered. After a few weeks their exotic clientéle dispersed, not to _ return before the following year. _ (It probably happened—and it very often did happen, as a matter of fact—that a fair was lo- cated at the spot where already existed a mercan- tile group. The one may have assisted the develop- _ ment of the other. But it is impossible to hold that this was the real cause of its existence. Several _ great cities can be named, which never had a privi- leged market or which did not have one until very _ late. Worms, Speyer, or Mainz never was the seat _ of a fair; Tournai had one only in 1284, Leyden in 1304, and Ghent in the fifteenth century only.° The fact t therefore remains that geographical loca- _ tion joined to the presence. of a town or a fortified °H. Pirenne, “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen- age, Revue Historique, 1895, Vol. LVII, p. 66. | 7a P ey 144. MEDIEVAL CITIES burg seems the essential and necessary condition for a colony of merchants. 4 Nothing is less artificial than the development of a colony of this sort. The fundamental needs of commerce—ease of communication and security— account for it in the most natural way. In a more advanced era, when better methods would permit man to conquer Nature and to force his presence upon her despite handicaps of climate or of soil, it would doubtless have been possible to build towns anywhere the spirit of enterprise and the quest of gain might choge a site. But it was quite another matter in a period when society had not yet ac- quired enough vigor to rise above the physical con- ditions in the midst of which it developed. It nat- urally adapted itself to them and in accordance with them its life was regulated.{In short, the towns of the Middle Ages were a phenomenon de- termined as much by physical surroundings as the course of rivers is determined by the conformation of the mountains and the direction of the valle As the commercial revival in Europe gained headway after the tenth century, the merchant colonies established in the towns or at the foot of the burgs enjoyed an uninterrupted growth. Their population increased through the action of econom- ic vitality. Up to the end of the thirteenth century, THE MIDDLE CLASS 145 the progress which héd been manifest from the _ start continued steadily. No other course was open. _ Each of the focal points of international traffic naturally shared in this activity, and the multipli- _cation of merchants naturally resulted in an in- crease of their number in all the spots where they had first settled, for these spots were exactly the _ones most favorable to commercial life. If they had attracted the traders sooner than others did, it is because they, better than the others, satisfied their professional requirements. Here, therefore, isa thoroughly satisfactory explanation of the fact | that, Jas a general rule, the greatest commercial “cities in a region were also the oldest. There is by no means enough information to sat- isfy our curiosity concerning these primitive mer- cantile groups. The historiography of the tenth and eleventh centuries is completely unconcerned with social and economic phenomena. Written ex- 'clusively by clerics or by monks, it naturally meas- ured the importance and the value of events according to how they affected the Church. Lay so- ciety did not claim their attention save insofar as it related to religious society. They could not neglect the recital of the wars and political conflicts which reacted on the Church, but there was no reason for them to have taken pains to note the beginnings of 1 ul x 146 MEDIEVAL CITIES city life, for which they were lacking in compre- hension no less than in sympathy.’ A few allusions made incidentally, a few fragmentary annotations upon the occasion of a disorder or an uprising— this is what the historian is obliged to content him- self with. We must go to the twelfth century to get, here and there from some rare layman dabbling in ~ writing, a little more substantial prize. Maps and records supplement this poverty to a certain ex- tent. Yet they are rare indeed for the period of origins. It is only by the end of the eleventh cen- tury that they begin to throw a little more abund- ant illumination. As for first-hand sources—that is to say, written and compiled by townsmen—there. are none in existence earlier than the end of the twelfth-century. It is therefore necessary, although there are a few, to ignore them and to have re- course, too often, to inference and hypothesis in this study of origins. Details are lacking concerning the gradual peo- pling of the towns. It is not known how the first traders, who came to locate there, settled in the midst of the pre-existing population. The towns, 7 The chronicler Gilles d’Orval, for example, speaking of the franchises granted the town of Huy by the Bishop of Liége in 1066, mentions a few points and passes over the rest in silence “in order not to bore the reader.” He is evidently thinking of the ecclesiastical public for which he is writing. | THE MIDDLE CLASS 147 whose precincts frequently included empty spaces - occupied by fields and gardens, must have furnished them at the start with a place which soon became too restricted. It is certain that in many of them, from the tenth century on, they were forced to lo- cate outside the walls. At Verdun they built a forti- _ fied enclosure (negotiatorum claustrum), joined to the city by two bridges.* At Ratisbonne the “city of merchants” (urbs mercatorum) arose beside the episcopal city, and the same thing is to be seen at Strasbourg and elsewhere.’ At Cambrai the new- comers surrounded themselves with a palisade of wood which a little later was replaced by a stone -rampart.’° At Marseilles the circuit of the city must have been enlarged at the beginning of the eleventh century.“ It would be easy to multiply _ these examples. They establish beyond question the _ rapid extensions undergone by the old cities which had not hitherto witnessed any growth since the _ Roman era. The peopling of the burgs was due to the same 8 Richer, Historiae, Book III, par. 103, “negotiatorum claustrum muro instar oppidi extructum, ab urbe quidem Mosa interfluente sejunctum, sed pontibus duobus interstratis et annexum.” 9In the old municipal laws of Strasbourg, the new agglomera- tion is called “urbs exterior.” , 10 Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium,” Monumenta Germanzae historica, Vol. VII, p. 499. 11 F, Kiener, Verfassungsgeschichte der Provence, p. 212. 148 MEDIEVAL CITIES causes as that of the towns, but it worked out under quite different conditions. Here, in fact, available space was not to be had by the new arrivals. The burgs were merely fortresses whose walls enclosed a strictly limited area. The result was that, at the start, the merchants were driven to settle outside this area because there was no other place for them. They built beside the burgs an “outside burg’— that is to say, a “faubourg” (forsburgus, suburbi- wm). This suburb was called, by contemporary texts, the “new burg” (novus burgus), in contrast to the feudal burg or “old burg” (vetus burgus) to which it was joined. In the Netherlands and in England there was a word used to designate it which corresponded admirably to its nature— portus. In the administrative terminology of the Roman Empire, not a sea port, but an enclosed place serv- ing as storehouse or transfer point for merchandise was called a Gortus)* The expression was passed on, with hardly “any change, to the Merovingian and Carolingian eras. It is obvious that all the places to which it was applied were situated on watercourses and that market-tolls were collected 12Digeste, L, 16. 59: “Portus appellatus est conclusus locus quo importantur merces et inde exportantur”’; Isidorus of Seville, Etymologiae, Book, XIV, chap. vil, pars, 39, 40: “Portus dictus a deportandis commerciis.” | THE MIDDLE CLASS 149 | in them. They were, therefore, landing places where was accumulated in the natural course of trading operations merchandise destined to be shipped fur- ther.”° L etween a porfus anda market or a fair the dis- tinction is very clear. While the latter were period- ic meeting places of buyers and sellers, the former ‘was a permanent place of trade, a center of unin- terrupted traffic. After the seventh century Dinant, ‘Huy, Valenciennes and Cambrai were places with a portus, and in consequence transfer points.” The ‘economic slump of the eighth century and the ‘Norseman invasions naturally ruined their busi- ness. It was not until the tenth century that the old porti took on new life or new ones were established, as at Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, St. Omer, and else- where:/At the same date there appears in Anglo- Sax6n texts the word “port,” employed as a syno- nym for the Latin words uwrbs and czvétas, and even at the present day the term “port” is commonly met with in the names of cities of every land of English speech.” - 13In the twelfth century the word still retained its original meaning of landing place: “Infra burgum Brisach et Argentinen- sem civitatem, nullus erit portus, qui vulgo dicitur Ladstadt, nisi apud Brisach,” H. G. Gengler, Stadtrechtsaltertumer, p. 44. 14]. Pirenne, “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen- age,” Revue Historique, Vol. LVII, p. 12. 15 Murray, New English Dictionary, Vol. VII, 2nd part, p. 1136. ¥ of et ee 150 MEDIEVAL CITIES Nothing shows more clearly the close connection that existed between the economic revival of the | Middle Ages and the beginnings of city life. They were so intimately related that the same word ' which designated a commercial settlement served _ in one of the great idioms of Europe to designate _ the town itself. Old Dutch supplies a similar in- ~ stance. In it the word poort and the word poorter are both employed, the first with the meaning of “town”’ and the second with that of “towgsman.” / It can be definitely assumed that the portz, sO frequently spoken of during the tenth and eleventh centuries, at the foot of the burgs of Flanders and nearby regions, were made up of merchant groups. Several passages in the chronicles or lives of the saints which deal with the subject, though in scant detail, leave no room for doubt on this point. It will be enough to cite here the curious narrative of the Miracula St. Womari, written about 1060 by a monk who was an eye-witness of the events he re- ported. Here we have to do with a troop of friars arriving in procession at Ghent. The inhabitants go out to meet them, “like a swarm of bees.” They conduct.their pious visitors first to the Church of St. Pharailde, situated within the limits of the burg. The next day they leave the latter to repair to the Church of St. John the Baptist, recently 4 ¥ 7 Ron - THE MIDDLE CLASS 151 erected in the portus.'* It therefore seems that here ‘is a case of the juxtaposition of two residential ‘centers of different origin and nature. The one, the older, is a fortress and the other, the more recent, is a place of trade, And it is from the gradual fusion of these two elements, of which the first is ab- sorbed little by little by the second, that the city 1 born.” // It will be well to take note, before going further, ‘of the fate of those towns and burgs whose loca- tion did not favor their becoming commercial cen- ‘ters. Typical examples, without going outside the ‘Netherlands, were Térouanne or the burgs built about the monasteries of Stavelot, Malmédy, ‘ Lobbes, etc. In the agricultural and demesnial civ- jlization of the Middle Ages, all these places were notable for their wealth and their influence. But, situated too far from the great highways of com- “munication, they were not affected by the economic revival nor, so to speak, fecondated thereby. In the midst of the flowering which it inspired, they re- mained sterile, like seed fallen upon stony ground. None of them rose above the rank of mere half- 16 “Miracula §S. Womari,” Monumenta Germaniae historica, Vol. XV, p. 841. 2H 27H. Pirestie, “Tes villes flamandes avant le XII® siécle,” An- nales de l'Est et du Nord, Vol. I, p. 22. © 152 MEDIEVAL CITIES rural market-towns’. And it is not to the point, furthermore, to show that in the evolution of the city, the towns and the burgs had on the whole only an auxiliary function. Adapted to a social order very different from that which witnessed the birth of cities, they could not have been able to give birth to the latter by their own force. They were, so to speak, the crystallization points of commercial ac- tivity. It did not arise from them—it came to them from without, when favorable conditions of site brought it their way. Their role was essentially a passive réle.fIn the history of the development of cities, the commercial suburb was considerably more important than the feudal burg. It was the suburb that was the active elementJand, as will be seen later, therein lies the explanation of that re- newal of municipal life which was merely the con- sequence of the economic revival.” 18 We may make the same observation concerning the towns of Bavai and Tongres, which had been important administrative centers in the North of Gaul during the Roman era. Not being Situated on any watercourse, they did not profit by the com- — mercial revival. Bavai disappeared in the ninth century ; Tongres — has remained without any importance up to our own day. | 19 Naturally, no claim is made that the evolution took place inl exactly the same way in every city. The merchant suburb is not everywhere so clearly distinguished from the original burg as it is, for instance, in Flemish cities. According to local conditions, the immigrant merchants and artisans formed their colonies in divers ways. Here merely the main outlines of the subject can be indicated. See on this point the observations of N. P. Ottokar, Opiti po istoru franzouskich gorodov, Perm, 1919, p. 244. : | : : THE MIDDLE CLASS 153 , A striking characteristic of the merchant groups | was their uninterrupted growth, beginning with the tenth century. Therein they show the most violent contrast to the immobility in which the towns and the burgs, at the feet of which they were located, persisted. They continually drew to themselves new ‘inhabitants. They expanded steadily, covering a ‘larger and larger area, so much so that in many places they had, by the start of the twelfth century, already surrounded on all sides the original fort- _resses about which their houses pressed. After the _ beginning of the twelfth century, it became neces- sary to create new parishes for them. At Ghent, at Bruges, at St. Omer, and in many other places, con- temporary texts remark the construction of these churches, due often to the initiative of wealthy merchants.” Only a general idea can be formed of the ar- rangement and disposition of the suburb, for exact Ne en aa aE =’ details are lacking. The original type, however, ’ was universally very simple. There was, of course, a market, always established on the bank of the stream which passed by the locality. This was the junction point of the streets (plateae) leading from it towards the gates giving access to the 20In 1042 the church of the burghers at St. Omer was built at the expense of a certain Lambert who was most probably him- self a burgher. A. Giry, Histoire de St. Omer, Paris, 1877, p. 369. 154 MEDIEVAL CITIES open country. For the merchant suburb was surrounded by defence works, one of its most important features.” These defence works were, of course, absolutely © necessary in a society where, despite the efforts of the princes and the Church, violence and rapine continued to be in universal evidence. Before the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire and the Norseman invasions, the Monarchy had succeeded fairly well in guaranteeing public security, and as a result the porté of that time, or at least the greater number of them, remained unfortified. But by the second half of the ninth century there no longer existed any guarantee for the safety of per- sonal property, other than the protection of ram- parts. A capitulary of 845-856 clearly indicates that the rich men and the few merchants who still were left sought refuge in the towns.” The new prosperity of trade attracted the attention of high- waymen of all sorts to such an extent that mercan- tile centers felt a pressing need for adequate pro- tection against them ‘a as merchants did not venture on the highways unless armed, so also they — made of their collective residences a sort of strong- — 21 See the map of Bruges at the beginning of the twelfth century in Galbert de Bruges, Histoire du meurtre de Charles le Bom ui] Comte de Flandre, edit. H. Pirenne, Paris, 1891. 