Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (89 page)

COMMUNITY

Villages

The continued identification of the individual with collective happiness owed much to the strength of communal social organization. This developed in Scandinavia, France and elsewhere, so the differences between these countries and the Empire are a matter of degrees rather than absolutes, but their specific expression in a corporate socio-political order was nonetheless significant.
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Communal political forms emerged relatively early in the Empire as a defining element alongside lordship. They were weakest during the early Middle Ages, but grew stronger around the eleventh century, expanding rapidly during the fourteenth century to peak around 1500. If their subsequent development was checked by the expansion of princely governments, both urban and rural communes remained generally stronger than in other countries, and persisted well beyond 1806.

The vast majority of the Empire’s inhabitants lived in scattered
hamlets into the tenth century. The 200–300 people living on a typical Carolingian manor were described as a single
familia
, but their structure was not communal since important decisions were reserved for the lord or his steward, while a significant proportion lived segregated as slaves. The few, more genuine communities that existed were all religious houses like monasteries and convents, though again these usually also contained subordinate dependents. Several different kinds of settlement might be combined in one place, notably royal palaces that also functioned as farms and often had attached religious houses.
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True villages only emerged with the economic changes of the mid-eleventh century, coupled with the contraction of domains and the disappearance of the entirely servile population. They were given focus through the spread of church-building and incorporation of more rural areas into parishes. Parishes were not corporations, because they depended on the church hierarchy, but their development helped forge communal identity, especially as Gregorian reform stressed their role in selecting clergy. Even if clerical appointments remained largely in the control of lords and (later) patricians, other subsequent theological developments periodically reinforced parish identity, notably the spread of more formalized communal worship after 1215. Various forms of village developed, but nucleated settlements were fairly typical and consisted of houses grouped around a church, surrounded by gardens and often an outer perimeter demarcated by an earth wall or wooden palisade to protect against strangers and wild animals. Beyond this lay land organized in the three-field system, plus common assets like meadows and woods.
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Towns

Towns contracted in the Romanized areas during late antiquity as the dwindling population could no longer defend settlements that remained tempting targets for raiders. Many bishops abandoned their diocesan towns to escape the Vikings during the ninth century, further hastening urban decline. In Italy, this process accelerated the
incastellamento
, or construction of castles in more defensible sites, proliferating the fortified places that made it so difficult for later emperors to establish firm control there.
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Nonetheless, all 107 Italian episcopal towns in the twelfth century could claim continuous occupation since ancient Rome,
while the presence of a bishop also ensured continuity in Germany’s oldest urban settlements: Mainz, Trier, Cologne, Worms, Speyer and Strasbourg. Kings and lords often appear in annals as ‘founders’ of medieval towns, though of course the real work was done by the inhabitants. Nonetheless, political factors need to be added to purely materialist and functionalist explanations for urban development: for example, Pavia, Ravenna and Rome all owed their importance in part to continuous favour by the Lombards, Byzantines and Carolingians respectively.

Thanks to their continuous existence, Italian towns already enjoyed considerable advantages over their equivalents north of the Alps, especially once their populations began to grow during the tenth century after four centuries of stagnation. These towns were both larger and had a higher proportion of legally free inhabitants, who were able to use their relative wealth to acquire rights and property in the surrounding countryside. Politics also favoured this process, because Carolingian rule had established fewer powerful lords, compared to Germany. This established a lasting distinction between the town and its surrounding area, now identified as the ‘count’s land’ (
contado
). The extension of urban control over the hinterland was checked during the reign of Hugo of Arles, who won the support of the Italian episcopate by selling them many of the counts’ rights over both town and countryside around 940. Although bishops generally held both jurisdictions for the next century, the upper strata of the urban population were emerging as their lesser vassals. Gregorian reform accelerated this trend by reinforcing this group’s claims to participate in selecting bishops and generally to exercise greater influence over their own affairs.

Carolingian expansion saw the foundation of new towns north of the Alps around important monasteries to serve as bases for the expanding ecclesiastical structure. The new settlements formed around a cathedral, sometimes with other religious buildings sited to structure the town in the shape of a cross. Defensive palisades and ditches demarcated town from country by the tenth century. Ottonian patronage provided an additional spur with the grant of toll and market rights to many bishops, enabling episcopal towns to develop as regional economic centres. This trend peaked in the mid-eleventh century as the Salians granted exemptions from servitude to attract additional inhabitants. The Salians and especially their Staufer successors also
increasingly favoured towns on their royal progresses rather than rural palaces or monasteries. Towns expanded to incorporate a market square with merchants’ and artisans’ houses within an expanded fortified ring. Speyer, for instance, already grew tenfold during the Ottonian era, while in total 130 new market towns developed along the Rhine and Danube across this period.
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Although generally newer than Italian towns, those north of the Alps were often more advanced economically at this point. Middle and Lower Rhenish towns engaged in long-distance trade, while those in Flanders and Brabant were already centres of cloth manufacturing from 1020. Most Italian towns remained only regional centres into the twelfth century, apart from Genoa and Venice, which grew rapidly through the trade opportunities opened by the Crusades after 1096. Meanwhile, a new type of urban foundation spread east from Lorraine in the twelfth century as secular lords now also established towns endowed with immunities directly from their foundation in a deliberate attempt to attract wealth and labour by offering an attractive new settlement. The Zähringer founded Freiburg (literally ‘free town’) in the Breisgau in 1120, while other early examples include Lübeck (1143), Munich (1158) and Leipzig (1161). Whereas there were only 200 German towns in 1025, there were over 600 by 1150, and 1,500 by 1250; of these, 150 were in royal lands, 38 controlled by bishops and the rest under lordly jurisdiction. By contrast, very few new towns were founded in Italy, with the most famous being Alessandria, established collectively by the Lombard League in 1168 and named after their ally Pope Alexander III. This is not surprising, since Italy already had around 300 large towns, whose population was expanding four times faster than anywhere else in Europe. By 1300, there were 20 cities in north and central Italy with at least 20,000 inhabitants, while Florence had 100,000 and Milan 175,000.
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By contrast, rural settlements expanded in numbers, but rarely significantly in size across 1000–1300. Colonization and migration transformed the east European countryside from scattered hamlets to villages during the twelfth century, when many Slavic villages were also reorganized through new legal codes. Migration drew off population from the west, where settlement size and numbers stabilized both overall and in the relation between the number of people and the area of land that could be worked without having to travel too far each day.
Less favourably sited settlements were now abandoned, though lords continued to offer inducements to attract migrants to more difficult areas like the Black Forest. The number of new towns peaked along with eastern colonization in the period 1220–1320, with the foundation of Berlin, Frankfurt an der Oder, Breslau, Gdansk and Königsberg. Many of the towns established at this point were not entirely new, like Stuttgart, which expanded from a village under the patronage of the Württemberg counts. New foundations continued across 1320–1450, but on a much reduced scale.

