The Origins of the Cities and Towns of Western Europe
In the early decades of the fourteenth century -- before the Black Death of 1348-50 wiped out at least one-third and possibly more than one-half of the urban population -- there were perhaps six million western Europeans living in cities and towns, out of a total population of about sixty million.
Though it is impossible to obtain exact statistics for this period of history, nevertheless there is sufficient evidence to support an educated guess that in the late twelfth century there were about four million city-dwellers out of a total population of about forty million. In the early fourteenth century, four cities -- Venice, Florence, Palermo,-363
and Paris___ are thought by some specialists to have had a population of over 100,000 each, and five
others___ Milan, Genoa, Barcelona, Cologne, and London______ a population of about 50,000 each. A
larger group of towns, including Bologna, Padua, Ghent, Bruges, Strasbourg, Nuremberg, Lubeck, and Hamburg, are thought by some specialists to have had between 20,000 and 40,000 inhabitants, and a still larger group, including York, Bristol, Ypres, Antwerp, Augsburg, Frankfurt, Zurich, Basel, and others, between 6,000 and 20,000. 6_ Other estimates are higher: some experts would credit Milan and Venice with about 200,000 each, and Genoa and Naples (along with Florence, Palermo, and Paris) with about 100,000 each. 7 Still another writer has assigned to Paris about 100,000 at the end of the twelfth century and about 240,000 at the end of the thirteenth. 8 Then, of course, at the other end of the spectrum there were thousands of towns of under 6,000 inhabitants, many of them with only a few hundred. (See map 3.)
These cities and towns, highly diverse in size, emerged and developed in highly diverse ways and for highly diverse reasons. Yet there were certain common patterns that make them all cities or towns, just as there are certain common patterns that make the diverse nation-states of the twentieth century all nation-states.
The best way to discover those common patterns is to describe the origin and early development of various kinds of cities and towns in various parts of Europe, starting in France and moving on to Normandy, Flanders, the German duchies, England, and finally Italy.