22 Boretius, Capitularia regum francorum, Vol. II, p. 405. : : hol (The settlements which they founded at the foot of the towns or burgs bring to mind the close parallel existing in the forts and the blockhouses ‘built by the European immigrants in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries in the colonies of “America and Canada. Like the latter, they were “customarily defended merely by a solid palisade of wood pierced with gates and surrounded by a moat. An interesting souvenir of these first urban fortifications survives in the custom, long preserved in heraldry, of symbolising a city by a sort of circular hedge. It is certain that this rude enclosure of timber had no other purpose than the parrying of unex- pected attacks. It constituted a security against bandits; it would not have been able to withstand a regular siege.” In case of war it had to be aban- doned and put to the torch in order to prevent the enemy from turning it to his own ends, while refuge was sought in the stronger citadel of a town or _ burg. It was not until about the beginning of the _ twelfth century that the growing prosperity of the - merchant colonies enabled them to make their se- curity somewhat more certain by building solid ramparts of stone, flanked by towers, and capable 23 See above (chap. m1, Note 14), the text cited for Cambrai. At Bruges, at the beginning of the twelfth century, the town was still defended only by wooden palisades. THE MIDDLE CLASS 155 Saar aE. 156 MEDIEVAL CITIES — of facing a serious attack. Thereafter they became fortresses in themselves. The old feudal or epis- copal enceinte which continued to stand in their center thus lost all reason for existence. Little by little their useless walls were allowed to fall in ruin. Houses leaned up against them, and they were broken open to make way for new streets. Very often it happened that the towns bought them back from the count or the bishop, for whom they no longer represented anything but idle capital, demolished them and transferred the ground they had covered into building lots. ¥ Inthe need of security which the merchants felt there lies, therefore, the explanation of the funda- mental characteristic of the towns of the Middle Ages. They were strongholds. It is impossible to imagine a town existing at that era without walls. It was an attribute by which towns were distin- guished from villages. It was a right, or to use the expression of that time, it was a privilege which none of them lacked. Here again heraldry con- forms very exactly to reality, in surmounting the crests of cities by a walled crown. But the rampart was not only the symbol of the — city 3 it was from it also that came the name which i served and which still serves to designate the popu- — lation. Because of the very fact that it was a forti-. \ Y SS ——————eEEE——EEeE=Ew THE MIDDLE CLASS 157 fied place, the town became a burg/T he mercantile center, as has been shown above, was designated by the name of “new burg”’ to distinguish it from the original “old burg.”’ And hence its inhabitants, at the beginning of the eleventh century at the latest, received the name of “burghers” (burgen- ses) //The first known mention of this word occurs in France in 1007. It appears again in Flanders, at St. Omer, in 1056; then it passes into the Empire by the intermediary of the region of the Moselle, where it crops up at Huy in 1066. It was there- fore the inhabitants of the “new burg,” that is to say of the merchant burg, who received, or more probably who created it to describe themselves, the appellation of “‘burghers.’’ It is curious to see that it was never applied to those of the “old burg.” These latter were known as castellani or castrenses. And this is further, and particularly significant, proof that the origins of city populations should be sought not in the older population of the early fortresses but in the immigrant population which trade brought to them and which, in the eleventh century, began to absorb them. /, The appellation of “burgher” did not imme- diately come into universal use. Along with it, that of cives (citizen) was still employed, in conformity with the ancient tradition. In England and Flan- eee, — a ee 158 - MEDIEVAL CITIES ders there are also found the words poortmanni and poorters, both of which fell into disuse about the end of the Middle Ages but confirm in the happiest manner the identity, which has elsewhere been es- tablished, between the portus and the “new burg.” Strictly speaking, they were really one and the same thing, and the synonymity which language shows between the poortmannus and the burgensis would be enough to attest to it even if sufficient proof had not been already adduced. /-It is somewhat difficult to define this original middle class of the commercial centers. Evidently _it was not composed exclusively of those wide-tray- elled merchants spoken of in the preceding chapter. It must have comprised, besides them, a more or less important number of men engaged in the un- the necessary accessories for carrying on business As a result, men from the whole neighboring terri tory were drawn to the nascent city in search of a professsion. A definite and positive attraction by the urban population for the rural population is clearly manifest by the beginning of the eleventh _ loading and the transporting of merchandise, in the — _ rigging and the equipping of the boats, in the manu- _ facture of carts, casks, chests or, in a word, of all / century. The greater the concentration of popula- — tion, the greater the effect it had roundabout. It ~! : ‘3 t THE MIDDLE CLASS 159 _ needed, for its daily existence, not only a quantity but also an ;ncreasing variety of skilled workmen. _ The few artisans who heretofore had sufficed for the limited needs of the towns and the burgs evi- dently could not satisfy the multiplied exigencies of the newcomers. Members of the most indispens- able profession therefore had to come from outside _ —bakers, brewers, butchers, smiths, and so on. | But trade itself stimulated industry. In every region where industry was carried on in the country, trade made a successful effort first to lure it to the city and then to concentrate it there. Flanders supplies one of the most instructive ex- amples in this respect. It has already been shown © that ever since the Celtic era the trade of cloth- making was widely carried on in the country. The peasants, thanks to the preservation of processes and of Roman methods, there manufactured cloth capable of supplying the basis of a regular and profitable export trade. The merchants of the towns did not fail to take advantage thereof. By the end of the tenth century they were shipping cloth to England.* They soon learned to know the excellent quality of the native wool and sought to introduce it into Flanders, where they could have it worked up under their supervision. Thus they 24 See above, chap. Iv. 160 MEDIEVAL CITIES made themselves givers of work and naturally at- tracted to the cities the weavers of the country.” These weavers thereafter lost their rural character and became simple employees in the service of the merchants. | The increase of the population naturally fa- “* vored industrial concentration. Numbers of the | poor poured into the towns where cloth-making, LY” the activity of which trade grew proportionately with the development of commerce, guaranteed them their daily bread. Their condition there, how- ever, seems to have been very miserable. The com- petition which they maintained with each other in the labor market allowed the merchants to pay them a very low wage. Existing information, of — which the earliest dates back to the eleventh cen- tury, shows them to have been a brutish lower class, uneducated and discontented.” The social conflicts — which industrial life must have fomented, and which were so terrible in the Flanders of the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries, were already in embryo in the very period of city evolution. The 25 Ghent must have already been an important weaving center in the eleventh century, since the “Vita Macarii,” Monumenta — Germaniae historica, Vol. XV, p. 616, speaks of the proprietors — of the neighborhood bringing their wool thither. 26 On this point see the “Chronicon S. Andreae Castri-Camera- _ censil,” Monumenta Germaniae historica, Vol. VII, p. 540, and — the “Gesta abbatum Trudonensium,” zdid., Vol. X, p. 310. , PHE MIDDLE CLASS 161 antagonism between capital and labor is thereby _ revealed to be as old as the middle class. The old rural industry very quickly disappeared. It could not compete with that of the town, abund- _antly supplied with the raw material of commerce, ~~ eee operating at lower prices, and enjoying more ad- vanced methods. For the merchants, with an eye to selling, did not fail to improve the quality of the cloths they exported. They organized and _ themselves directed the workshops where they were - milled and dyed. In the twelfth century they had come to be without rivals, in the markets of Europe, for the fineness of their weaves and the beauty of their colors. They increased the dimensions also. The old square “cloaks” (pallia) which the weav- ers of the country districts had formerly made, _ were replaced by pieces of cloth thirty to sixty ells in length, more economical to make and easier to ship. The cloths of Flanders thus became one of the _ most sought-after general articles of merchandise. _ The concentration of this industry in the towns re- mained, until the end of the Middle Ages, the chief source of their prosperity and helped to make them virtually great manufacturing centers, of which -Douai, Ghent and Ypres were distinctive types. Although cloth-making was the dominant indus- 1 162 MEDIEVAL CITIES try in Flanders it was, naturally, far from being restricted to that country alone. Many of the towns’ of the North and the South of France, of Italy and — Rhenish Germany, were also successfully engaged in it. Cloth, more than any other manufactured product, was the basis of the commerce of the Mid- dle Ages. Metallurgy enjoyed far less importance. It was confined almost entirely to brass-working, to which certain cities, and particularly Dinant in Belgium, owe their fortune. But whatever might be the nature of industry in other respects, every- where it obeyed that law of concentration which was operative at such an early date in Flanders. (Everywhere the city groups, thanks to commerce, drew rural industry to them.” In the era of demesnial economy, each agricul- tural center, big or little, supplied in the largest measure possible its own wants. The great pro- prietor maintained in his “court” artisan-serfs, just as each peasant built his own house or made — with his own hands the furniture or the utensils he needed. The-ped the Jews, the infrequent merchants who passed through the markets at great intervals supplied the rest. They lived under con- *7In the eleventh century the “Miracula Sancti Bavonis,” Monumenta Germaniae historica, Vol. XV, p. 5945 mentioned at Ghent the “Jaict qui ex officio agnominabantur coriaru.” There is no doubt but that these artisans had come there from without. = “mer to industry and commerce, and this state of advantageous to the middle classes than to the THE MIDDLE CLASS 163 ditions very similar to those which still exist in many regions of Russia. All of that was changed _ when the towns began to offer to the rural popula- tion industrial products of every sort. It result- ed in an exchange of commodities between the mid- dle classes and the rural population, as has been _ pointed out above. The artisans who supplied the _ town people found in the rural classes another as- sured clientéle. There came about a sharp-division™ of labor between town and country. The latter gave itself over to agriculture exclusively, the for- a ai E things was to endure as long as the social order of the Middle Ages. It was, incidentally, much more Ceres _ peasants The towns, therefore, energetically rl their, _ efforts to safeguard it. They never failed to oppose every attempt to introduce industry into the coun- try districts. They jealously watched over the m nopoly which guaranteed their existence. It was not until the dawn of the modern era that they were willing to give up an exclusivism no longer compatible with economic progress.” The middle classes whose double activity—com- 28H. Pirenne, Belgian Democracy—Its Early History, Man- chester, 1915, p. 201. AAR RENEE REIT TR I EE 164 MEDIEVAL CITIES mercial and industrial—has just been outlined, were faced by innumerable difficulties which they overcame only as time went on. No provision had been made for their reception in the towns and burgs where they settled down. There they were a cause of perturbation at first, and probably they were very often greeted as undesirables. First of all they had to come to terms with the proprietors of the soil. Sometimes it was the bishop, some- times a monastery, sometimes a count or a seigneur who owned the land and there administered jus- tice. Frequently it even happened that the space occupied by the portus or the “new burg” was amenable to the jurisdiction of several tribunals and of several demesnes. It was intended for agri- culture, and the immigration of the newcomers changed it all at once into ground for building. A certain time was needed before the owners per- ceived the profit they could make out of it. At first they particularly resented the inconvenience caused — by the appearance of these colonies given over to a_ sort of life which went counter to custom or which shocked traditional ideas. Conflicts immediately arose. They were inevit- | : : ‘ able, in view of the fact that the newcomers, who — were strangers, were hardly inclined to value the interests, rights and customs which inconvenienced THE MIDDLE CLASS 165 them. Room had to be made for them as best as could be done, and as their numbers increased their encroachments became more and more bold. In 1099, at Beauvais, the chapter was obliged to _bring action against the dyers who had so obstruct- -ed the course of the river that its mills could no longer function.” Elsewhere, from time to time, a | bishop or a monastery disputed with the burghers the lands they occupied. But whether they willed or not, they had to come to terms. At Arras the abbey of St. Vaast ended by parting with its til- -lages and parcelling them out. Similar cases oc- : : : ' curred at Ghent and Douai. Despite the penury of existing information, it must be assumed that ar- rangements of this sort were very common. Even at the present day the names of streets recall, in many cities, the agricultural character which was theirs at the beginning. At Ghent, for example, one of the principal arteries is still designated under the name of “Field Street”’ (Veldstraat) and near ‘it is to be found “Husbandry Square” (place du Kouter).*° To the multiplicity of proprietors corresponded 29H. L. Labande, Histoire de Beauvais, Paris, 1892, p. 55. 80 For the status of real estate in the towns, see G. Des Marez, Etude sur la propriété fonciére dans les villes du Moyen-age et spécialement en Flandre, Ghent, 1898. The oldest known reference to the enfranchisement of city land dates back to the beginning of the eleventh century. 166 MEDIEVAL CITIES the multiplicity of forms of government to which the lands were subject. Some were subject to land- taxes and statute-labor, others to prestations des- tined for the maintenance of the knights who formed the permanent garrison of the “old burg;” still others to dues collected by the castellan or by the bishop or by the solicitor with the title of Chief \ Justiciary. All, in short, bore the stamp of an era in which economic organization, like political or- ganization, had been based entirely on possession of the soil. To that were added the formalities and the taxes customarily levied at the time of the transfer of real estate, and which singularly com- plicated, if they did not actually make impossible, purchase and sale. Under such conditions the land, burdened by the’ accumulated vested interests which weighed heavy- ily upon it, could not play any part in business operations, acquire a market value, or serve as a basis of credit. , The multiplicity of jurisdictions complicated — still more a situation already so intricate. It was” rare indeed that the land occupied by the burghers _ belonged to only a single seigneur. Each of the | proprietors, among whom it was shared, had his — demesnial court which alone was competent in mat- ters of real estate. Some of these courts adminis- tered, in addition, either high justice or low justice. ‘The confusion of competencies aggravated still further the confusion of jurisdictions. The result was that the same man was dependent at the same time on several tribunals, according to whether it was a question of debts, of crimes, or simply of the possession of the land. The difficulties which re- sulted therefrom were the greater in that these tri- -bunals were not all held in the town, and it was ‘sometimes necessary to travel a long distance to plead before them. Furthermore, they differed ‘among themselves, in their composition as well as in the law they administered. Side by side with the demesnial courts there existed almost always an older tribunal of aldermen set up, it might be, either in the town or in the burg. The ecclesiastical court of the diocese drew to it not only matters relevant to canonical law, but even all those in which a member of the clergy was interested, with- out taking count of the number of questions of suc- cessions, civil status, marriage, etc. glance at the condition of individuals, makes the complexity seem greater yet. As the composi- tion of the city took form, every contrast and every gradation in the status of individuals was to be found. Nothing could be more bizarre, in fact, than this nascent middle oa he merchants, as has THE MIDDLE CLASS 167 168 MEDIEVAL CITIES been seen above, were de facto free men. But this was not the case with a very great number of the immigrants who, lured by the hope of finding work, flocked to the towns. They were almost always na- tives of the nearby countryside and so could not. dissemble their civil status. The seigneur of the demesne from which they had escaped could easily seek them out and identify them; people from their own village ran into them when they came to town. Their parents were known, and it was therefore evi- dent that they had been born into serfdom, since serfdom was the general status of the rural class. It was therefore impossible for them to claim, like the merchants, a freedom which these latter en- joyed only’ because their true civil status was un- known. hus the majority of artisans kept, in the town, the status of