SECULAR CHARACTER

In addition to its communitarian character, urban law had a secular character. In contrast to Greek and Roman cities of antiquity and of the imperial period, Western cities and towns did not have responsibility for maintaining the religious cult.

This did not mean that the urban community was indifferent to religious faith. On the contrary, all the cities and towns of western Europe were actively Christian. They were filled with churches and

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sanctuaries to saints. They considered themselves to be divinely instituted. "It is to Jesus Christ that we owe the development of the laws and advantages of our city," states the concord by which the citizens of Marseilles established a peace with the citizens of Nice in 1219. "It is God alone, Himself, who governs our city." 52 Their mission, however, as cities, was defined as secular, or temporal, rather than sacred or eternal; it was, primarily, to control violence and to regulate political and economic relations_that is, to keep peace and to do justice.

The fact that the city considered itself to be a secular polity and did not claim to apply ecclesiastical law or to perform sacred rites or propagate religious doctrine, but left those tasks to the church, was an essential part of its character as a city in the Western sense. This was not only a negative thing; it also had the positive significance of establishing the independent value of worldly, or temporal, goals. Not only were the new city governments independent of direct ecclesiastical authority in the institutional sense, but their tasks of maintaining peace and justice were independent of the tasks of the church in maintaining the Christian faith. And those independent tasks of maintaining peace and justice were themselves taken to be, though temporal, nevertheless ordained by God, worthy of unstinted devotion, and an important part of God's plan of salvation for mankind.

The secular character of urban law was reflected in the fact that every city had its own variation of urban law and, further, that urban law was only one of several varieties of secular law, including royal law, feudal law, manorial law, and mercantile law. The coexistence of various types of secular law was inherent in its secular character. No one system of secular law claimed to embrace the whole of the secular jurisdiction. Each was a particular local system, governing one part of the life of those subject to its jurisdiction. This, too, distinguishes the law of the European cities of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and thereafter from the law of the cities of ancient Greece and imperial Rome. The Greek city was the sole polity to which its citizens owed allegiance, and its law was the sole law by which they were bound. The Roman city did not have a law of its own; the Roman citizen was governed solely by the Roman law, the noncitizen solely by the jus gentium, the law of nations. The unique feature of the law of Western Christendom was that the individual person lived under a plurality of legal systems, each of which governed one of the overlapping subcommunities of which he was a member.