Urban Law

SOME THOUSANDS of new cities and towns came into existence in the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries -- in northern Italy, Flanders, France, Normandy, England, the German duchies, Castile and Aragon, and other parts of Europe.

These were not, of course, the first cities in world history. Yet there had never before been anything quite like them. In the period from the first century B.C. to the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., the Roman Empire had been made up of thousands of cities, but they had served chiefly as centers for administrative control by the Roman imperial authority and had been governed by imperial officers. The cities of ancient Greece, on the contrary, had been self-contained, independent citystates. In contrast to both Greece and Rome, the cities and towns that emerged in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were neither administrative centers of a central authority nor self-contained republics. They were something in-between.

After the Western Roman Empire was finally demolished by Germanic invaders in the fifth century, almost all the Roman cities in the West rapidly declined, and by the ninth century they had virtually disappeared. This was true even in northern Italy. But in southern Italy, which remained largely Byzantine with a strong Arab influence, Naples, Salerno, Bari, Syracuse, Palermo, and other Roman cities survived. In addition, some important early seaport towns outside of southern Italy remained, such as Venice and Durazzo on the Adriatic and a few ports

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on the Mediterranean coast of what later became France and Spain.

With rare exceptions, including the city of Rome itself, there was no political continuity between the former Roman cities and the modern European cities that ultimately emerged, often on or near the Roman sites, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. There was, to be sure, a continuity of ecclesiastical authority in those cities that were seats of bishoprics (headquarters of episcopal dioceses), but even they had declined from great metropolitan centers to small towns, largely integrated with the countryside. Although such episcopal seats continued to bear the name of civitas ("city"), all other towns were called by various names signifying either fortification (bourg, borough, borgo, or burgus; also castellum, castrum, opidum, urbs, municiplum) or else, more rarely, commercial center (portus, port, or wik). In the year 1000 there were few settlements west of Venice or north of Palermo with more than several thousand inhabitants. (See map 1.)

It was not, however, their small size or their small number which most sharply differentiated the cities and towns -- henceforth these two designations will be used more or less interchangeably -- of western Europe in the year 1000 from the modern cities and towns that emerged in the following two centuries, but rather their relatively indistinct social and economic character, on the one hand, and their relatively indistinct political and legal character, on the other. Socially and economically, towns before 1000 consisted mostly of people who lived by cultivating the soil. There were also merchants living in trading settlements in the towns -- usually just outside the walls of the castle or other fortification -- as well as knights and nobles living on the castle grounds, but these classes generally were a minority of the town population, while artisans and craftsmen were only a small fraction.

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that in the year 1000 there were no cities in Western Europe, if by "city" is meant either a locality whose population lives not by cultivating the soil but by commerce (he should have added "and industry"), or a community which is a legal entity and which possesses laws and institutions peculiar to itself..1.

Causes of the Rise of the Modern City

Several types of factors contributed to the rise of the modern city: economic, social, political, religious, and legal.