serfdom in which they had-been born. There was, to be sure, an incompatibility be- tween their new social status and their traditional ~legal status. They had ceased to be peasants but - they were not able to efface the original stain with which serfdom hdd marked the rural class. If they sought to dissemble it they did not fail to be rudely recalled to reality. It sufficed for their seigneur to. claim them; they were obliged to follow him and _ be returned to the demesne whence they had fled The merchants themselves indirectly resented) if THE MIDDLE CLASS 169 | the wrongs of serfdom. If they wished to marry, : the woman they chose belonged almost always to the serf class. Only the richest among them could | aspire to the honor of espousing the daughter of some knight whose debts he had paid. For the others, their union with a serf would have for its /consequence the serfdom of their children,,Com- /mon law ascribed to children, in fact, the legal_ status of their mother by virtue of the adage partus | ventrem sequitur, and it is easy to imagine the ab- surd consequences which arose out of this principle for familiesé, Marriage caused serfdom to reappear in the household. Rancors and conflicts were inevi- tably born of so contradictory a situation. The an- cient law, in seeking to impose itself upon a social order for which it was not adapted, ended in manifest absurdities and injustices which called irresistibly for reform. larger and with its numbers acquired power, the no- it. The knights who were settled in the town or in the burg no longer had any reason for living there after the military importance of these old fort- resses had disappeared. There was a distinct ten- dency, at least in the North of Europe, to retire to bility little by little retreated and gave way before | _, On the other hand, while the middle class grew \ the country and to leave the towns. Only in Italy’ 170 MEDIEVAL CITIES and in the South of France did the nobles continue to have. their residences in the town.y 4 This fact must be attributed to the’ preservation, in those countries, of the traditions and, in a certain measure, of the municipal organization of the Ro- man Empire. The cities of Italy and Provence had been too intimately a part of the territories of which they were the administrative centers not to have preserved, at the time of the economic decline of the eighth and ninth centuries, closer relations with it than anywhere else. The nobility, whose fiefs were scattered all over the country, did not acquire that rural character which typified the no- bility of France, Germany or England. They stayed - in the towns, where they lived on the revenues from their lands. There they built, in the late Middle Ages,those towers which today give so picturesque an aspect to so many of the old cities of Tuscany. They did not divest themselves of the urban stamp with which ancient society had been so strongly marked.jThe contrast between the nobility and | the middle class, therefore, appears less striking in Italy than in the rest of Europe. At the era of the commercial revival, the nobles of the cities of Lom- bardy even interested themselves in the business of the merchants and put some of their income into business enterprises. It is in this way, perhaps, that _ THE MIDDLE CLASS 171 the development of Italian cities differs most pro- foundly from that of the cities of the North. In these last it is only in a quite exceptional case that we find here and there, as if gone astray in the midst of middle class society, a family of knights. In the twelfth century the exodus of the nobility to the country was completed almost everywhere. | This is a development, however, which is still very little understood, and it is to be hoped that further researches will throw greater light upon it. Mean- while it may be assumed that the economic crisis, to which the nobility were prey following the di: minution of their r ues in the thirteenth cen- tury, was not without its influence in their disap- pearance from the towns. They must have found it advantageous to sell to the burghers the lands _ they owned, the altering of which into ground for building had enormously augmented their value. The status of the clergy was not sensibly modi- fied by the influx of the middle class to the towns _ and burgs. Out of it arose a few inconveniences for them, but also a few advantages. The bishops had to battle to maintain intact, in the presence of the newcomers, their rights of justice and their rights of demesne; the monasteries and the chapters saw themselves forced to permit houses to be built on 4 172 MEDIEVAL CITIES ee eS their fields or on their tillages. The patriarchal and © demesnial form of government to which the Church | had been accustomed suddenly found itself at grips — with unexpected claims and needs, out of which was to result, at the start, a period of uneasiness and insecurity. ) On the other hand, however, compensations were not lacking. The rental or tribute levied on the lots of land given over to the burghers formed an in- creasingly fruitful source of revenue. The increase in population brought with it a corresponding in- crease in the perquisites supplied by baptisms, mar- riages and deaths; the yield from offerings went on | increasing without let-up; merchants and artisans formed pious confraternities affiliated to a church or to a monastery in return for annual dues. The creation of new parishes, proportionately as the number of inhabitants mounted, multiplied the numbers and the resources of the secular clergy. After the beginning of the eleventh century abbeys, on the contrary, were founded in towns only in _ very exceptional cases. They were not able to ac- ¥ custom themselves to that life, too blustering and — busy, and in addition it was no longer possible to | find the room necessary for a great religious a with the accessory services it required. The Cister- | | | | | THE MIDDLE CLASS 173 cian Order, which spread so widely through Europe in the course of the twelfth century, organized only in the country. It was only in the following century that the monks were to come back to the towns again. The mendicant friars, Franciscans and Dominicans, who were to come and settle there, were not merely ' a normal development arising from the new orien- ~ tation which religious fervor took. The principle of poverty which they professed made them break with the demesnial organization, heretofore the support of monastic life. By them monasticism was found to be wonderfully well adapted to a city atmosphere. They asked no more of the burgh- ers than their alms. In place of isolating them- selves in the center of vast, silent enclosures, they built their convents along the streets. They took part in all the agitations, all the miseries as well, and understood all the aspirations of the artisans, whose spiritual directors they well deserved to be- come. Chapter VII Municipal Institutions I'TIES, in their formative period, found them- selves in a singularly complicated situation. They were faced with problems of all sorts. In _ them there existed side by side two populations which did not mix, and which presented all the contrasts of two distinct worlds. The old demesnial organization with all the traditions, all the opin- — ions, all the ideas which may not have been born of it but which received from it their particular stamp, came to grips with wants and aspirations which had taken it by surprise, which went counter to its interests, to which it was not adapted and which, from the very first, it opposed. If it gave ground, that was in spite of itself and because the new conditions which had to be faced were due to causes too profound and irresistible for their effect not to be felt. The consequences of facts which are so little af- fected by human wishes as the increase of popula- tion and the expansion of trade could not be avoided. Probably those in positions of authority in the social order were not able to appreciate the — import of the changes that were taking place about MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 175 them. The old order of things sought, at first, to maintain its position. Only later, and usually too late, did it try to adapt itself. As always happens, the change did not come about all at once. And it would be improper to attribute, as has frequently been done, to “feudal tyranny” or to “sacerdotal arrogance” an opposition which is to be explained | by more natural incentives. There happened in the Middle Ages what has happened so often since then. Those who were the beneficiaries of the estab- lished order were bent upon defending it, not so much, perhaps, because it guaranteed their inter- ests, as because it seemed to them indispensable to the preservation of society. It should be borne in mind, moreover, that this social order the middle classes accepted. Their de- mands and what might be called their “political programme” did not aim in any way at its over- throw; they took for granted the privileges and the authority of the princes, the clergy, and the nobili- ty. They merely wished to obtain, because it was necessary to their existence, not an overthrow of the existing order but simple concessions. And these concessions were limited to their own needs. They were completely uninterested in those of the rural population from which they had sprung. In short, they only asked of society to make for them 176 MEDIEVAL CITIES a place compatible with the sort of life they were leading. They were not revolutionary, and if they — happened to turn to violence it. was not through hate against the government but quite simply to force concessions. A brief review of the principal points in their programme will be enough to show that they did not go beyond an indispensable minimum. What they wanted, first of all, was personal liberty, which would assure to the merchant or the artisan the possibility of going and coming, of living where he wished and of putting his own person as well as that of his children under the protection of the seigniorial power. Next came the creation of a special tribunal by means of which the burgher would at one stroke escape the multiplicity of jurisdictions to which he was amenable and the in- conveniences which the formalistic procedure of ancient law imposed upon his social and economic ANN Then came the instituting in the city of a “peace’—that is to say, of a penal code—which \, would guarantee security. And then camé\ the j abolition of those prestations most incompatible | with the carrying on of trade and industry, and _ with the possession and acquisition of land. What they wanted, in fine, was a more or less ex- — MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 177 tensive degree of political autonomy and local self-government. All of this was very far from forming a coherent whole and being justified on theoretical principles. Nothing was further from the mind of the original middle classes than any conception of the rights ot man and citizen,’ Personal liberty itself was not claimed as a natural right. It was sought only for. the advantages it conferred. This is so true that at Arras, for example, the merchants tried to have themselves classed as serfs of the Monastery of St. Vast in order to enjoy the exemption from the mar- ket-tolls which had been accorded to the latter.” Jt was not until the beginning of the eleventh century that the first direct action was taken by the middle classes against the order of things they suf- fered from. Their efforts thereafter never halted. _ Despite vicissitudes and reverses, the movement of reform advanced unhesitatingly towards its goal, broke by main force, if necessary, the opposition that stood in the way and ended, in the course of the twelfth century, by giving the towns those es- “sentially municipal institutions which were to be _ the basis of their constitutions. fi j eS Pirenees “L’origine des constitutiéns urbaines au Moyen- age,’ Revue Historique, Vol. LVII, pp. 25, 34. J MEDIEVAL CITIES Everywhere it was the merchants who took the initiative and directed events. Nothing was more natural than that. They were the most active, the richest, the most influential element in the city population and they endured with so much the more impatience a situation which clashed with their interests and belittled their confidence in themselves.” The rdle they then played, despite the enormous difference in time and conditions, may fittingly be compared with that which the capital- istic middle class assumed after the end of the eighteenth century in the political revolution which put an end to the old order of things. In the one case as in the other, the social group which was the most directly interested in the change assumed the leadership of the opposition, and was followed by the masses. Democracy in the Middle Ages, as in modern times, got its start under the guidance of a select few who foisted their programme upon the confused aspirations of the people. . The episcopal cities were the first to be the scene | of combat. It would be a decided mistake to at- ‘tribute this fact to the personality of the bishops. A great number of them distinguished themselves, on the contrary, by their manifest solicitude for the public weal. Excellent administrators, whose mem- _ * H. Pirenne, “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen- 178 age,” Revue Historique, Vol. LVII, PP. 25, 34. MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 179 ory has remained with the people throughout the centuries, were by no means rare among them. At _ Liége, for example, Notger (972-1018) attacked the castles of the robber barons who infested the | | | | neighborhood, and turned from its course a branch of the Meuse to make the city more healthy and to ' strengthen its fortifications.° Similar examples could easily be cited in the case of Cambrai, Utrecht, Cologne, Worms, Mainz and a number of cities of Germany where the emperors strove, up to the time of the investiture struggle, But the more the bishops were conscious of their duties, the more also they had to defend their gov- ernment against the demands of their subjects and endeavor to keep them under an authoritative, pa- _triarchal regimen. The confusion of spiritual power and temporal power in their hands, moreover, caused every concession to seem to them to be a. to name prelates notable equally for their intel- _ _ligence and their energy. peril to the Church. It must also not be forgotten ’ that their functions obliged them to reside perma- -nently in their cities and that they feared, with _ good reason, the difficulties which would be caused them by the autonomy of the burghers in whose 8G. Kurth, Notger de Liége et la civilisation au X° siécle, Brus- sels, 1905. * - Pe f / ABo MEDIEVAL CITIES r "midst they lived. Finally, it has already been seen af i rs e | - - that the Church had little sympathy with trade. This unsympathetic attitude must naturally have made the Church deaf to the wishes of the mer- chants and of the people who were grouped behind them, have prevented an understanding of their wants, and given a false impression of their real power. Out of this came misunderstandings, clashes, and soon an open hostility which, after the begin- ning of the eleventh century, was to end in the in- evitable.* ~ The movement began in Northern Italy. There, commercial life was older and there the political consequences of it were likewise earlier. Unfor- tunately very few details are known concerning these events. It is certain that the troubles to which the Church was then prey could hardly have de- layed their precipitation. The inhabitants of the towns sided passionately with the monks and the priests who were waging a campaign against the evil customs of the clergy, attacking simony and the marriage of priests, and condemning the inter- vention of lay authority in the administration of 4H. Pirenne, Belgian Democracy, p. 27. F. Keutgen Amter und Ziinfte, Jena, 1903, p. 75. We find in the English clergy the same hostility towards the middle class, as in the German and French clergy. K. Hegel, Stadte und Gilden der germanischen Volker, Leipzig, 1891, Vol. I, p. 73. the Ws ii, LU che prvire UL UIT 1 dpdacy. ine bDisne- ops, named by the Emperor and compromised by that fact in itself, thus found themselves face to —— ——— eS Se Se ——<—— face with an opposition in which mysticism, the claims of the merchants and the discontent caused by the misery of the industrial workers were allied and mutually strengthened. It is certain that the nobles took part in the agitation, for it gave them | the opportunity to shake off episcopal suzerainty, and made common cause with the burghers and the | en Patarenes—the name by which the conservatives contemptuously designated their adversaries. In 1057 Milan, even then the queen of the cities _ of Lombardy, was in open revolt against the arch- bishop.” The vicissitudes of the investiture struggle naturally spread the disturbances and gave them a turning more and more favorable to the insurgents, | proportionately as the cause of the Pope got the better of that of the Emperor. There were insti- _ tuted, either by the consent of the bishops or by violence, magistrates with the title of “‘consuls”’ and charged with the administration of the towns.° - \ he first of these consuls to be mentioned, but prob- : ably not the first to exist, appear at Lucca in 1080,/ 5 A. Hauck, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, Vol. III, p. 692. 6K. Hegel, Geschichte der ReaAteaeeTassung von Ttalien, Leip- zig, 1847, Vol. II, p. 137. 