A

CITIES AND URBAN LIFE

CITIES AND URBAN LIFE. The names that come immediately to mind when one thinks of early modern cities are for the most part capitals or court cities or major colonial ports. They were grand places, of which much remains and, although smaller than they are today in both area and population, more populous than any city Catholic Europe had known in the Middle Ages (Orthodox Constantinople and Muslim Cordoba may have exceeded half a million inhabitants). However, only a small fraction of the urban population of Europe—itself a fraction of the total—lived in any of them. So we shall first examine a more common type of town, which can tell us what life was like for townspeople and rural visitors alike.

Scattered over the map of Europe were literally thousands of these ordinary towns, ranging from fewer than 1,000 inhabitants to perhaps 20,000, anything larger being reckoned a fairly big city. How many we cannot really say. A legal definition of a town or city depends on the grant at some time of a charter. A functional definition implies a minimum population, an organized periodic market, or a range of occupations besides farming, forestry, or fishing. Even with better and more comprehensive data than we have, different places would qualify as towns according to the criterion chosen. In fact, students of Europe's urban system and its evolution over three centuries have adopted thresholds of at least 5,000 inhabitants. To the extent that large cities fared better than small ones in our period, leaving out the latter exaggerates the growth of the urban share.

How large a share of Europe's population was urban? This varied between regions, and so does the precision of our estimates in this prestatistical era. Most scholars agree that barely one in ten Europeans lived in a sizable (>5,000) town in 1500—as many as one in four in Flanders and in northern Italy, far fewer in most of northern and eastern Europe. Still, adding the smaller towns and those people who spent some time in a town, perhaps one in five persons experienced urban life as more than a visitor. Growth in the urban share was concentrated in regions that were underurbanized in 1500, while those with a high initial share actually became less urban. England stands out from the rest of Europe in the later eighteenth century because the mass urbanization associated with the industrial revolution was under way by 1760 or so. However, the European urban proportion changed little for the period as a whole, with any increase almost within the bounds of uncertainties in measurement.

THE SMALL CITY

What was the "typical" small town like? It was enclosed by a wall, and since building a wall was no small task, a growing town would put up with a lot of crowding before expanding the enclosed area. Conversely, losing population freed up space on which to graze animals or bleach cloth. The town plan could take many forms, a rough circle with four gates and two main roads crossing in the center being common, a neat design, such as a rectangular grid, less so. The plan, the style of the houses, and many other aspects of life had not changed much since the Middle Ages, when the town was founded, nor would highly visible changes take place until well into the industrial age, if then. The churches, the market—a hall or an open place—and a guildhall or town hall were the dominant structures while a few larger dwellings such as a monastery, a noble house, or a ruined castle stood out from the rest in terms of size and style.

The population included officials of the municipality and the territorial authority, either lord or king. Local gentry might also reside in town all or part of the year. Clergy were numerous, especially in Catholic countries, and bishops could still rule cities. Most characteristically urban were craft occupations, often combined with retail trade. Master and journeyman now represented a fairly permanent status, more like modern-day employer and employee. Given the difficulties of travel to a larger city, the town might house a few professionals, such as an apothecary, a notary, and a barber surgeon. The largest category of working people, however, was made up of servants, day laborers, and apprentices—enough servants, in fact, that many larger towns had a female majority. Housekeeping was labor-intensive, as were transport and construction, though they employed mostly men.

Women, many of the unskilled, and those who were not native to the town were denied citizenship. The status of citizen or burgher was valued even though self-government was often limited to an elite of merchants, nobles, and officials. Wealth or important skills could procure citizenship, most easily during recovery from some demographic catastrophe. The other outsiders, tolerated and indeed indispensable for many rough tasks, were, like the undocumented aliens in many Western cities today, hard to keep track of. They were less likely to marry and more likely to die at an early age than were citizens. They also had less claim on assistance and protection, mostly dispensed by the church, than the native-born paupers, orphans, and infirm of the town.

Trades still clustered on particular streets although people might also live in neighborhoods defined by extended families, clans, or loyalty to a powerful man. The center of town was considered desirable (in bigger cities the wealthy were laying out whole districts for their elegant new houses), while the suburbs, outside the walls, lacked status. The countryside, on the other hand, furnished a whole string of necessities, from laborers and wet nurses to food, wood, straw, raw materials, and carting services. In turn, farmers found in town a market, credit, and a range of consumer goods to buy. Burghers earned income from rural property and mortgages, and rich ones often acquired a country estate as a means of entry into the aristocracy (an alternative was to purchase a suitable royal appointment).

