While civilization was rising from the ashes in western Europe, Constantinople basked in the glories of a culture unsevered from its classical roots. As capital of the Byzantine Empire, it had been the beacon of Christian civilization throughout the Dark Ages. In the eleventh century, it reached its apogee as one of the world's richest, grandest, and most sophisticated cities.
To the medieval European traveler, the first glimpse of the metropolis was a formidable sight. Its imposing walls towered to heights of forty feet; while above them, on the city's seven hills, a profusion of roofs and domes soared to the crowning glory of the cathedral of Hagia Sophia, the heart of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
Within the city gates, further wonders awaited the newcomer. Here were reservoirs, drains, and columned cisterns; the imperial palace, whose labyrinth of pavilions, chambers, and gardens was filled with mechanical marvels for the monarch's amusement; the Hippodrome, where chariot races drew crowds of as many as 60,000 people; and noble residences with ivory doors, mosaic floors, and costly rugs and furniture. Still more astonishing were the crowds that thronged the streets. At a time when the largest European towns numbered their citizens in the thousands, Constantinople was home to some one million inhabitants. In this city, visitors from the West might see more people in one day than they would in a lifetime at home.
Underlying this magnificence was a history of commercial success. Lying at the heart of the Mediterranean economy, the city had a perfect natural harbor and also stood guard over the great overland trade routes from the Levant, Kievan Russia, and the Far East. Constantinople was the marketplace of the world. Located in its streets of two-story colonnades were shops and workshops of every description: Here, one could buy furs, fine cloth, spices and medicinal drugs, precious stones and metals; while inside the shops, artisans turned raw materials into all manner of finery.
Behind the glittering facade undoubtedly lay squalor, but this could not diminish the city's glories. Its architecture influenced all nations who encountered it: The Basilica of the Holy Apostles, for example, shown below in a twelfth-century illumination, inspired Saint Mark's Cathedral in Venice.
In 1204, when plundering Crusaders sacked the city, much of its splendor went up in smoke. But it would be another two and one-half centuries before this glittering prize finally fell to the Turks of Asia Minor.
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Fire was a constant hazard. Few ordinary houses were constructed of stone or brick. The spaces between their timberwork were filled in with wattle and daub— little more than twigs and plaster—while the roofing was made invariably from straw or reeds. Rows of such tinder-dry buildings would burn within minutes when a fire, ignited by a misplaced candle or a spark on the thatch, swept through the city streets. As a result, many councils issued regulations regarding the construction of buildings. After 1189, it was decreed, Londoners were required to build their houses of stone up to a certain height and roof them with slate or clay tiles. Disasters still occurred, however. In 1212, London Bridge, then crowded with shops and houses, caught fire at both ends. Three thousand bodies were fished out of the Thames River when the conflagration was over.
Teams of firefighters were organized in many large cities, but their buckets and carts were inadequate to combat the inferno that so often roared toward them. Their most effective technique was to tear down burning buildings with special fire hooks in an attempt to stop the blaze from spreading.
Fire had one beneficial result: It destroyed the verminous conditions that created serious health problems in every city. It was not that medieval people were personally unclean. Public baths were an institution that had survived since Roman days. In 1292, Paris had twenty-six such establishments distributed throughout its various quarters. Medieval Florence had three whole streets devoted to bathhouses. It was not until the fifteenth century that public baths became commonly associated with prostitution and fell into disrepute.
Nor were medieval people negligent of the sick or totally ignorant of contagious diseases. Hospitals were important institutions in every major city. Thirteenth-century Florence, with a population of nearly 100,000, had more than 1,000 beds for the sick. Funded by the Church and by private charity, hospitals provided a modicum of cleanliness and quiet for the patients—who often shared beds. These hospitals were frequently no more than almshouses or homes for elderly inmates. Many patients did not emerge alive from their stays, but at least they died in some decency.
But public baths and hospitals were not enough. As poor people continued to pour in from the countryside, medical knowledge and struggling city administrations were totally unable to cope with the resulting problems of sanitation, and by the fourteenth century, the disposal of human waste had reached a crisis point. Only the wealthy had private toilets and cesspits. Most of the population had to dump their ordure into open sewers or onto public dunghills. Even to hardened medieval noses, the stench was sometimes sickening.
City councils enacted strict laws regarding the disposal of waste. "We decree that no one shall throw water into the street, nor any steaming liquid, nor chaff, nor the refuse of grapes, nor human filth, nor bathwater, nor indeed any dirt," officials sternly cautioned the citizens of Avignon. Yet, in poorer districts, an alternative to the street did not exist; besides, lawmakers seldom had the resources to enforce their edicts. Some cities were worse than others. Siena, which had no drains, was particularly notorious. "The town not only stinks every night and morning when people throw their nastiness out of the windows, but even in the day, it is seen lying about the streets," observed a contemptuous Florentine.
No one enjoyed such sights and stenches, but the means to alleviate them were lacking. Paving was one technique that helped reduce the filth. Paris, in 1185, was
Toiling workers pound cobblestones into position outside the walls of their city. By the time this fifteenth-century Flemish manuscript—possibly depicting Brussels—was executed, many European centers had given their muddy thoroughfares a hard surface. The first city to do so was Paris, where municipal funding provided for the paving of main streets in 1185. In the side alleys, however, where the reluctant inhabitants had to pay for their own improvements, the traveler still got dirty feet. Many cities also maintained roads throughout the surrounding countryside in the hope of attracting merchants—and their money—to the neighborhood.