182 There is a record as Cally dS L0UO0 Ui a coumunal: court’’ in that city, a characteristic feature of city autonomy which surely must have existed at the same date in plenty of other places." The Consuls of Milan are not cited before 1107, but they were surely much earlier in origin than that. From the time they are first mentioned, they show the dis- tinctive physiognomy of communal magistrates. \ They were recruited among divers social classes,— among the capitane?, the valvassores, and the czves and represented the communio civitatis. The most typical feature of this magistracy was its yearly character, wherein it was in distinct con- trast to the offices for life which alone the feudal régime knew. This yearly feature of the offices was the consequence of their elective nature. In laying | hold of power, the city population entrusted it to_ delegates named by itself. Thus was affirmed the ~ principle of control at the same time as that of elec- tion. Municipal democracy, from its first attempts at organization, created the instruments necessary to its proper functioning and unhesitatingly set foot on the path which has been followed ev since. From Italy, the “consulate” soon spread to the 7R. Davidsohn, Geschichte von Florenz, Berlin, 1896- 1908, Vol. I, pp. 345, 350. MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 183 cities of Provence, evident proof of its perfect adaptation to the:needs which were felt by the mid+ dle class. Marseilles had consuls at the start of the twelfth century, or at the latest by 1128;° we find them next at Arles and at Nimes, until little by 8 ee et EE little they spread in the South of France as com- merce made headway from place to place, and with it, the political transformation which it brought in | early at the same time as in Italy, municipal institutions arose in the region of\Flanders and the North of France. There is nothing-surprising in this, since that country, like Lombardy, had\been the scene of vigorous commercial activity. Fortun- ately the sources of information here are more> abundant and more precise. They make it possible to follow fairly accurately the march of events. It is not the episcopal cities alone which here hold the stage. Side by side with them are to be-ob-— served other centers of activity, though it is with- in their walls that were formed those communes whose nature it is most important to consider. The oldest, and fortunately also the best known, 1s that Yy Cambrai. Posing the eleventh century the prosperity of é is city was well advanced. At the foot of the or- 8F. Kiener, Verfassungsgeschichte der Provence, p. 164. / a a } [ ! by 184 MEDIEVAL CITIES iginal town clustered a commercial suburb, which had been surrounded in 1070 by a wall. The popu- lation of this suburb endured with scant patience the authority of the bishop and his castellan. It prepared in secret for revolt when, in 1077, Bishop Gerard II had to absent himself to go receive in Germany the investiture at the hands of the Em- peror. He was hardly en route before, under the direction of the richest merchants of the town, the people arose, took possession of the gates and pro- claimed a commune. The poor, the artisans, and the weavers, in particular, launched themselves still more passionately into the fray when a re- former-priest called Ramihrdus denounced to them the bishop as a simoniac and inspired in the depths of their hearts the mysticism which, at that same era, was arousing the Lombard Patarenes. As in Italy, religious fervor lent its strength to the polit- ical demands and the commune was sworn in the dst of general enthusiasm.” _ This commune of Cambrai was the oldest of all ‘that are known north of the Alps. It seems to have been both a fighting organization and an instru- — ment of public safety. It was necessary, in fact, to await the return of the bishop and to prepare to — ° W. Reinecke, Geschichte der Stadt Cambrai, Marburg, 1896. be cope with, lishing amé g them the necessary solidarity, and it was this asociation, sworn to by the burghers on teristic ofthat first commune. ft Its sucess, however, was ohly ephemeral. The bishop, ypon receiving the news, hastened back ‘and suc¢eded in restoring his authority for the ‘time beitg/But the experiment of the Cambresians was nof long in being imitated./] he following years were marked by the establishment of com- ‘munes in the majority of the towns of Northern ‘France; at St. Quentin about 1080, at Beauvais ‘about 1099, at Noyon in 1108-1109, at Laon in 1115. During the initial period the middle class _and the bishops lived in a state of permanent hos- tility and, as it were, on the point of open war. Force alone was able to prevail between such ad- /versaries, equally convinced of their due rights. Ives of Chartres exhorted the bishops not to give ground and to consider as void the promises which, under the threat of violence, they had happened to make to the burghers.*° Guibert of Nogent, on his part, spoke with mingled contempt and fear of om H. L. Labande, Histoire de Beauvais, p. 55. i MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 185 - m. The need of unanimous action was. ‘imperative/An oath was exacted from all, estab- \\ the eve ofbattle, which was the essential charac- j / Acumen 186 MEDIEVAL CITIES those ““pestilential communes” which the serfs had set up against their lords, to escape avchority and to do away with the most legitimate nghts.™* In spite of all, however, the communes pre- vailed. Not only did they have the strength that numbers give, but the Monarchy whichin France, starting with the reign of Louis VI, wasbeginning to regain lost ground, interested itsel! in their cause; Just as the popes, in their conflict with the German emperors, had relied upon the Patarenes of Lombardy, so the Capetian monarchs of the twelfth century favored the efforts of the middle classes. // \ var Cb probably be no question of ascribing to them a political principle. At first glance their conduct seems full of contradictions. Yet it is none the less true that they evinced a general tendency to take the part of the towns. The clear interest of the Monarehy was to support the adversaries of high feudalism. Naturally, help was given when- ever it was possible to do so without becoming ob- ligated to these middle classes who in arising against their lords fought, to all intents and pur- poses, in the interests of royal prerogatives. To ac- cept the King as arbitrator of their quarrel was, for the parties in conflict, to recognize his sovereignty. 11 Guibert de Nogent, De vita sua, edit. G. Bourgin, p. 156. MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 187 _ The entry of the burghers upon the political scene had as a consequence the weakening of the con- tractual principle of the Feudal State to the ad- vantage of the principle of the authority of the Monarchial State. It was impossible that royalty should not take count of this and seize every chance to show its good will to the communes which, with- out intending to do so, labored so usefully for it. In specially designating by the name of “‘com- munes”’ those episcopal cities of the North of France where municipal institutions were the re- sult of insurrection, it is well to exaggerate neither their importance nor their originality. There is no reason for claiming that there was any essential difference between commune-cities and other cities. They were distinguished from one another only by | incidental characteristics. At bottom their nature _ was the same, and in reality all were equally com- | _ munes. In all of them, in fact, the burghers formed | a COrps, a uneversitas, a communitas, a communio, all the members of which, conjointly answerable# [te one another, constituted the inseparable parts. _ _ Whatever might be the origin of its enfranchtses~ ment, the city of the Middle Ages did not consist + ina simple collection of individuals; it was itself _an individual, but a collective individual, a legal | person. All that can be claimed in favor of ' ' € ¢ » the | eat we | i 188 MEDIEVAL CITIES communes s/récto sensu is a particular distinctive- ness of institutions, a clearly established separa- tion of the rights of the bishop and those of the burghers, and a. manifest preoccupation to safe- guard the rights of the latter by a powerful cor- porate organization. But all of that derived from the circumstances which presided over the birth of the communes. Although they preserved the traces of their insurrectionary composition, it does not necessarily follow that they should be assigned, for that reason, a special place in the ensemble of cities. It can even be observed that certain ones among them enjoyed prerogatives less extensive, a juris- diction and an autonomy less complete, than those of localities in which the commune was only the mark of the advent of a peaceful evolution. It is a manifest error to reserve for them, as is some- times, done, the name of “‘collective seigniories.” We shall see later that all fully developed cities were such seigniories. Violence, therefore, was far from being an essen- ial factor in the creation of municipal institutions. dn the majority of towns subject to the power of a lay prince, their growth was accomplished, in gen- eral, without need of recourse to force. And it is not. necessary to attribute this situation to the partic- ular good-will which the lay princes had shown iia ——$—$<————$ — MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 189 towards political liberty. /On the other hand all ,, the incentives which inspired the bishop to oppose the burghers carried no weight with the princes. /, They professed no hostility in regard to trade; on/ the contrary, they were experiencing its good ef- fects. It increased traffic in their territories, and by that very fact augm@ited the revenues from their tolls and the activity of their mints which _were forced to meet an increasing demand for cur- rency. Having no spot as capital and incessantly _ travelling about their demesnes, they lived in their towns only at rare intervals and therefore had no reason for quarelling with the burghers over the ad- ? ministration of them. It is quite characteristic that ‘Paris, the only city which before the end of the \, twelfth century could be considered a real capital,\ ° ‘did not succeed in obtaining an autonomous mu- — ‘nicipal constitution. But the’ interest ‘which im-, | pelled the King of France to keep~control of he customary residence was completely lacking with ‘the dukes and counts, as peripatetic as the King was sedentary. Lastly, they did not view altogether with displeasure the act of the burghers in seizing the power from the castellans who had become an hereditary class and whose strength was a cause of uneasiness to them. They had, in short, the same incentives as the King of France for looking with gf —_—- —— _ -- -_-- 190 MEDIEVAL CITIES favor upon these tendencies, since they weakened the status of their vassals. It is not on record, how- ever, that they systematically lent them their aid, They confined themselves, in general, to letting them alone and their attitude was almost always of benevolent neutrality. wast region offers a better chance for studying mu- nicipal origins in a purely lay environment than does F' anders¢In this great country, which stretched _-trom the shores of the North Sea and the Zealand Islands to the frontiers of Normandy, the episco al cities never rivalled in importance and wealth the commercial and industrial cities. Térouanne, the diocese of which comprised the watershed of the Yser, was and always remained a half-rural ham- let. Arras and Tournai, which extended their spir- _ itual jurisdiction over the rest of the territory, de- veloped to an appreciable extent only in the course of the twelfth century. On the contrary, Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, St. Omer, Lille and Douai, where were gathered together in the course of the tenth century active merchant colonies, give an unusual- ly clear picture of the birth of municipal institu- tions. Chey lend themselves to this so much the beta ter in that, all being organized in the same way and showing the same characteristics, the informa MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 191 tion of which each gives us its share-can be safely , combined into one general picture.” All these cities show, first, the characteristic fea- _ ture of having been organized around a central | burg which was, so to speak, their nucleus. At the foot of this burg was grouped a portus, or ‘new | burg,” populated by merchants to whose numbers | were soon added artisans, either free or serf, and where, after the eleventh century, the textile in- | dustry came to be concentrated. Over the burg as over the portus extended the authority of the cas- ) tellan. More or less important parcels of land oc- Bpied by the immigrant population belonged to the abbeys, others to the Count of Flanders. A trib- _unal of aldermen had its seat in the burg under the | presidency of the castellan. This tribunal had in other respects no competency relative to the city. Its jurisdiction extended over all the castellany of which the burg was the center, and the members who composed it resided in that same castellany _and came to the burg only on the days of hearings. For ecclesiastical jurisdiction, to which were amen- able a number of matters, it was necessary to go to _the episcopal court of the diocese. 12 H. Pirenne, “Tes villes flamandes avant le XII° siécle,” Revue de l'Est et du Nord, 1905, Vol. I, p.9; Belgian Democracy, p. 64; Histoire de Belgique, 4th edit., Vol. I, p. 170. 192 MEDIEVAL CITIES A variety of obligations weighed upon the land . and the inhabitants, whether of the burg or of the portus: ground rents, prestations in money or in kind destined for the upkeep of the knights charged with the defence of the burg, and tolls levied on all merchandise brought by land or water. 7 All this was of long standing, created at the height of the demesnial and feudal régime, and was in no way adapted to the new needs of the mer- chant population. Not being made for it, the or- ganization which had its seat in the burg not only rendered no service but on the contrary interfered with activities. The survivals of the past bore down with all their weight upon the needs of the present. Obviously, for reasons which have been given above and to which it is unnecessary to return, the middle class felt far from content and exacted the reforms necessary to their free expansion. In these reforms it devolved upon them to take the initiative, for they could not rely on either the castellans, the monasteries, or the barons whoul | lands they occupied, to bring them about. But it 3 was also necessary, in the midst of a population so heterogeneous as that of the portws, for a group of © men to take control of the mass and to Dae enough A power and prestige to give it directio Hohe mer-:_ chants, in the first half of the oe century, — MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 193 resolutely assumed this role. Not only did they _ constitute the wealthiest element in each town, the most active and the most desirous of change, but they had in addition the strength that union gives. The needs of commerce early impelled them, as has been seen above, to organize in confraternities called gilds or hanses—autonomous corporations in- dependent of all authority and in which their will alone made the law. Freely elected chiefs, “deans” or “counts of the hanse” (Dekanen, Hansgrafen), supervised the maintenance of a voluntarily ac- cepted discipline. At regular intervals the col- leagues assembled to drink and deliberate over _ their interests; a treasury, supported by their con- tributions, provided for the needs of the society; a community house (Gé/dhalle) served as the place of their meetings. Such was the Gild of St. Omer, about 1050, and it may be assumed from this “instance that very probably similar associations existed at the same period in all the merchant colonies of Flanders.” 