Day to day, the town's inhabitants dealt with one another, with the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside, and with those who passed through—peddlers and merchants, pilgrims and gypsies, soldiers and entertainers. But the larger world also impinged, more and more as time went on. A wider range of goods became common, including both colonial products and manufactures. Protoindustrial production could pit town against country, or merchants could enlist both to make and sell goods such as watches, textiles, or cutlery.

The spread of markets presaged the modern or capitalistic economy. But the wider world also affected our prototype town in the distant person of the sovereign, who regulated markets and demanded loyalty, service, and taxes. Since the king might farm out tax collection, and noble privileges and dues persisted, while the church also demanded payment of tithes, etc., the fiscal situation was almost always complicated and contested. Still, a hierarchy of administrative centers developed, with the royal capital at the apex and our little town a basic element. To sum up, towns played a critical role in the structuring of early modern society through both states and markets, coercion and commerce.

PERIODS OF GROWTH AND STAGNATION

Small towns grew in the sixteenth century when Europe finally regained (and surpassed) the population reached before the fourteenth-century crisis marked by the Black Death. Ports flourished along with market centers as the Atlantic Ocean joined the inland seas (Mediterranean, North, Baltic) and Europe's rivers as highways for trade. While regional and royal capitals changed relatively rarely, major ports competed strongly for leadership in commerce and finance. In the north, Bruges gave way to Antwerp and later to Amsterdam and London, while in the south, Genoa and Venice battled for supremacy, with Barcelona and Marseille also contesting for their share. Overall, however, the once-dominant Mediterranean was losing out to the Atlantic–North Sea region. Cities such as Bristol and Glasgow, Bordeaux and Nantes, Hamburg and Lübeck, Lisbon and Seville benefited from trade with the New World, whereas most Mediterranean ports stagnated after 1600.

By 1580, the urban renaissance showed signs of a slowdown. Small towns and free cities, such as Frankfurt and Cologne in Germany, saw their prosperity diminish. The turmoil of the next seventy years, centering on wars of religion, would concentrate growth in a relatively few large royal capitals (successful ports did not multiply their inhabitants to the same degree). Paris and London would at least double in population and surpass the half-million mark. Naples, despite weak trade, kept on growing. Newer capitals grew even faster in this period and the half century following. Madrid barely existed before it became the capital in 1567; by 1750 it had 123,000 souls. Berlin tripled its population after welcoming Huguenots expelled from France in 1685; and in 1703 Peter the Great began to drain a swamp for the Russian capital named after his patron saint. Similar stories can be told about Vienna, Stockholm, The Hague, court cities in Germany, and some subcapitals of empire, such as Brussels and Milan. On the periphery, colonial gateways such as Dublin, Charleston, and Lima combined trade with control by the home government.

The cycle turned again in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. With population growing, agriculture intensifying, and the first new industrial towns springing up, smaller places regained their share of urban growth. Even this reversal, however, did not stop many very small market centers from losing urban functions to nearby larger ones.

THE CAPITAL CITIES

How did a city grow so large merely because the monarch established her or his capital and court there, and what was life like in such a city? In this era of strong monarchy, the capital drew the many who served the sovereign directly. To rule is first of all to tax; hence there was a considerable fiscal apparatus. Senior judiciary and military officials also remained close to the seat of power. Elite military units—"household troops/regiments"—protected the monarch against riots and insurrection, which flourished in big cities, culminating in the Paris revolution of 1789.

Absolute monarchy meant a court, and many nobles added a house in the capital to their country residence. Of course, this additional source of expense added to the financial pressure on the nobility. Louis XIV of France consolidated his power by handing out a variety of pensions and profitable positions and requiring the candidates to stay at court. The more time they spent in Paris (where many nobles actually lived) or Versailles, the more need there was for royal patronage, and the more vital it was to stay around.

The system relied on pomp, ceremony, and festivities, so a court city needed a big working population "backstage." From pastry cooks to fencing masters, carriage makers to performers, lawyers, seamstresses, and chaise bearers, conspicuous consumption provided lots of employment. Along with individual craftsmen working to order, workshops near the demanding clientele produced an increasing range of manufactured luxury goods. Aristocrats and those who aspired to the aristocracy from all over soon looked to Paris or London for their furniture, clocks, ceramics, and bronzes. Monarchs also sponsored royal manufactures for porcelain, tapestries, and carpets or for military goods, where scale of production was important.