Early towns often encountered significant difficulties through being endowed with insufficient land or access to water. Later efforts granted more land to enable the first settlers to grow their own food. Twelfth-century foundations also addressed social questions through charters regulating relations to lords. Many of the new towns beyond the Elbe deliberately copied charters from so-called ‘mother towns’ to the west. Although new itself, Lübeck served as the exemplar for 100 other towns after the thirteenth century, while Magdeburg law was used from east central Europe to Russia, and Nuremberg and Vienna were copied across Bohemia, Moravia and the Balkans. Elsewhere, cities like Frankfurt served as models for smaller towns in their region.

Growth ended abruptly with the Black Death. The total number of German settlements fell by 40,000 to 130,000 across 1340–1470, with contraction reaching 40 per cent in upland areas like Hessen, Thuringia and the Austrian Alps, compared to 10 per cent in more favourable lowland regions, especially between the Lower Rhine and Weser and on the middle Elbe. Around 4,500 settlements were also abandoned in Bohemia and Moravia. Yet losses in Italy were only 10 to 25 per cent.
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Towns suffered badly during the plague itself, but fared better overall in retaining their size. By 1450, the Empire had around 2,500 towns, including 88 Swiss and 150 Austrian ones, but excluding those in Italy. Whereas there was one town per 400 square kilometres in south-west Germany, the ratio in the north-east was one per 1,000 square kilometres. Most had fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, while only 5 per cent had over 5,000 and just 30 towns had more than 10,000. Cologne was the largest with 40,000 inhabitants. Pre-modern urban settlement was now essentially complete, with only 200 more towns added by 1800, largely as princely residences, garrisons or refugee settlements like
Mannheim, Potsdam and Erlangen. The urban proportion of the population also remained broadly constant, rising only from 20 to 25 per cent across 1300–1800, with the highest density in Holland and Brabant, where the proportion was already 40 to 50 per cent in 1514. Further development remained constrained by agricultural productivity: a medium-sized village produced only sufficient surplus to feed 25 town dwellers in the late sixteenth century, meaning that at least 10,000 villages were required to sustain the German urban population.
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Despite differences between Germany, Italy and the Low Countries, urban development in the Empire broadly conformed to a western and central European pattern influenced by how politics and agriculture were organized. Growth during the high Middle Ages had created a multitude of individually modest towns, compared to the pattern in south-east Europe and the Islamic world, which was dominated by far fewer but individually larger cities: fourteenth-century Cairo already had 600,000 inhabitants, a figure not reached in Germany or Italy until well into the nineteenth century.

The Emergence of the Household

More obviously communal self-government only emerged from the eleventh century, beginning in Italian towns and becoming general by 1200. This complex process frequently pitted lords and commons against each other, and many of the concessions were only won through violent protest. However, civic emancipation was never a singular, glorious act, but instead developed incrementally, often over several centuries, with some rights acquiring new meaning with changed circumstances. Most privileges were intended to promote a town’s development, not free its inhabitants, while lords often retained residual rights.
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The new freedoms were never equal or universal
Liberty
, but instead local and particular
liberties
that bound the community and its inhabitants within the wider web of rights constituting the Empire’s legal order. Communal government in rural areas involved the transfer of decision-making power from a lord or steward to villagers, especially through the demarcation of access rights to specific resources. The village assumed an identity as a collective actor, but not all its inhabitants could participate in decisions.

Communal government rested on households, which became the
fundamental socio-political unit in the Empire and the primary site for production, consumption and (for non-clerical houses) reproduction. Households originated in the Frankish development of the hide as a family package of rights and resources. Villages developed around these households by 1200, manifest by the spread of more solid house-building techniques employing a sturdy timber-frame or even stone construction. The house assumed a semi-sacred character with special rituals surrounding its construction and especially in setting the roof.
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Door keys symbolized the power to control entry. Biblical examples encouraged a potent household ideology resting on the ideal of a married couple. This ideal underwent subtle shifts, especially in how gender roles were defined, as well as the rediscovery during the Renaissance of ancient ideas of good farm management (
oeconomia
), and later this received heightened religious-moral emphasis with the Reformation.
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