13 G, Espinas and H. Pirenne, “Les coutumes de la gilde mar- chande de Saint Omer,” Le Moyen-dge, 1901, p. 196; H. Pirenne, “La hanse flamande de Londres,” Bulletin de l’ Academie Royale de Belgique, Classe des lettres, 1899, p. 65. For the réle played by the gilds in England, see the fundamental work of Charles Gross, The Gild Merchant, Oxford 1890. See also K. Hegel, Stadte und Gilden. der germanischen Volker, Leipzig, 1891.; H. Van der Linden, Les gildes marchandes dans les Pays-Bas 2 ae a eat Ee 194 MEDIEVAL CITIES The prosperity of trade was so intimately bound | up with the organization of the towns in which it had located that the members of the gild were almost automatically charged with making pro- vision for the needs that were most pressing. The castellans had no reason to restrain them from meeting, through their own resources, those emer- gencies that were clearly apparent. They permitted them to “extemporize,”’ as it were, in official com- munal administration. At St. Omer an arrange-. ment made between the gild and the castellan, Wulfric Rabel (1072-1083), permitted the for- mer to attend to the cases of the burghers. Thus, without having any legal warrant therefor, the merchant association devoted itself of its own ac-— cord to the organization and the management of the nascent city. It made up for the impotence of public power. At St. Omer the gild devoted a part of its revenues to the construction of defence works and to the maintenance of the streets. There is no doubt but that other Flemish towns, its neighbors, did the same. The name of ‘“‘counts of the Hanse”? which the treasurers of the city of Lille kept all through the Middle Ages is sufficient proof, in the absence of other records, that there also the chiefs. au Movyen-adge, Ghent, 1890; C. Koehne, Das Hansgrafenamt, | Berlin, 1893. ~ MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 195 of the voluntary corporation of merchants drew upon the treasury of the gild for the benefit of their . fellow citizens. At Audenarde the name of Hans- graf was borne up to the fourteenth century by a “magistrate of the commune. At Tournai, as late as the thirteenth century, city finances were placed under the control of the Charité St. Christophe, that is to say of the merchant gild. At Bruges the contributions of the “brothers of the hanse” sup- ported the municipal treasury up until its disap- _ pearance at the time of the democratic revolution ¢ : | of the fourteenth century. he result of all this, manifestly, was that the \y ‘gilds were, in the region of Flanders, the initiators | of city autonomy. Of their own accord they charged © themselves with a task which no one else had been: “able to carry out. Officially they had no right to act as they did; their intervention is to be explained) ‘solely by the cohesion which existed among their _ members, by the influence their group enjoyed, by the resources they disbursed, and finally by the un- derstanding they had of the collective needs of the | middle-class population. It can be stated, without exaggerating, that in the course of the eleventh / | century the chiefs of the gild performed, de facto, the functions of communal magistrates in every town. /) jf 2 nearer Some a 196 MEDIEVAL CITIES They were doubtless the ones, also, who led the Counts of Flanders to take an interest in the de- velopment and the prosperity of the towns. In 1043 Baldwin IV obtained from the monks of St. Omer the concession on the basis of which the burghers built their church. At the beginning of the reign of Robert the Friesian (1071-1093), exemp- tions from tolls, grants of land, privileges limiting the episcopal jurisdiction or the requirements of military service were granted in considerable num- ber to the cities then in process of formation. Rob- ert of Jerusalem favored the city of Aire with “‘lib- erties” and exempted, in 1111, the burghers of jres from the judiciary duel. /The result of all this was that little by little the — / ‘middle class stood out as a distinct and privileged -. group in the midst of the population of the country. i From a simple social group given over to the car- \' rying on of commerce and industry, it was trans- _ “formed into a legal group, recognized as such by ~ the princely power. And out of that legal status — itself. was to come, necessarily, the granting of an _ independent legal organization./ The new law ~ needed as its organ a new tribu Al. The old alder-— manic district courts, sitting in the burgs and administering justice in accordance with a cus-_ tom that had become archaic and incapable of ac- pale, MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 197 _ commodating its rigid formalism to the needs of a community for which it had not been created, had to give way to courts whose members, recruited _ from among the burghers, were able to render them a justice adequate to their desires and conforming _ to their aspirations—a justice, in fine, which was their justice. It is impossible to say exactly when _ this important development took place. The oldest - reference in Flanders to an aldermanic court,—that is to say of such a court peculiar to one city,— _ dates back to the year 1111 and has to do with _ Arras. But there is nothing to prevent the assump- _ tion that aldermanic courts of this kind must have _ already existed at the same period in the more im- _ portant localities such as Ghent, Bruges or Ypres. Whatever may have been the case elsewhere, the _ beginning of the twelfth century saw this decided _ innovation come to pass in all the cities of Flan- _ ders. The disturbances which followed the assas- sination of Count Charles the Good, in 1127, _ permitted the burghers to realize in full their po- litical programme. The pretenders to the county, William of Normandy, and later Thierry of Alsace, in order to rally them to their cause conceded to them the demands they addressed. The charter granted to.St, Omer in 1127. may be considered as the point of departure of the polit- a cet 198 MEDIEVAL CITIES ical programme of the burghers of Flanders.” It recognized the city as a distinct legal territory, pro- vided with a special law common to all inhabitants, with special aldermanic courts and a full | com- munal autonomy. Other charters in the course of the twelfth century ratified similar grants to all the principal cities of the county. Their statys was thereafter secured and sanctioned by written warrants. On the other hand care must be taken not to at- eal to the city charters an exaggerated import- ance.’® Neither in Flanders nor in any other region of Europe did they embrace the whole of the city law. They limited themselves to fixing the prin- cipal outlines, to formulating some of the essen- tial principles, to settling a few particularly im- portant conflicts. Most of the time they were the product of special circumstances and they took count only of matters which were under debate at the time they were drawn up. They cannot be con- sidered as the result of systematic planning and legislative deliberation similar to that out of which © are born, for example, modern constitutions. If the middle classes have kept watch over them through-.- 14 A. Giry, Histoire de la ville de St. Omer, Paris, 1877, p. 371. 15 N. P. Ottokar, Opiti po istorii franzouskich gorodov, Perm, 1919. NS SO MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 199 out the centuries, with an extraordinary solicitude, preserving them under triple lock in chests of iron and surrounding them with a quasi-superstitious respect, it is because they considered them as the palladium of their liberty. It is because they per- mitted them, in case of violation, to justify their r_bellion, but it is not because they included the whole of their rights. They were not, so to speak, more than the framework of the latter. Round _ about their stipulations existed and continued un- _ceasingly to develop a thick vegetation of rights, usages, and unwritten but none the less indispens- _ able privileges. This is so true that a number of charters themselves foresaw and recognized in ad- vance the further development of city law. The chronicler Galbert informs us that the Count of _ Flanders accorded to the burghers of St. Omer in 1127: “ut die in diem consuetudinarias leges suas ' corrigerent, ’—that is to say, the power of correct- _ ing from day to day their municipal laws." There was, therefore, more in the law of the city than what was contained in the terms of the charters. They specified merely fragments of it. They were full of gaps; they were concerned with neither order nor system. We need not expect to find in 16 Galbert de Bruges, Histoire du meurtre de Charles le Bor, Comte de Flandre, edit. H. Pirenne, Paris, 1891, p. 87. 200 MEDIEVAL CITIES them the fundamental principles out of which came later evolutions, as for example, Roman law evolved from the law of the Twelve Tables. It is possible, however, in examining their prin- ciples and supplementing one by another, to char- acterise in its general traits the city law of the Mid- dle Ages as it developed in the course of the twelfth century in the different regions of Western Europe. There is no need to take account, since we are seek- ing only to trace the general outline, either of the _ difference in States or even in nations. City law was “a phenomenon of the same nature as, for example, that of feudalism. It was the consequence of a so- cial and economic situation common to all peo- ples. ‘Taking it by regions, there are of course nu- merous differences in detail. But at bottom it was everywhere the same and it is solely concerning this pean basis that we shall deal in the follow- (AY KSA _ appeared within its walls. Whatever might be the ing paragraphs. The first thing which should be considered is the status of the individual as it was when city law was — definitely evolved. That status was one of freedom: b It is anecessary and universal attribute of the mid- 2 dle class. Each city established a “franchise” in ) this respect. Every vestige of rural serfdom’ dis- differences and even the contrasts which wealth set 4 MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 201 _ up between men, all were equal as far as civil status | _ was concerned. “The air of the city makes free,” says the German proverb (Die Stadtluft macht | frez), and this truth held good in every clime. Free- 1 i | edon-of old, used to be the monopoly of a privi- leged class. By means of the cities it again took _ its place in society as a natural attribute fi the cit- _izen. Hereafter it was enough to reside on city soil | to acquire it. Every serf who had lived for a year and a day within the city limits had it by definite tight: the statute of limitations abolished all rights | which his lord lord exercised over his person and chat- tels._ Birth meant little. Whatever might be the mark with which it nah his cradle, it vanished in the atmosphere of the city. ? | This freedom, which at the beginning only mer-‘ chants had enjoyed de facto, was now the common _ right of all the burghers de jure. j stigmatized the infant in If there could still exist, here tof there among | them, a few serfs, these latter were not members of the city population. They were hereditary servitors of the abbeys or of the seigniories which retained in the cities bits of land not subject to city law and where the old state of things was prolonged. urgher and freeman had become synonymous Haw? reedom, in the Middle Ages, was an at- tribute as inseparable from the rank of citizen of 202 MEDIEVAL CITIES a city as it is in our day of that of the citizen of a State. / JN ith freedom of person there went on 7 ¢ footing, in the city, the freedom of the land. merchant community, land, in fact, could nét re- main immobile and be kept out of commerce by un- wieldy and diverse laws that prevented its free conveyance and kept it from serving as a means of credit and acquiring capital value. This was the more inevitable in that land, within the city, changed its nature—it became ground for build- V3 ing. It was rapidly covered with houses, crowded one against the other, and i acreased in value in pro- portion as they multipli /Thus it automatically came about that the owner of a house acquired in the course of time the ownership, or at the least possession, of the soil upon which it was built Everywhere the old demesnial land was rand formed into “‘censal estate,” or ‘‘censal allodium.” / City hold thus became free hold. He who occupied it was not bound by more than the land taxes due to the owner of the land,,when he did not happen to be himself the owner: / He could freely transfer it, convey it, mortgage it and make it serve as se- curity for capital he might borrow, In selling a _ mortgage on his house, the burgher’ procured the _ liquid capital he needed; in buying a mortgage on _ MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS ~ 203 _ the house of another, he assured himself of an in- come proportionate to the sum expended. He _ placed, as we would say today, his money out at interest. Compared to the old feudal or demesnial _ tenures, tenure in city law—tenure in Weichbild | or Burgrecht as they called it in Germany, or | bourgage in France—thus showed a well-marked } individuality. | _ Subject to new economic conditions, city land : ended by acquiring a new law, suited to its nature. The old land-courts probably did not abruptly dis- — | appear. The enfranchisement of the soil did not _ have as consequence the spoliation of the old pro- _prietors. Very often they kept, when it was not bought back from them, portions of the land of _ which they had been lords. But the seigniory which _ they still exercised over them no longer carried _ _ with it the personal dependence of the tenants. i—™ | City law not only did away with personal servi- & and restrictions on land, but also caused the; i _ disappearance of the seigniorial rights and | / | — —— claims which interfered with the activity of com merce and eg de he market-tolls (teloneum) which were such ahandicap to the free circulation of goods were particularly odious to the burghers, and they early made the effort to get rid of them. /, The chronicler Galbert shows that this was, in’ 204 # MEDIEVAL CITIES Flanders in 1127, one of their chief preoccupa- tions. It was because the pretender, William of Normandy, did not keep his promise in this par- ticular that they rose against him and called Thier- ry of Alsace. In the course of the twelfth century, everywhere, voluntarily or under compulsion, the | market-tolls were modified. Here, they were bought off by means of an annual fee; there, the manner of levying them was changed. In almost every case they were placed under the supervision, and sub- ject to the jurisdiction, of the city authorities. It was the city’s magistrates who henceforth took charge of supervising trade and who took the place of the castellans and the old demesnial function- aries in the standardization of weights and meas- ures and in the judicial administration of markets and industry generally. If the market-tolls were modified in passing un- der the authority of the city, it was otherwise with: the other seigniorial rights which, incompatible with the free functioning of the life of the city, were inevitably condemned to disappear altogether. Mention might be made of the surviving charac- teristics of the agricultural era which had been left impressed on the physiognomy of the city: com- | mon ovens and mills, at which the seigneur com-— pelled the inhabitants to grind their wheat and MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS * 205. bake their bread; monopolies of every sort, by vir- tue of which he enjoyed the privilege of selling at certain periods, without competition, the wine from his vineyards or the meat from his cattle; the / right of shelter, which imposed upon the burghers the obligation of furnishing him lodging and sub- Sistence during his stays in the city; the right of fequisition, by which he appropriated to his service the boats or the horses of the inhabitants; the right of summons to arms, imposing the obligation of following him to war; customs of every sort and every origin which had become oppressive and vex- atious because they had long since become useless, such as that which forbade the building of bridges over the water courses or that which compelled the inhabitants to assist in the maintenance of the knights composing the garrison of the “old burg.” Of all this there remained, at the end of the twelfth century, hardly more than the memory. The lords, after having tried resistance, finished by giving! way. They realized, in the course of time, that their manifest interest commanded them not to hinder the development of the cities, in order to preserve a few meagre revenues, but to favor it by doing away with the obstacles that stood in its path. They began by taking count of the incompatibility | of these old prestations with the new state of things, 206 © MEDIEVAL CITIES and they ended by ae Tae them as erings and extortions.’ ike the status of individuals, the pee of e land, and the fiscal system, the fundamental character of the law itself underwent a transforma- tion in the cities. The complicated and formalistie procedure, the compurgations, the ordeals, the ju- diciary duel—all these crude methods of proof. which too often let chance or sheer luek decide the issue of a trial, were not long, in their turn, in adapting themselves to the new conditions of a city environment. The old rigid forms of contract, which custom had established, disappeared as rap- idly as economic life became more complicated and. active. [he judiciary duel evidently could not be. long retained in the midst of a population of mer chants and artisans. Proof through witnesses was likewise early substituted in place of proof through compurgators, before the city magistracy bench, The Wergild, the old blood-price, gave way to a system of fines and corporal punishments. Finally, legal delays, originally so long, were considerably reduced. It was not only procedure that was modifies The very content of the law evolved in parallel fashion. In questions of marriage, succession, liens, debts, mortgages, and particularly i in questions of Se ee % MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS % 207 business law, a whole new body of legislation was coming into being in the cities, and the jurispru- dence of their tribunals created a civil practice, increasingly amplified and exact. City law was characterised no less from the criminal point of view than from the civil. In such ‘aggregations as the cities were, of men from every station in life, in this environment where abounded wanderers, yagabonds and adventurers, a rigorous discipline was necessary to the maintenance of se- curity. It was equally necessary for intimidating the thieves and bandits who, in every civilization, ‘are drawn towards commercial centers. This is so ‘true that as early as the Carolingian era the towns, within the walls of which the wealthy class sought ‘shelter, seemed to enjoy a special “peace.’’