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. Several fifteenth-century towns were sufficiently large and self-possessed to create an urban society capable of articulating its own communal values in religious, ceremonial, literary and artistic form. As the civic councillors of Florence, Venice, Bruges and Barcelona were alike aware, both urban self-expression and urban political power were always dependent on a local economy prosperous enough to generate exceptional wealth, albeit always unequally, among their citizens. The limitations of German urban political and military power, even when towns associated themselves with one another in so-called leagues, were already becoming obvious by the end of the century. The Italian humanists who began by creating the most explosive new urban ideology in European history eventually helped to destroy the community of tastes and interests upon which a common civic mentality must ultimately rest.