ECONOMIC FACTORS
Pirenne attributed the emergence of the modern European city in the eleventh and twelfth centuries primarily to the revival of commerce. He stressed the fact that in the. eleventh century the marketplace, which usually existed in the faubourg ("suburb") of the castle or episcopal palace or abbey, began to swallow up the principal area.
It was this suburb that became the core of the new city or town. Pirenne also traced the founding of thousands of new towns throughout Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries primarily to pressures exerted by the new merchant class. Later scholars have properly criticized this explanation for neglecting the fact that producers, not merchants, composed the overwhelming majority (probably four-fifths) of the inhabitants of most cities and towns of that time, and that these producers -- chiefly artisans and craftsmen -- came largely from the surplus agrarian population created by the rapid increase in agricultural productivity in the eleventh century. The increased prosperity of the countryside was also an essential precondition for supplying the cities with food and raw materials and for the marketing of the cities' products. Thus the economic causes of the emergence of modern cities must be traced not only to the expansion of commerce and the rise of a merchant class but also to the expansion of agriculture and to the rise of a class of artisans and craftsmen and other industrial producers. 2The cities provided a new mode of production, as well as a new mode of distribution.