*’ This is that same word “peace” which was used in the ‘twelfth century to designate the criminal law of ‘decapitation, castration, amputation of limbs. It applied in all its rigor the /ex taléonis: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Its evident purpose was \ to repress derelictions, through terror:/All who en- f 17 Capitularia regum Francorum, edit. Boretiuy, Vol. II, p. 405. the'city. his city“peace was a law of exception, more Se vere, more harsh, than that of the country districts. \ It was prodigal of corporal punishments: hanging, | tow * 208 # MEDIEVAL CITIES “ tered the gates of the city, whether nobles, freemen » or burghers, were equally subject to it. Under it the _ city was, so to speak, in a permanent state of siege. _ But in it the city found a potent instrument of | unification, because it was superimposed upon the jurisdictions and seigniories which shared the soil; it forced its pitiless regulation on all. More than community of interests and residence, it contrib- uted to make uniform the status of all the inhab-_ itants located within the city walls and to create the middle class. The burghers were essentially a eroup of homines pacis—men of the peace. The | peace of the city (pax véllae) was at the same time > the law of the city (Jex villae). The emblems which symbolized the jurisdiction and the autono- . my of the city were above all emblems of peace: such as were, for example, the cross or the sym- bolic set of stone steps in the market-place, the | belfries (Bergfried), the towers of which arose from the heart of the cities of the Netherlands and Northern France, and the statues of Roland, which, wete’so numerous in Northern Germany. | Uf By virtue of the peace with which it was en-_ \ (dowed, the city formed a distinct legal district. The | legal principle of territoriality carried with it that of personality. Equally subject to the same penal law, the burghers inevitably shared, sooner or later, MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 209 in the same civil law. The practice of the city was extended up to the limits of the peace and the city formed, within the circumference of its ramparts, a community of law. | Ut he peace, on the other hand, contributed large (; in making the city a commune. It had, in effect, \ the oath as its sanction. It supposed a conjuratio of all the city population. And the oath taken by the burgher was not confined to a simple promise of obedience to municipal authority. It involved strict obligations and imposed _,a strict duty to maintain and respect the peace! Every juratus— that is to say, every burgher sworn—was obliged _ to lend,a helping hand to any burgher calling for help. Thus the peace created, among all its mem-| bers, a permanent solidarity. Hence the term “brothers” by which they were sometimes desig- nated, or the word amécitia used at Lille, for ex- -ample, as synonym for pax. And since the peace _ covered the whole city population, the latter, there- _ fore, was a commune. The very names which the _ municipal magistrates bore in a number of places, _—“warders of the peace” at Verdun, “safeguard of friendship” at Lille, “jurors of the peace” at * Valenciennes, Cambrai and many other cities,— make it easy to see the close relationship between _ the peace and the commune. en 210 MEDIEVAL CITIES Other causes naturally contributed to the birth | of city communes. The most potent among them | was the need, early felt by the burghers, of a tax “system. Funds were necessary for public works of the most pressing nature, and, above all, for the construction of the city wall. Everywhere the need of building this protecting rampart was the point of departure for city finances. In the cities of the region of Liége the communal tax bore the charac- teristic name of firmétas (‘firmness’). At Angers the oldest municipal accounts were those of the “Clouaison, fortification et emparement’ of the city. Elsewhere part of the fines were appropriated ad opus castr?,—for the improvement of the forti- fications. Taxes, naturally, provided the means of secur- ing the needed resources. To subject the taxpayers thereto, recourse had to be had to compulsion. | Everyone was obliged to participate according to | his means, in the expenses incurred in the interests 5 | of all. Whoever refused to support the charges which they involved was barred from the city. The _ latter was therefore a commune, an obligatory as- — sociation, a moral personality. According to the phrase of Beaumanoir, it formed a “‘compaignie, laquelle ne pot partir ne deseurer, angois convient qu'elle tiegne, voillent les parties ou non qui en la } | i | MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS ph isi Com paignie sont.’ That is to say, a society which could not be dissolved, but which must needs exist independently of the wishes of its members.” ei Se hus the city of the Middle Ages was simul- i taneously a legal district and a commune. / There remain to be examined the agencies by which were met the demands its nature imposed. First of all, inasmuch as it was an independent legal district, it by all means had to have its own jurisdiction. City law being bounded by the city walls, in contrast to the regional law, the law of without, a special tribunal had to be charged with applying it and the burghers had to have, in conse- quence, the assurance of their privileged status. This is a clause which is lacking in hardly any mu- nicipal charter: that the burghers could be a only by their own magistrates. The latter, as a nec- essary consequence, were recruited from their midst. It was essential that they be members of the com- mune and naturally the latter, to a greater or less degree, took part in their nomination. Here, it had the right of designating them to the seigneur; there, the more liberal system of election was applied; _ still elsewhere, recourse was had to complicated formalities: elections in several steps, drawing by ‘ 18 Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, edit. Salmon, Vol. I, Xo MEDIEVAL CITIES lot, and so on, which manifestly had for their pur- pose the obviating of bribery and corruption. Most often, the president of the tribunal (mayor, bailiff, | etc.) was an officer of the seigneur’s. It happened, nevertheless, that the city had something to say in his choosing. It had in every case an assurance, in the oath which he must take to respect and defend its privileges. By the beginning of the twelfth century, and in some cases even by the end of the eleventh, a few cities were already in possession of their special tribunal. In Italy, in the South of France, in sev- eral parts of Germany, its members bore the name of “consuls.” In the Netherlands and in Northern France they were called échevins, or aldermen. In still other places they were designated as jures, or jurors. In accordance with the locality, the extent of the jurisdiction they exercised also varied quite noticeably. They did not have it everywhere in its entirety. It frequently happened that the seigneur reserved to himself certain special cases. But these — local differences are of little importance. The es- sential thing is that every city, by the very fact — that it was recognized as a legal district, had its — own judges. Their competency was set by the law of the city and limited to the territory in which it applied. Sometimes in place of a single body of — MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 213 magistrates there were several of them, each hav- ing its own special attributes. In many cities, and particularly in the episcopal cities where municipal institutions were the result of insurrection, were to be seen, side by side with the aldermen over whom the seigneur had more or less influence, a body of jurors presiding over matters of peace and special- ly competent in cases arising out of the communal statutes. But it is impossible to go into details here; it will suffice to have indicated the general evolution, without regard to its innumerable modifications. In its status as a commune, the city was admin- istered by a council (consélium, curia, etc.). This council sometimes coincided with the tribunal, and the same individuals were at once both judges and administrators for the middle class. Most often, however, it had its own individuality. Its mem- bers received their authority from the commune. They were its delegates, but it did not abdicate entirely in their favor. Nominated for a very short time, they could not usurp the power that was en- trusted to them. Not until later, when the consti- tution of the city had been developed and when administration had become complicated, did they form a real assembly upon which the influence of the people made itself felt but feebly. At the start B14 MEDIEVAL CITIES it was quite otherwise. The original jurors, charged with watching over the public weal, were only rep- resentatives very similar to thé selectmen of New England towns, mere executors of the collective will. The proof of this lies in the fact that at first they lacked one of the fundamental characteristics of every organized body—a central authority, a president. The ““burgomasters” and the “mayors” of the communes were, in fact, of relatively recent creation. [hey did not exist much before the thir- teenth century. They belong to an era in which the character of institutions was tending to be modi- fied, and in which the need of a greater centraliza- tionand a more independent power was being felt. ) “Phe council carried on the routine administra- YA on. It had charge of finances, commerce, and in- dustry. It ordered and supervised public works, organized the provisioning of the city, regulated the equipment and the deportment of the communal army, founded schools for children, provided for _ the upkeep of almshouses for the old and the poor.g The statutes it decreed formed a genuine body off | municipal legislation of which there existed, north of the Alps, scarcely any prior to the thirteenth century. But a close study of these statutes leads _ to the conviction that they merely developed and | clarified an older form of government. MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 215 Nowhere, perhaps, was the spirit of innovation and the practical judgment of the middle class more highly manifest than in the realm of admin- istration.” The work done there seems the more noteworthy in that it was an original creation. Nothing in the prior state of things could have served as a model for it, since the needs for which it provided were new needs. This is made clear by a comparison, for example, of the financial sys- tem of the feudal era with that which the city com- -munes instituted. In the first, taxes were merely a fiscal prestation, an established and perpetual obli- gation taking no count of the means of the tax- | payer, bearing down only on the people, and the + proceeds of which were added to the demesnial re- sources of the prince or seigneur who collected them, without any part of them being directly ap- propriated for the public interest. ‘The second, on the contrary, recognized neither exceptions nor privileges. All burghers, enjoying equally the ad- vantages of the commune, were equally obligated to contribute towards the expenses. The quota of each was in proportion to his means. At the start 19 The monumental work of G. Espinas, La vie urbaine de Douai au Movyen-dge, Paris, 1913, 4 vols., should be consulted to get an idea of the wealth of city regulation in this respect. 216 MEDIEVAL CITIES it was generally calculated on the basis of income. — Many cities kept consistently to this practice up — : to the end of the Middle Ages. Others substituted. 4 for it the excise,—that is to say, the indirect tax | levied on articles of consumption and especially on C foodstuffs,—in such a way that the rich and the ~ poor were taxed according to their expenditures. — 1 But this city-excise was in no way connected with the old market-tolls. It was as flexible as the latter — were strict, as variable in accordance with the cir- _ cumstances or the needs of the public as the latter were immutable. But whatever might be the form _ they took, the proceeds of these taxes Ly entirely © devoted to the needs of the commune,/By the end _ of the twelfth century, a fiscal system had been developed and at this era can be discovered the first _ _ traces of municipal accounts. The provisioning of the city and the regulating — of commerce and industry testify more clearly still to the burghers’ aptitude for solving the social and economic problems which their conditions of exist- — ence put up to them. They had to provide for the - subsistence of a sizeable population, obliged to get — its food-supply from without; to protect their ~ workmen from foreign competition; to make cer-_ tain of their supply of raw materials and to insure MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 217 the exporting of their manufactures. They accom- plished it by a system of regulation so marvellous- ly adapted to its purpose that it may be considered a masterpiece of its kind. The city economy was worthy of the Gothic architecture with which it was contemporary. It created with complete thor- Ry it created ex nihtlo—a social legislation more complete than that of any other period in history, including our own a doing away with the middlemen between buyér and seller, it assured to the burgher the bene- fit of a low cost of living; it ruthlessly pursued fraud, protected the worker from competition and exploitation, regulated his labor and his wage, watched over his health, provided for apprentice- ship, forbade woman- and child-labor, and at the same time succeeded in keeping in its own hands the monopoly of furnishing the neighboring coun- try with its products and in opening up distant markets for its trade. All this would have been impossible if the civic spirit of the burghers had not been equal to the tasks that were laid upon them. It is necessary, in fact, to go back to antiquity to find as much devo- tion to the public good as that of which they had given proof. Unus subveniet alteri tamquam fratré oughness—and, it may well be sai 4 218 MEDIEVAL CITIES swo—‘‘let each help the other like a brother’— says a Flemish charter of the twelfth century,” and these words were actually a reality. As early | as the twelfth century the merchants were expend- | ing a good part of their profits for the benefit of -, their fellow citizens,—building churches, founding hospitals, buying off the market-tolls. The love lof gain was allied, in them, with local patriotism. Every man was proud of his city and spontane- ously devoted himself to its prosperity. This was because, in reality, each individual life depended directly Upony the collective life of the municipal associationé Ba he commune of the Middle Ages had, in fact, all the essential attributes which the State | exercises today. It guaranteed to all its members ‘the security of his person and of his charrelafom side of it he was in a hostile world, surrounded by perils and exposed to every risk. In it alone did he have a shelter, and for it he felt a gratitude which bordered upon love. He was ready to devote him- self to its defence, just as he was always ready to bedeck it and make it more beautiful than its neigh- bors: Those magnificent cathedrals which the thir- teenth century saw erected would not have been 20 Map of the city of Aire in 1188, in L. A. Warnkoenig, Flan- drische Staats- und Rechtsgeschichte, Tubingen, Baer: Vol. III, appendix, p. 22. MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 219 conceivable without the joyous alacrity with which the burghers contributed, by gifts, to their con- struction. They not only were houses of God; they also glorified the city of which they were the great- est ornament and which their majestic towers ad- vertised afar. They were for the cities of the Mid- dle Ages what temples were for those of antiquity. To the ardor of local patriotism corresponded its exclusivism. From the very fact that each city constituted a State, cities saw in one another only rivals or enemies. They could not rise above the — sphere of their own interests. They were self-cen- tered, and the feeling which they bore for their neighbors resembles very closely, within narrower limits, the nationalism of our day. The civic spirit which animated them was singularly egoistic. They jealously reserved to themselves the liberties they enjoyed within their walls. The peasants who é dwelt round about them did not seem to them to be * compatriots at all. They thought only of profitably exploiting them. With all their might they stood on guard to prevent the peasants from freeing themselves from the industrial system of which the cities had a monopoly. The task of provisioning these cities was likewise imposed upon the peas- ants, who were subjected to a tyrannical protec- torate whenever it was possible to do so, as in Tus- cany, for example, where Florence subjected to its yoke all the surrounding countryside. We are, however, toughing here upon events | which were not if ara with all their conse- quences until the beginning of the thirteenth cen- tury. It will suffice to have briefly sketched a ten- dency which, in the period of origins, was hardly more than a suggestion of what was to come. Our intention has been merely to define the city of the Middle Ages after having depicted its origin. Fur- thermore, it has been possible to note only its prin- cipal traits. The physiognomy which has been out- lined resembles those countenances obtained by photographing portraits superimposed one on the other. The contours of it give a countenance com- — mon to all and belonging to none of them. | \\If we wished, in ending this too-long chapter, | yates up its essential points in one phrase, per- — haps it would be possible to say that the city of the { Middle Ages, as it existed in the twelfth century, | was a commercial and industrial commune living _ in the shelter of a fortified enceinte and enjoying a law, an administration and a jurispdudence of exception which made of it a collective, privileged — ersonality. \\ *% / 220 MEDIEVAL CITIES | Chapter