POLITICAL FACTORS

Emperors, kings, dukes, and lesser (seignorial) rulers, as well as popes and bishops, were often able to increase both their military protection and their wealth by chartering towns which would be open to immigrants from the countryside -- principally peasants and lesser nobility.

Such towns were often more efficient militarily than castles, since the citizens were generally given the right and duty to bear arms. The peasants for centuries had had no such military right or duty (although they could be called up under special circumstances), and knights had had to be paid to perform military service. Citizens, to be sure, had to be supplied with arms, but they were subject to universal military service in defense of the city. In many places where the popular militia of the tribes and villages of the Germanic age had disappeared and the feudal levies were precarious, the twelfth-century feudal monarchs, dukes, counts, and other great lords relied heavily upon urban military obligation for defense of their territories. Thus the English Assize of Arms of 1181 provided that "all townsmen and all communes of free men" were to bear certain kinds of arms £-- thereby making all citizens soldiers and all cities military units.

In addition to giving military support, the new cities and towns substantially increased the economic resources of territorial rulers by providing tolls and market taxes and rents as well as industrial goods. In this connection the right of many cities and towns to coin money -- and the obligation of citizens to pay for their land in money -- represented a significant shift away from a largely barter economy. The royal and feudal rulers of Europe stood to benefit from this shift equally with the new commerical and industrial classes.

Of course, such political incentives for rulers to found cities and towns -360-

had existed in earlier centuries, at least potentially; but in the eleventh and twelfth centuries political conditions became more favorable for their realization.

Undoubtedly, social and economic and political factors all worked together to stimulate the emergence of new cities and towns, and without the presence of those factors it is hard to imagine that perhaps 5,000 new cities and towns would have emerged, as they did, all over western Europe during the same centuries -- starting in the eleventh, peaking in the twelfth, and continuing in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth.

Yet there were also social and economic and political factors working in the opposite direction. Feudal lords, including bishops and abbots, often had a strong economic interest in preventing the departure of their peasants; also they were not disposed to yield political power to the new urban complexes. Similarly, emperors, kings, and other rulers who granted charters to cities and towns had a strong interest in inserting clauses in those charters which would secure their own continued control over the citizens. Often the cities had to fight for independence and often they lost. Moreover, one cannot assume that most peasants and lesser nobility were keen to leave the manors and the villages; to do so was to risk the loss of traditional ties and values for the sake of something new and unknown.

Here one confronts the limitations of conventional social theory in explaining historical change. It is not enough to show that basic social, economic, and political conditions were favorable to the change that eventually took place. Conditions alone do not produce change, any more than soil and seed alone produce crops. Moreover, conditions that are favorable to change may be favorable also to stability. Even the Marxian theory of dialectical materialism only postulates that "ultimately" the forces of change will triumph, leaving open the crucial questions of time and circumstance. Surely, however, one cannot know why a great historical change occurred without first knowing when and how it occurred.