RELIGIOUS AND LEGAL FACTORS
If one examines more closely the timing and the circumstances of the emergence of modern cities and towns in Europe, if one asks what brought urbanization about precisely in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries and not before, if one wishes to explain the process by which the urban movement developed and was brought to fulfillment -- then one
-361
must take into account two factors often neglected by social, economic, and political historians: the religious factor and the legal factor.
The new cities and towns of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were religious associations in the sense that each was held together by religious values and rituals, including religious oaths. Many of them were sworn communes (conjurationes, "conspiracies"), and of these a considerable number had been founded by insurrectionary organizations. Those that were formed initially by merchants were often governed by a merchant guild, which was itself a religious association, dedicated to charitable and other religious works as well as to regulation of business activities. Those that were established by imperial, royal, ducal, or episcopal (or other ecclesiastical) initiative were also conceived as brotherhoods and were held together by oaths.
To stress the religious character of the cities and towns is not to say that they were ecclesiastical associations. They were wholly separate from the church, and in that sense they were the first secular states of Europe. Nevertheless, they derived much of their spirit and character from the church. Indeed, it would have been astonishing if it had been otherwise, since they emerged during the era of the Papal Revolution.
The new European cities and towns of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were also legal associations, in the sense that each was held together by a common urban legal consciousness and by distinctive urban legal institutions.
In fact, it was by a legal act, usually the granting of a charter, that most of the European cities and towns came into being; they did not simply emerge but were founded. Moreover, the charter would almost invariably establish the basic "liberties" of citizens, usually including substantial rights of self-government. Of course, the legal character of the new European cities and towns was closely associated with their religious character. The charters were confirmed by religious oaths, and the oaths, which were renewed with successive installations of officers, included, above all, vows to uphold the municipal laws.The importance of both religious and legal factors in the emergence of the western European cities may be judged by contrasting the development of cities in the contemporary Islamic civilization of the Middle East. There, despite similar economic and political factors (flourishing commerce, small-scale industry, a middle class, strong central territorial rulers), and despite the head start furnished by the physical survival of many of the cities of the Roman Empire, urban culture was weak. 5Both economically and politically, the Islamic cities lacked corporate unity and an independent character; they were essentially large villages, more or less integrated with the countryside. The crucial difference, in comparison with the West, was that, on the one hand, Islamic cities and towns were never sworn communes and never consisted of religious guilds or brotherhoods and, on the other hand, they were never incor-
-362-
porated and never given charters of rights and liberties. In contrast to Western culture from the time of the Papal Revolution, Islam lacked both the zeal to reform and redeem secular society and the concept that competing plural polities and legal systems can serve as instruments of such reform and redemption.
The rise of the European city in the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries was due at least as much to the contemporaneous transformation of religious and legal consciousness, associated with the Papal Revolution, as to the commercial-industrial and political-military transformations (which were also associated with the Papal Revolution).
What made urbanization possible then and not before, and there and not elsewhere, were new religious and legal concepts and institutions and practices-and new religious and legal passions and acts -- concerning communes and other kinds of fraternal associations, collective oaths, corporate personality, charters of liberties, rational and objective judicial procedures, equality of rights, participation in lawmaking, representative government, and statehood itself. These concerns, in turn, were related to structural characteristics of the Western legal tradition that were shared not only by urban law but also by the other contemporaneously emerging legal systems.Without urban legal consciousness and a system of urban law, it is hard to imagine European cities and towns coming into existence at all. But even if they had -- that is, even if large, densely populated centers of commerce and industry could somehow have been formed in the West without a foundation in urban law -- perhaps they would have been, like the ancient Roman cities, merely administrative and military outposts of some central authority (or authorities), or else, like Islamic cities, merely large villages, without their own independent character as cities, without an autonomous, integrated urban community life, or perhaps like something else; but they would not have been cities in the modern Western sense. They would not have had the self-conscious corporate unity and the capacity for organic development that have given the Western city its unique character.