6 - Urban Europe

Summary

‘a city is a multitude of men bound together by a certain bond of society.’ Any historian who approaches the towns and cities of fifteenth-century Europe in the hope of imposing a more precise and helpful definition than that offered by St Augustine is sooner or later doomed to disappointment. Even if, which has increasingly come to seem uncertain, an urban community ever provides an intelligible social construct for historical analysis in its own right, it is often painfully difficult to know how to discriminate between the smaller towns and larger villages of late medieval Christendom. Such problems of definition as well as the vagaries of record survival still make it impossible – and perhaps pointless – to try to estimate the total number of urban communities in late medieval Europe as a whole. Thus, although the total number of towns in fifteenth-century Germany has sometimes been estimated at as many as 3,000, by Italian, Flemish or even English standards most of those towns were very small indeed. More seriously still, recent research has demonstrated as never before that the political and economic fortunes of most fifteenth-century cities were endlessly volatile, rising and falling from decade to decade and even from year to year. ‘The historian contemplating the economic evolution of this period has the impression that he is watching a relay-race, with the torch being taken over in turn by one town after another, and sometimes returning to its starting-point after one or two generations.’ Ironically enough, even the dramatic increase in the quantity of surviving original evidence produced by fifteenth- century towns and townsmen themselves, ranging from the unrivalled taxation records of Florence to the massive civic registers at Barcelona and the guild archives of many of the greater cloth-producing centres in the Low Countries, can sometimes add to these problems by making it more rather than less difficult to detect the most significant long-term urban trends.