The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (12 page)

No longer critical as trade entrepôts, cities like Cairo and Istanbul began to weaken commercially.
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Even coffee, originally an export of the Near East to the West, was being transported to Ottoman bazaars on Dutch ships stocked with beans grown in their Javan colonies.
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The Westerners even began to establish a powerful presence in the East. Small commercial settlements on the peripheries of China, India, and Africa evolved slowly into large, commercially vibrant cities. Gradually, the great interior Islamic and Chinese capitals, still magnificent in aspect, began to lose control of even their own domestic trade. Political power and finally cultural influence also would soon slip from their grasp. One era of urban civilization was drawing to a close, and a new one, dominated by Europeans and their descendants, was about to begin.

PART FOUR

WESTERN CITIES REASSERT THEIR PRIMACY

CHAPTER TEN

EUROPE’S URBAN RENAISSANCE

In the years following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe possessed one powerful cohesive force—the Catholic Church. The Christian clergy, whose presence now sustained Rome in its stunted form, had always been ambivalent at best toward the old classical urban society. Yet in the midst of the collapse of the empire, it was the church that nurtured the first glimmerings of Europe’s urban renaissance.

The church contributed in both cultural and political spheres. Christian monks preserved the written languages, the ancient texts, and the traditions of intellectual rigor critical to Europe’s urban revival.
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Equally important, in many of the last surviving towns, diocesan structures served as the basis of urban boundaries and privileges; the bishops, whether in Paris, Rome, or elsewhere in Italy, most often offered the only recognized form of authority.
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A full resurgence of urban life required more than ecclesiastical blessings. Cities, as always, needed both a secure periphery and a vital economy. The church lacked the force to fight off invaders, whether Viking, heathen, or Islamic; its own theology was also often diffident, if not outright hostile, toward the commercial values upon which an urban economy depends.

Unable to rely fully on the church, and without strong empires capable of ensuring their security, Europe’s beleaguered urban communities were forced to rely on their own resources for survival. With marauding knights and brigands roaming the countryside, the first priority lay in erecting a defensive perimeter. An eighth-century description of Verona, in Italy, tells of a city “protected by thick walls and surrounded by forty-eight gleaming towers.” In the years before the introduction of cannons, strong city defenses could resist even the fiercest invaders.

Thus began a new golden age for independent European city-states. Merchants and artisans in places like northern Italy financed their own defensive armed forces.
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In a world where imperial boundaries were vague and often meaningless, cities constituted the one reliably defined space.
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Safe behind their walls, urban merchants and artisans enjoyed an independence unimaginable in the cities of the East. There was no emperor, caliph, or sultan to restrain the private property rights or the guild privileges of the commercial classes.
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In the West, the autonomous city and nascent capitalism grew together. “The love of gain,” writes Henri Pirenne, “was allied, in them, with local patriotism.”
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Italy emerged as the focal point for the renewal of urbanism. Blessed with an urban infrastructure left over by the Romans, Italy in the early years of the second millennium became
terra di citta,
or “the land of cities.”
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The First Crusade in 1095 exposed these Italian cities to the model presented by their more advanced counterparts in the Islamic world. Ultimately unable to dominate the Muslims militarily, traders from cities such as Venice, Genoa, and Pisa procured spices, silks, and sophisticated manufactures from their erstwhile enemies.
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Inland cities like Florence and Padua participated in this commercial expansion not only by manufacturing textiles, but also by financing trade, all this at a time when usury remained largely unacceptable among both Muslims and Christians.
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The slow but steady decline of Constantinople opened new opportunities for the Italian city-states. Constantinople would remain Christendom’s largest city for centuries, but the old imperial center now lacked the energy to protect its own periphery.
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By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the capital city was losing control of the eastern Mediterranean, giving the Italian cities ever greater control of the critical trade routes to the East.

The greatness of these cities did not lie in their girth—even by the fourteenth century, Florence, Venice, Genoa, Milan, or Bologna were home to no more than one hundred thousand souls. Instead, the Renaissance cities’ greatest assets lay in their powerful commercial spirit, their willingness to embrace the classical urban tradition, and, decisively, the creativity to improve upon it.

The Italian cities eagerly embraced the long-abandoned classical notions of civic nationalism. They drew on sources such as Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, a Roman architect from the time of Augustus, whose work was rediscovered early in the fifteenth century. Renaissance city builders enthusiastically devoured Pollio’s notions of the radial concentric city, with a defined core or forum and residential areas extending outward toward the city walls.
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Not content merely to copy old traditions, Renaissance urban visionaries such as Leon Battista Alberti, Antonio Averlino, and Leonardo da Vinci advanced the old Roman art of urban infrastructure, developing new techniques for the construction of defensive fortifications and canals. Filled with pride in their accomplishments, the Italian urban centers— like their classical counterparts—vied with one another in fashioning the most arresting urban landscapes.

In this competition among cities, none exceeded Venice. With its magnificent Grand Canal, Loggia, and Rialto, the city became, as the historian Jacob Burckhardt put it, “the jewel box of the world.”
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Equally important, Venice also presaged the ultimate shape of the modern city, the greatness of which stems primarily from its economic power. Venice paid for its opulence not through imperial conquest or by its position as a sacred center. Instead, its wealth—like that of Phoenicia— derived almost entirely from its commercial prowess.