VIII Cities and European Civilization ; HE birth of cities marked the beginning of a new era in the internal history of Western Europe. Until then, society had recognized only two active orders: the clergy and the nobility. In ™ taking its place beside them, the middle class rounded the social order out or, rather, gave the finishing touch thereto. Thenceforth its composi- tion was not to change; it had all its constituent elements, and the modifications which it was to undergo in the course of centuries were, strictly speaking, nothing more than different combina- tions in the alloy. _ Like the clergy and like the nobility, the middle © class was itself a privileged order. It formed a dis- tinct legal group and the special law it enjoyed isolated it from the mass of the rural inhabitants which continued to. make up the immense majority of the population. Indeed, as has already been seen, it was obliged to preserve intact its excep- tional status and to reserve to itself the benefits arising therefrom. Freedom, as the middle class conceived it, was a monopoly. Nothing was less liberal than the caste idea which was the cause of ' gneur. Upon the suspension of commerce, nothing impelled him to ask of the soil a surplus which it 222 MEDIEVAL CITIES its strength until it became, at the end of the Mid- dle Ages, a cause of weakness. Nevertheless to that — middle class was reserved the mission of spreading the idea of liberty far and wide and of becoming, without having consciously desired to be, the means of the gradual enfranchisement of the rural classes. The sole fact of its existence was due, indeed, to have an immediate effect upon these latter and, little by little, to attenuate the contrast which at” the start separated them from it. In vain it strove — to keep them under its influence, to refuse them a share in its privileges, to exclude them from en- — gaging in trade and industry. It had not the power ~ to“arrest an evolution of which it was the cause y and which it could not suppress save by itself i vanishing. t For the formation of the city groups disturbed — at once the economic organization of the country. districts. Production, as it was there carried on, had served until then merely to support the life of the peasant and supply the prestations due to his sei- would have been impossible for him to get rid of, since he no longer had outside markets to call upon. He was content to provide for his daily bread, cer- tain of the morrow and longing for no ameliora- CITIES AND CIVILIZATION 223 tion of his lot, since he could not conceive the pos- sibility of it. The small markets of the towns and the burgs were too insignificant and their demand was too regular to rouse him enough to get out of . his rut and intensify his labor. But suddenly these markets sprang into new life. The number of buy- ers was multiplied, and all at once he had the as- surance of being able to sell the produce he brought to them. It was only natural for him to have prof- ited from an opportunity as favorable as this. It depended on himself alone to sell, if he produced enough, and forthwith he began to till the lands which hitherto he had let lie fallow. His work took on a new significance; it brought him profits, the chance of thrift and of an existence which became more comfortable as it became more active. The situation was still more favorable in that the sur- plus revenues from the soil belonged to him in his own right. The claims of the seigneur were fixed by demesnial custom at an immutable rate, so that the increase in the income from the land benefited only the tenant. /But the seigneur himself had a chance to profit from the new situation wherein the development of the cities placed the country districts. He had “enormous reserves of uncultivated land, woods, _heaths, marshes and fens. Nothing could be simpler ee 224 MEDIEVAL CITIES than to put them under cultivation and through them to profit from these new outlets which were becoming more and more exigent and remunerative as the towns grew in size and multiplied in num- ber, The increase in population would furnish the necessary hands for the work of clearing and drain- ing. It was enough to call for men; they would not fail to show ups) By the end of the reveal century the move- — ment was already manifest in its full force. Mon- ih asteries and local princes thenceforth were busy ~ transforming the sterile parts of their demesnes in- j to revenue-producing land. The area of cultivated | land which, since the end of the Roman Empire, ~ / had not been increased, kept growing continually ' ereater. Forests were cleared. The Cistercian Or- i der, founded in 1098, followed this new path from its very origin. Instead of adopting for its lands — the old demésnial organization, it intelligently — adapted itself to the new order of things. It adopt- ~ ed the principle of farming on a big scale and, de- — pending upon the region, gave itself over to the — most remunerative form of production. In Flan- ders, where the needs of the towns were greater — since they themselves were richer, it engaged in rais- — ing cattle. In England, it devoted itself particular- N yw CITIES AND CIVILIZATION 225 ly to the sale of wool, which the same cities of Flanders consumed in greater and greater quantity. Meanwhile, on all sides, the seigneurs, both lay and ecclesiastic, were founding “new” towns. So was called a village established on virgin soil, the occupants of which received plots of land in return for an annual rental. But these new towns, the number of which continued to grow in the course of the twelfth century, were at the same time free towns. For in order to attract the farmers the sei- eneur promised them exemption from the taxes _which bore down upon the serfs. In general, he re- served to himself only jurisdiction over them; he abolished in their favor the old claims which still existed in the demesnial organization. The charter of Lorris (1155) in the Gatinais, that of Beau- mont in Champagne (1182), that of Priches in the Hainault (1158) present particularly interesting _ types of charters of the new towns, which were also ~ to be found everywhere in neighboring countries. - That of Breteuil in Normandy, which was taken over in the course of the twelfth century by a num- ber of localities in England, Wales, and even Ire- land, was of the same nature. _4- Thus a new type of peasant appeared, quite dif- fear from the old. The latter had serfdom as a oe | 226 MEDIEVAL CITIES / characteristic; the former enjoyed freedom. And ~ _ this freedom, the cause of which was the economic disturbance communicated by the towns to the or- ganization of the country districts, was itself _ copied after that of the cities. The inhabitants of the new towns were, strictly speaking, rural bur- ~ ghers. They even bore, in a good number of char- ters, the name of burgenses. They received a legal constitution and a local autonomy which was mani- — festly borrowed from city institutions, so much so — that it may be said that the latter went beyond the circumference of their walls in order to reach the — country districts and acquaint them with liberty. And this new freedom, as it progressed, was not — long in making headway even in the old demesnes, whose archaic constitution could not be maintained in the midst of a reorganized social order. Either — by voluntary emancipation, or by prescription or usurpation, the seigneurs permitted it to be gradu- ally substituted for the serfdom which had so long | been the normal condition of their tenants. The form of government of the people was there 1 changed at the same time as the form of govern- ment of the land, since both were consequences of — an economic situation on the way to disappear. Commerce now supplied all the necessaries which > the demesnes had hitherto been obliged to obtain re A ) a CITIES AND CIVILIZATION 227 by their own efforts. It was no longer essential for each of them to produce all the commodities for which it had use. It sufficed to go get them at some ~ nearby city. The abbeys of the Netherlands, which had been endowed by their benefactors with vine- yards situated either in France or on the banks of the Rhine and the Moselle where they produced the wine needed for their consumption, began, at about the start of the thirteenth century, to sell these properties which had now become useless and whose working and upkeep henceforth cost more than they brought in.* No example better illustrates the inevitable dis- appearance of the old demesnial system in an era transformed by commerce and the new city econo- my. Trade, which was becoming more and more active, necessarily favored agricultural production, broke down the limits which had hitherto bounded it, drew it towards the towns, modernised it, and at the same time set it free. Man was therefore de- / tached from the soil to which he had so long been/ enthralled, and free labor was substituted more and more generally for serf labor. It was only in regions remote from commercial highways that 1H. Van Werveke, “Comment les établissements religieux belges se procuraient-ils du vin au haut Moyen-age?,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 1923, Vol. II, p. 643. 228 MEDIEVAL CITIES there was still perpetuated in its primitive rigor the old personal serfdom and therewith the old forms of demesnial property. Everywhere else it disappeared, the more rapidly especially where towns were more numerous. In Flanders, for ex- ample, it hardly existed at all after the beginning of the thirteenth century, although, to be sure, a few traces were still preserved. Up to the end of the old order there were still to be found, here and there, men bound by the right of mortemain or _ subject to forced labor, and lands encumbered by _ various seigniorial rights. But these survivals of the _ past were almost always simple taxes and he who paid them had, for all of that, full personal liberty. — f \/ The emancipation of the rural classes was only _ one of the consequences provoked by the economic — revival of which the towns were both the result — and the instrument; It coincided with the increas- ‘ ing importance of ‘liquid capital. During the de mesnial era of the Middle Ages, there was no othe form of wealth than that which lay in real estate. It ensured to the holder both personal liberty and social prestige. It was the guaranty of the privi- leged status of the clergy and the nobility. Exclu- sive holders of the land, they lived by the labor of their tenants whom they protected and whom they nr CITIES AND CIVILIZATION 229 ruled. The serfdom of the masses was the necessary consequence of such a social organization. There was no alternative save to own the land and be a lord, or to till it for another and be a serf. But with the origin of the middle class there took its place in the sun a class of men whose exist- \, ence was in flagrant contradiction to this tradition’ al order of things. The land upon which they set- tled they not only did not cultivate but did not even own. [hey demonstrated and made increas- ingly clear the possibility of living and growing rich by the sole act of selling, or producing ex- change values. Landed capital had been everything, and now by the side of it was made plain the power of liquid | capital. Heretofore money had been sterile. The great lay or ecclesiastic proprietors in whose hands was concentrated the very scant stock of currency in circulation, by means of either the land taxes which they levied upon their tenants or the alms which the congregations brought to the churches, normally had no way of making it bear fruit. To be sure, it was often the case that monasteries, in time of famine, would agree to usurious loans to nobles in distress who would offer their lands as security. But these transactions, forbidden other- FEA ~urable in money During the course of the eleventh 230 MEDIEVAL CITIES wise by canonical law, were only temporary ex- pedients.* As a general rule cash was hoarded by its possessors and most often changed into vessels, or ornaments for the Church, which might be melt- ed down in case of need. Trade, naturally, released this captive money and restored its proper func- tion. Thanks to this, it became again the instru- ment of exchange and the measure of values, and since the towns were the centers of trade it neces-— sarily flowed towards them. In circulating, its power was multiplied by the number of transac- tions in which it served. Its use, at the same time, became more general; payments in kind gave way more and more to payments in money. WA new motion of wealth made its appearance: that of mercantile wealth, consisting no longer in land but in mo rd or commodities of trade meas- dl century, true capitalists already existed in a num- — ber of cities; several examples have been cited above, to which it is unnecessary to refer again here. These city capitalists soon formed the habit of putting a part of their profits into land.?/The best means of consolidating their fortune and their 2R. Génestal, Réle des monastéres comme établissements de 1 crédit, Paris, 1901. 8H. Pirenne, “Les périodes de l’histoire sociale du capitalisme,” Revue belge de philologie et d’ histoire, 1923, Vol. II, p. 269. CITIES AND CIVILIZATION za credit was, in fact, the buying up of land. They devoted a part of their gains to the purchase of real estate, first of all in the same town where they dwelt and later in the country.’“But they changed themselves, especially, into money-lenders. The economic crisis provoked by the irruption of trade into the life of society had caused the ruin of, or at least trouble to, the landed proprietors who had not been able to adapt themselves to it. For in speeding up the circulation of money a natural) result was the decreasing of its value and by that very fact the raising of all prices. The period con- temporary with the formation of the cities was a period of high cost of living, as favorable to the business men and artisans of the middle class as it was painful to the holders of the land who did not succeed in increasing their revenues. By the end of: the eleventh century many of them were obliged to have recourse to the capital of the merchants in order to keep going. In 1127 the charter of St. Omer mentioned, as a current practice, the loans contracted among the burghers of the town by the knights of the neighborhood. But more important operations were already current at this era. There was no lack of merchants rich enough to agree to loans of considerable amount. About 1082 some merchants of Liége lent / 232 MEDIEVAL CITIES ‘ money to the abbot of St. Hubert to permit him to : buy the territory of Chavigny, and a few years later | advanced to the bishop Otbert the sums necessary ; to acquire from Duke Godfrey, on the point of de- — parting for the Crusades, his chateau of Bouillon.’ The kings themselves had recourse, in the course of the twelfth century, to the good services of the city ‘ financiers. William Cade was the money-lender to ~ the King of England.*® In Flanders, at the begin- — ning of the reign of Philip Augustus, Arras had be- y come preeminently a city of bankers. William the ¢ Breton describes it as full of riches, avid of lucre — and glutted with usurers: Ahrabatum ... potens urbs ... plena Divitiis, inhians lucris et foenore gaudens.” | The cities of Lombardy and, following their ex- — ample, those of Tuscany and Provence, went much — further in carrying on that commerce which the Church vainly sought to oppose. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, Italian bankers had — already extended their operations north of the Alps_ and their progress there was so rapid that a half ~ century later, thanks to the abundance of their Si ae! 4H. Pirenne, “Les périodes de V’histoire sociale du capitalisme,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 1923, Vol. Il, p. 281. 5M. T. Stead, “William Cade, a Financier of the Twelfth Century,” English Historical Review, 1913, p. 209. } 6 Guillaume le Breton, “Philipidis,’ Monumenta Germaniae historica, Vol. X XVI, p. 321. 4 CITIES AND CIVILIZATION 233 capital and the more advanced technique of their procedure, they had everywhere taken the place of the local lenders. v The power of liquid capital, concentrated in the cities, not only gave them an economic ascendancy but contributed also towards making them take part in political life. For as long as society had known no other power than that which derived from the possession of the land, the clergy and the nobility alone had had a share in the government., The feudal hierarchy was made up entirely on the basis of landed property. The fief, in reality, was only a tenure and the relations which it created be- tween the vassal and his liege lord were only a particular modality of the relations which existed between a proprietor and a tenant. The only dif- ference was that the services due from the first to the second, in place of being of an economic nature, were of a military and political nature. Just as each’ local prince required the help and counsel of his vassals so, being himself a vassal of the King, was he held on his part to similar obligations. Thus only those who held land entered into the direction of public affairs. They entered into them, more- over, only in paying through their own person; that is to say, using the appropriate expression: consilio et auxtlio—by their counsel and help. Of 234 MEDIEVAL CITIES a pecuniary contribution towards the needs of their sovereign there could be no question at an epoch when capital, in the form of real estate alone, rved merely for the maintenance of its possessors.. JK erhaps the most striking character of the feudal State was its almost absolute lack of finances. In it, money played no role. The demesnial revenues of the prince replenished only his privy purse. It was impossible for him to increase his resources by taxes, and his financial indigence prevented him from taking into his service revocable and salaried agents. Instead of functionaries, he had only hered- itary vassals, and his authority over them was lim- ited to the oath of fidelity they gave him. But as soon as the economic revival enabled him to augment his revenues, and cash, thanks to it, began to flow to his coffers, he took immediate ad- — vantage of circumstances. The appearance of bai- | liffs, in the course of the thirteenth century, “ai . 