So much for the skilled trades. An army of servants, porters, and laborers helped craftsmen do their work and helped the rich get through their festive rounds. Of course, even the most lavish court did not fully dominate a city of several hundred thousand. The same groups we encountered in our small town formed a community of burghers that mostly stood apart from the goings-on of the aristocracy. They merely had less voice, whether in governing the city or in determining its outward appearance. Finally, big cities attracted a substantial underside of society: shady characters who offered forbidden pleasures or peddled banned literature, stealthy or violent criminals, beggars and paupers.

The menials had a big job keeping dirt and congestion from overwhelming the city completely. Huge amounts of food and fuel had to be brought in, and considerable tonnages of waste removed. Potable water was in perennially short supply although water itself might be too abundant. Disease and fire were ever-present dangers. London experienced both in the 1660s but rose again, bigger and busier than ever. However, grandiose plans to rebuild with straight and wide avenues after the Great Fire were shelved. Like most cities, London retained its narrow, winding, sewerless streets. Crowding was the rule, with rickety stories piled on top of leaning houses.

The blunt truth is that investment in urban amenities and infrastructure, particularly in the splendid baroque capitals, badly failed to cope with the numbers who flocked in. In fact, a constant stream of migrants was required, not only to fuel growth but to make up for a substantial natural deficit. Many urban dwellers, clerics and servants for example, remained unmarried, and death rates, for infants and adults alike, were always high and subject to sharp peaks during epidemics. Did this flow stimulate the surrounding countryside or rob it of vital forces? Historians can't agree or at least find examples of both.

The occasional monumental construction, broad boulevard, or elegant new neighborhood of "hotels" or "city-palaces" (often at the western, or windward edge of the older districts), should not deceive us. Mud, dirt, darkness, and pollution were the lot of most people, not just the very poor, and so were crowding, violence, and disease. Yet many came and stayed, preferring the stimulating dangers of the big city to the calm and relative safety of the smaller town or the farming village.

The urban share of the population may not have risen much, but European arts and letters—from the Italian Renaissance, to Dutch painting and Italian music, to the salons of Paris and the coffee-houses of London in the Enlightenment—became resolutely urban pursuits. Even the great country houses were designed and furnished in a fully urban style, and when the early Romantics looked to nature, it was very much from the point of view of city people. Yet unlike politics and culture, the big economic change on the horizon would not originate in the metropolitan cities, though it would eventually transform them. Even before 1800, the industrial revolution was actually being hatched in the countryside. However, cities would continue to dominate commerce and finance, as well as science and education, and in the nineteenth century industry would vastly expand existing towns and create sprawling agglomerations unlike any city before.

Finally, a word about technology. Early modern advances in production or transportation did little to change urban life. The horse remained supreme on land; building techniques did not change; and medicine remained largely powerless. However, two sets of inventions did make a difference to cities. The diffusion of printing and paper put books, newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets in easy reach of town dwellers and facilitated literacy and schooling. Clocks and watches changed attitudes toward time and quickened the pace of social life and business.

See also Amsterdam; Antwerp; Barcelona; Berlin; City Planning; Cologne; Hamburg; London; Lübeck; Madrid; Naples; Nuremberg; Paris; St. Petersburg; Seville; Versailles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, Philip, and E. A. Wrigley, eds. Towns in Societies: Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1978.

Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. 3 vols. New York, 1982–1984.

Clark, Peter, ed. Small Towns in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.

Clark, Peter, and Bernard Lepetit. Capital Cities and Their Hinterlands in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot, U.K., 1996.

De Vries, Jan. European Urbanization, 1500–1800. Cambridge, Mass., 1984.

Epstein, S. R., ed. Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.

Hohenberg, Paul M., and Lynn Hollen Lees. The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1994. Cambridge, Mass., 1995.

Langton, Jack, and Göran Hoppe. Town and Country in the Development of Early Modern Western Europe. Norwich, U.K., 1983.

O'Brien, Patrick, ed. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.

Tilly, Charles, and Wim P. Blockmans, eds. Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800. Boulder, Colo., 1994.

PAUL M. HOHENBERG