The city’s origins certainly were plebeian. No dominant religious or imperial figure forged the way to Venice’s ascent to greatness. Its own founding myth had little of saints or heroes; the first Venetians were said to be Roman refugees who hid amid the area’s marshy islands during a barbarian assault in 421.

From this small band of exiles, the Venetians developed their own urban culture, with each island parish serving as a neighborhood. Their fronts facing the sea, their backs to the mouth of the Po River, the Venetians developed skills as expert fishermen, traders, and seafarers.

Venice’s outward thrust initially relied on close ties with Byzantium. Links to the great city gave Venice unique access to the riches of the Levant at a time when most Europeans were largely isolated. Eventually, the Venetians chafed at imperial restrictions on their activities, which were interfering with their profits. Determined to go their own way, they established their own independent republic around 1000.

Essentially an elected oligopoly, the republic was run largely as a business concern, quick to take advantage of trade anywhere profits could be made.
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The Venetians developed a reputation for being self-serving in both business and politics. They traded with the Muslims when most of Christendom engaged them in bitter armed combat. In 1204, they took full advantage of the seizure of Byzantium by the Crusaders to further consolidate their hold on the eastern Mediterranean.
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Venetian ships eventually controlled Europe’s trade not only with the Arabs, but, frequently through Islamic and Jewish middlemen, also with India, South Asia, and China.

Not content to be merely middlemen or financiers, the Venetians also developed an elaborate production base, further enhancing the city’s economy. Long before the notion of specialized “industrial districts” became widespread elsewhere in the West, the Venetians broke up their neighborhoods along distinct functional lines, with specific residential and industrial communities for shipbuilding, munitions, and glassmaking. By the fourteenth century, more than sixteen thousand people worked in these varied industries, making Venice not only the West’s trader and banker, but its workshop as well.
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By the early sixteenth century, this combination of commerce and industry had transformed Venice into by far the wealthiest city in Europe.
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More remarkable still was the city’s distinctly cosmopolitan character. At a time when most of Europe was darkened by intolerance and violence toward strangers, Venice offered foreigners a “haven of comparative security.”
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Merchants from Germany, Jews and Greek Christians from the Levant, and other outsiders crowded Venice’s streets, bringing goods, ideas, and techniques to the city.
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The other Italian cities vied with Venice in the competition for money, talent, and industrial supremacy. Florence challenged Venetian supremacy in everything from banking to the textile trade. The Genoese battled for control of Mediterranean commerce. Smaller cities such as Prato concentrated on dominating specific industrial niches.
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The city-states were governed in many ways, more often than not despotically. Rival factions among the guilds, merchants, aristocrats, and clergy vied for control of the cities, often overturning one another with frequency. Yet the break with imperial and ecclesiastical traditions was clear; once again the city remained the supreme value, the basis for all political decisions. Regulations, particularly in reference to commerce, were designed for the economic benefit of the city, or its most powerful citizens, even if they violated traditional concepts of canon law.
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In this often contentious setting, urban politics of a distinctly modern type now arose. The Medicis of Florence can be seen as precursors of modern urban political bosses. Their power rested largely on their ability to deliver largesse to their factions and the populace at large. They were acutely opportunistic: The Medicis’ primary goal was not the propagation of faith or even the building of a great empire, but achieving for themselves and their city the highest possible level of material wealth.

Throughout northern Italy, urbanites now began to experience a level of affluence that by some modern estimates exceeded that of classical Rome.
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Niccolò de Rossi, a nobleman studying law in Bologna in the fourteenth century, captured the frankly materialistic spirit of the times:

Money makes the man,
Money makes the stupid pass for bright,
Money buys the treasury of sins,
Money shows.
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Such cynicism revealed what was becoming a critical weakness of the Italian city-states. As they grew more affluent, the Italian cities gradually lost the internal cohesion and intense civic spirit that had undergirded their rise. Having cut themselves off from the ecclesiastical orientation of their medieval past, they also began to lose their classical sense of virtue and moral cohesion. “Blind cupidity,” warned Dante early in the fourteenth century, would doom them:

The new people and sudden gains have begot in Thee, Florence, arrogance and excess so that Thou weepest for it!
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By Dante’s time, many prominent Florentines, Venetians, and Genoese inherited most of their wealth from previous generations. Seeking higher returns, and contemptuous of work, they spent their fortunes either on their pastoral estates or in ventures outside the city.
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As capital flowed elsewhere, formerly comfortable artisans descended into a growing propertyless proletariat. The old guild structure buckled further as the remaining industrialists farmed out their work to unorganized peasants in the countryside or to other countries.
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These internal problems weakened the city-states just as they faced the revival of new imperial centers that were increasingly stirred by strong nationalistic sentiments. By the 1600s, these cities—London, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Vienna—increasingly challenged the supremacy of the city-states. Other, more modest capitals such as Berlin,
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Copenhagen, and Warsaw also began to achieve significant size.
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Like the Sumerian, Phoenician, and Greek city-states before them, Italy’s independent municipalities, particularly as they lost their moral cohesion, could not compete alone against urban centers drawing on broader human and material resources. This proved their undoing. For all their artistic and commercial genius, the Italians lacked the collective will that might have allowed them to ward off the new challengers.