4/ the first symptom of the political progress which was going to make it possible for a prince to de- % velop a true public administration and to change © his suzerainty little by little into sovereignty. — For the bailiff) was, in every sense of the term, a — functionary. With theSe revocable office-holders, — .. remunerated not by grants of land but by steward- — ships, there was evinced a new type of govern- t ¥ CITIES AND CIVILIZATION 235 ment. The bailiff, indeed, had a place outside the feudal hierarchy. His nature was quite different from that of the old justices, mayors, or castel- Jans who carried on their functions under an hered- itary title. Between them and him there was the same difference that there was between the old serfholds and the new freeholds. Identical eco- nomic causes had changed simultaneously the or- ganization of the land and the governing of the people. Just as they enabled the peasants to free themselves, and the proprietors to substitute the -quit-rent for the demesnial mansus, so they en- abled the princes, thanks to their salaried agents, to lay hold of the direct government of their ter- ritories. This political innovation, like the social innovations with which it was contemporary, im- plied the diffusion of ready cash and the circula- ‘tion of money This is quite clearly shown to be the case by the fact that Flanders, where commer- ‘cial life and city life were developed sooner than in the other regions of the Netherlands, knew con- siderably in advance of these latter the institution of bailiffs. The connections which were necessarily estab- lished between the princes and the burghers also had political consequences of the greatest import. It was necessary to take heed of those cities whose 236 MEDIEVAL CITIES increasing wealth gave them a steadily increasing importance, and which could put on the field, in case of need, thousands of well equipped men. The feudal conservatives had at first only contempt for the presumption of the city militia. Otto of Frei- singen was indignant when he saw the communes of Lombardy wearing the helmet and cuirass and permitting themselves to cope ,with the noble ’ knights of Frederick BarbarossayBut the outstand- — ing victory won by these clodhoppers at Legnans (1176) over the troops of the Emperor soon dem-_ onstrated what they were capable of An France, the kings did not neglect to have rec urse to their” services and to ally them to their own interests. — They set themselves up as the protectors of the communes, as the guardians of their liberties, and — made the cause of the Crown seem to them to be ~ solidary with the city franchises. Philip Augustus must, have garnered the fruits of such a skilful pol- — ics ‘The Battle of Bouvines (1214), which defin- y itely established the sway of the Monarchy in the © interior of France and caused its prestige to radiate over all Europe, was due in great part to military — contingents from the cities. _ The influence of the cities as not less i impor- tant in England at the same era, although it was manifest in a quite different way. Here, instead of CITIES AND CIVILIZATION p42 te) supporting the monarchy, they rose against it by the side of the barons. They helped, likewise, in the creation of parliamentary government, the distant origins of which may, be dated back to the Magna Charta (1343). ¥ irene > \ 2 It was not onifin in Baeland, furthermore, that the cities claimed and obtained a more or less large share in the government. Their natural tendency led them to become municipal republics. There is but little doubt but that, if they had had the power, they would have everywhere become States within the State. But they did not succeed in realizing this ideal save where the power of the State was impotent to counterbalance their efforts. This was the case with Italy, in the twelfth cen- tury, and later, after the definite decline of the im- perial power, with Germany. Everywhere else they had not succeeded in throwing off the superior authority of the princes, whether, as in Germany and France, the Monarchy was too powerful to have to capitulate before them, or whether, as in the Netherlands, their particularism kept them from combining their efforts in order to attain an independence which immediately put them at grips with one another. They remained as a general rule, then, subject to the territorial government. But this latter did not treat them as mere sub- 238 MEDIEVAL CITIES F jects. It had too much need of them not to have — regard for their interests. Its finances rested in ~ great part upon them, and to the extent that they augmented the power of the State and therewith ie expenses, it felt more and more frequently the need of going to the pocketbooks of the burghers. — It has already been stated that in the twelfth cen- tury it borrowed their money. And this money the — cities did not grant without security. They well j knew that they ran great risks of never being reim- — bursed, and they exacted new franchises in return — for the sums which they consented to loan. Feudal — law permitted the suzerain to exact of his vassals — only certain well-defined dues which were restrict- ed to particular cases always identical in character. | It was therefore impossible for him to subject them ~ arbitrarily to a poll-tax and to extort from them — ‘supplies, however badly needed. In this respect the — charters of the cities granted them the most solemn cuarantees. It was, then, imperative to come to ‘terms with them. Little by little the princes formed | the habit of calling the burghers into the councils” of prelates and nobles with whom they conferred upon their affairs. The instances of such convoca- tions were still rare in the twelfth century; they multiplied in the thirteenth; and in the fourteenth CITIES AND CIVILIZATION 239 century the custom was definitely legalised by the institution of the Estates in which the cities ob- tained, after the clergy and the nobility, a place which soon became, although the third in dignity, the first in importance. “ Although the middle classes, as we have just seen, had an influence of very vast import upon the social, economic and political changes which were manifest in Western Europe in the course of the twelfth century, it does not seem at first glance that they played much of a role in the in- tellectual movement. It was not, in fact, until the fourteenth century that a literature and an art was brought forth from the bosom of the middle classes, animated with their spirit. Until then, science re- mained the exclusive monopoly of the clergy and employed no other tongue than the Latin. What literature was written in the vernacular had to do solely with the nobility, or at least expressed only the ideas and the sentiments which pertained to the nobility as a class, Architecture and sculpture pro- duced their masterpieces only in the construction and ornamentation of the churches. The markets and belfries, of which the oldest specimens date back to the beginning of the thirteenth century— as for example the admirable Cloth Hall of Ypres, 240 MEDIEVAL CITIES destroyed during the Great War—remained still faithful to the architectural style of the great re- ligious edifices. ‘ Upon closer inspection, however, it does not take long to discover that city life really did make its ~ own contribution to the moral capital of the Mid- dle Ages. To be sure, its intellectual culture was dominated by practical considerations which, be- fore the period of the Renaissance, kept it from putting forth any independent effort. But from the very first it showed that characteristic of being an exclusively lay culture.y By the middle of the twelfth century the municipal councils were busy founding schools for the children of the burghers, . Which were the first lay schools since the end of an- tiquity. By means of them, instruction ceased to be furnishéd exclusively for the benefit of the novices of the monasteries and the future parish priests. ~Knowledge of reading and writing, being indis- pensable to the practice of commerce, ceased to be 4 reserved for the members of the clergy alone, The — ri burgher was initiated into them long before the — noble, because what was for the noble only an in- tellectual luxury was for him a daily need. Natur- © ally, the Church immediately claimed supervision over the municipal schools, which gave rise to a number of conflicts between it and the city author-_ a) CITIES AND CIVILIZATION 241 ities. Che question of religion was naturally com: pletely foreign to these debates. They had no other cause than the desire of the cities to control the schools created by them and the direction of which they themselves intended to keep. However, the teaching in these communal schools was limited, until the period of the Renais- sance, to elementary instruction. All who wished to have more were obliged to turn to the clerical establishments. It was from these latter that came the “clerks” who, starting at the end of the twelfth century, were charged with the correspondence and the accounts of the city, as well as the publication of the manifold Acts necessitated by commercial life. All these “clerks”? were, furthermore, laymen, the cities having never taken into their service, in | contradistinction to the princes, members of the clergy who by virtue of the privileges they enjoyed would have escaped their jurisdiction. IT he language which the municipal scribes em- ployed was naturally, at first, Latin. But after the first years of the thirteenth century they adopted more and more generally the use of national idioms. It was by the cities that the common tongue - was introduced for the first time into administra- tive usagey Thereby they showed an initiative which corresponded perfectly to that lay spirit of / 242 MEDIEVAL CITIES which they were the preeminent representatives in the civilization of the Middle Ages. - This lay spirit, moreover, was allied with the most intense religious fervor. If the burghers were - very frequently in conflict with the ecclesiastic authorities, if the bishops thundered fulsomely_ against them with sentences of excommunication, and if, by way of counterattack, they sometimes gave way to decidedly pronounced anti-clerical tendencies, they were, for all of that, none the less animated by a profound and ardent faith. For proof of this is needed only the innumerable reli- gious foundations with which the cities abounded, the pious and charitable confraternities which were so numerous there. Their piety showed itself via a naiveté, a sincerity and a fearlessness which easi ly led it beyond the bounds of strict orthodoxy. f A t all times, they were distinguished above everything else by the exuberance of their mysticism. It wa this which, in the eleventh century, led them to side passionately with the religious reformers who were fighting simony and the marriage of priests; which, in the twelfth century, spread the contemplatiy ve asceticism of the Béguines and the Bégards; which, in the thirteenth century, explained the enthusias- tic reception which the Franciscans and » h Dominicans received. But it was this also which as as e : aes } : CITIES AND CIVILIZATION 243 sured the success of all the novelties, all the exag- gerations and all the deformations of religious thought. After the twelfth century no heresy cropped out which did not immediately find some adepts. It is enough to recall here the rapidity and the energy with which the sect of the Albigenses spread. Both lay and mystic at the same time, the bur- chers of the Middle Ages were thus singularly well prepared for the réle which they were to play in the two great future movements of ideas: the Re- naissance, the child of the lay mind, and the Re- formation, towards which religious mysticism was! leading. Bebhography Sources N no country does there exist a complete collec- tion devoted to the sources of city law. We shall confine ourselves to mentioning here: Baxvarp, A., British Borough CET 1042-1216 Cambridge, 1913 Gaupp, E. T., Deutsche PRO des Mittel- alters 2 vols., Breslau, 1851 GENGLER, H. G., Deutsche Stadtrechte des Mittel- alters Erlangen, 1852-1866 Codex juris municipalis Germaniae medti aevi Erlangen, 1863 Giry, A., Documents sur les relations de la royau- pane les villes en France de 1180 4 1314 Paris, 1885 Krutcen, F., Urkunden zur stadtischen Verfas- sungsgeschichte Berlin, 1901 Works Ir is useless to mention, despite the importance which they had in their own times, a number of works which have become antiquated today. The chief characteristics of the most important among them will be found in H. Pirenne, “‘L’origine des 246 MEDIEVAL CITIES § constitutions urbaines au Moyen-age,” Revue his-— torique, Vol. LIII, 1893. For England, see J. Tait, @ “The Study of Early Municipal History in Eng- land,” Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. LOZ. Asutey, W. J., ““The Beginnings of ee, Life a | the Middle Ages,”’ Quarterly Journal of Eco- nomics, Vol. X, 1896. Batvarp, A., The English Borough in the Twelfth Century . Cambridge, 1914. a Bateron, M., “The Laws of Breteuil,” English ‘ lore oe Review, Vol. XV, 1900 ) Betow, G. v. “Zur Entstehung der deutschen Stadtverfassung,” Historische Zettschrift, Vols. LVIII-LIX : Die Entstehung der deutschen Stadtgemeinde Diisseldorf, 1889 Der Ursprung der deutschen Stadtverfassung Disseldorf, 1892 Brancuet, A., Les enceintes romaines de la Gaule Paris, 1907 BromMaErt, W., Les chdatelains de Flandre Ghent, 1915 Bonvatot, E., Le tiers-état d’ apres la charte de Beaumont et ses filiales Paris, 1884 Des Marez, G., Etude sur la propriété fonciére dans les villes du Moyen-age et specialement en Flandre. | Ghent, 1898 BIBLIOGRAPHY 247 Doren, A. J., Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Kaufmannsgilden des Mittelalters Leipzig, 1893 Espinas, G., La vie urbaine de Douai au Moyen- age 4 vols., Paris, 1913 Fracnu, J., Les origines de l ancienne France, Vol. Paris, 1893 GinestTaL, R., La tenure en bourgage Paris, 1900 Geriacu, W., Die Entstehungszeit der Stadthe- festigungen in Deutschland Leipzig, 1913 Giry, A., Histoire de la ville de Saint-Omer et de ses institutions jusqu’au XIV® stécle Paris21577 Les établissements de Rouen 2 vols., Paris, 1883-1885 Gross, C., The Gild Merchant 2 vols., Oxford, 1890 Hecet, K., Die Entstehung des deutschen Stadte- WESENS Leipzig, 1898 Stadte und Gilden der germanischen Volker im Mittelalter 2 vols., Leipzig, 1891 Heremmeon, M. veW. “Burgage Tenure in Medi- eval England,” Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. XX, 1914 Houve.in, P., Essai historique sur le droit des _marchés et des foires Paris, 1897 248 MEDIEVAL CITIES KeutceEn, F., Untersuchungen uber den Urspraaaa der PeuTehen Stadtverfassung Leipzig, 1895 Lasanpg, H. L., Histoire de Beauvais et de ses in- \" stitutions communales Paris, 1892 Lucuaire, A., Les communes frangaises al époque des Capétiens directs, new edition, with intro- — duction by L. Halphen Paris, 1911 Maitianp, F. W., Township and Borough Cambridge, 1898 Orroxar, N., Opité po istorii franzoukish gorodov — Perm, 1919 Petit-Dutaitus, C. E., L’origine des villes en © Angleterre, Vol. I of the French translation of — Stubbs’ Constitutional History Prrennge, H., “L’origine des constitutions urbaines ~ au Moyen-age,” Revue historéque, Vols. IGOR APA, ahefopii berets “Villes, marchés et marchands au Moyen- Age,” Revue historique, Vol. LXVII, 1898 “Ta hanse famande de Londres,” Bulletin de l’ Academie de Belgique, Classe des lettres, 1899 “Les villes flamandes avant le XII siécle,” Annales del Est et du Nord, Vol. I, 1905 Belgian Democracy—Its Early History Manchester, 1915 Prov, M., Les coutumes de Lorris Paris, 1884 BIBL RretscHEL, S., Marki lichen Verhdltniss Leipzig, 1897 Das Burggrafenan Leipzig, 1905 Die civitas auf deu Leipzig, 1894 Rounp, J. H., “The Ca. quest,” Archaeologi Soum, R., Die Entstehu WESENS Leipzig, 1890 VANDERKINDERE, L., “La } lution constitutionelle Annales deVEst et dul “La notion juridique de , tin del Academie de Belg: tres, 1906 VANDER Linpen, H., Les gildes , les Pays-Bas au Moyen- age Ghent, 1896 Wauters, A., Del’ origine des premier ments des libertés communales en . Brussels, 1869 The numerous monographs devoted, in. country, to the particular history of a city muse course also be consulted. A list of them can be found in the national bibliographies and especial- — ly, for England, in the Bibliography of British Municipal History of Charles Gross. w ania Ag iin Pree 4 URBANA eT eee Ae Ss eres OE PIR OE | UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS mo te) oO ~ °°] Lf) ———ae ON te) © N os , a oO o Pe hear? pares aaa pee ateeare Sentient £4 a aS ee ee a a gi eal a a nea sor oe eg RI OI ADS Fe aie a pumpin etnnnetok te ain ge A EIEN 88% Resin as Nanas PEI SP La SINT EE EET ebinaniipn tet means OO FI IAS PWT IOe EE ane yee eae a tend Kt gry Sener” ara e spe ie ~n i a a soeser >: ER SE int, OES tmose Satie a mf — ion ae ep aa SAT NN SIRE AP ae, OE SE PG) ELEMENTS EM % ‘ pias pone nei Se te Ae “ Pian LO? 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