The earliest city to surface its streets with stone. By 1339, all the streets of wealthy Florence were paved, but this was an exception; for the most part, side streets remained unpaved and unserved by sewers. Cleaning up the mess that had begun to accumulate in the medieval city was the work of many centuries.
Water supplies grew dangerously polluted. Early industrial effluent—particularly from the reeking tanneries—could be as noisome as its mid-twentieth-century equivalent. Water from the canals of Antwerp, it was said, killed even the horses thatdrank it. What was worse, wells and fountains grew polluted through seepage from cesspits and graveyards. Collecting rainwater or employing water carriers were two solutions; even better was bringing in pure water by pipe from outside the city.
This last method, however, had the disadvantage of rendering a city vulnerable to sabotage by besieging armies. London, which lived in less fear of attack than most European capitals, brought in water by conduit as early as 1236, "for the poor to drink and the rich to dress their meat." Although it was to be the ultimate solution, piped water was slow to gain general acceptance and did little to solve the immediate problems of disease.
Even more than human excrement and foul water, the greatest bane of European cities was the flea, specifically Xenopsylla cheopis, the pestilent parasite of the black rat. Plagues had swept through Europe before, but the flea-spread bubonic plague of 1348 to 1349, known since as the Black Death, was by far the worst that ever struck. "Many died daily or nightly in the public streets," wrote Giovanni Boccaccio, who witnessed the disaster in his hometown of Florence. "Of many others, who died at home, the departure was hardly observed by their neighbors, until the stench of their putrefying bodies carried the tidings." In all, one-third to one-half of the urban population of Europe died in less than two years' time. And bubonic plague continued to strike in the succeeding centuries. The population of France shortly before the Black Death had been about 21 million; in 1470, it was still only 14 million. City populations were kept artificially high by the continued influx of country-people. Even so, orchards, gardens, and vineyards now appeared within the city walls where the space to build a house had previously been unobtainable. Some believed the plague to be evidence of God's wrath; others diagnosed a release of noxious gases. The real culprits were never even suspected by medieval scientists. And as a result, Xenopsylla cheopis and its unsavory host continued to make themselves at home in the cities of Europe for centuries to come.
Disease, disorder, famine, and fire—the disasters that routinely turned life upside down—failed to dampen the burgher's capacity for enjoying city life. William Fitz-stephen, an English monk, could find only two things wrong with twelfth-century London: drunkenness ("among the foolish sort") and the high risk of fire. Even the Black Death and subsequent plagues could not diminish the patriotism of Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of Florence in the late fourteenth century. "What city, not merely in Italy but in all the world," he wrote, "is more bedecked with churches, more
Beautiful in its architecture, more imposing in its gates, richer in piazzas, happier in its wide streets. . . ?" The list continued.
All citizens loved the opportunity to dress up for a parade or a festival. "A city should not only be commodious and serious, but also merry and sportful," wrote Fitzstephen. There was ample opportunity for fun. Fourteenth-century Europe celebrated approximately fifty saints' days as public holidays each year. Processions typically involved representatives from the whole community winding through the city streets: Nobles and clergy, all the guilds from goldsmiths to cobblers, the night watch, shopkeepers, merchants—even a contingent of widows—participated. Carts lumbered over the cobblestones bearing familiar tableaux from the Bible: the Annunciation, Jonah and the whale, the three kings on their camels. Such formal observances were only part of a holiday. There were feasting and sports for all: Knights and nobles might joust or play tennis; for the ordinary burgher, there were wrestling, archery, soccer, animalbaiting, and even ice-skating—with runners made of bone strapped to the shoes.
And recreation was not confined entirely to one's own city, for medieval men and women had discovered the pleasures of travel. Apart from trade, the principal reason for embarking on a journey was to visit a shrine, cathedral, or other holy place. Frequently, the object of veneration was the relic of a saint or of Christ himself. The capture of Jerusalem by Crusaders in 1099 and the sack of Constantinople in 1204 had released a flood of "genuine" relics onto the medieval tourist circuit. There were two heads of John the Baptist, three crowns of thorns (in Paris alone), Christ's baby teeth, and several separate relics of his circumcision. Fragments of the true Cross abounded—enough "to make a full load for a good ship," the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer John Calvin irascibly observed. Such charlatanism was understandable if not justifiable. Pilgrims were a valuable source of revenue to a bishop hard pressed to complete a cathedral or abbey church.
And indeed, pilgrims had on occasion been the making of whole cities. The French town of Chartres, for example, whose church contained the sacred veil of the Virgin Mary, had grown up solely to cater to the relic seekers who arrived by the thousand. Rome, which boasted of being the "threshold of the Apostles," attracted as many as 50,000 pilgrims annually in the mid-fifteenth century. Equally prestigious as a place of pilgrimage was Saint James of Compostela (now Santiago), which claimed to be the final resting place of James the Apostle. Thousands of international pilgrims traveled the long road to this remote corner of northwest Spain, lining the pockets of landlords and shopkeepers along the way.
The explosion of building that occurred during the Middle Ages was not the only aspect of medieval urban development. A cultural and economic revolution was also under way. Learning, so long cloistered within the monasteries, was now more readily available through schools and higher institutions that were as often secular as religious. Italy had fourteen university towns by the fourteenth century, France had eight, and England two.
Society had grown increasingly complex. Aspiring lawyers were sent to study at a university—Bologna being the most highly regarded in this field—to reach the top of their profession. On a less academic scale, merchants, too, had to be literate and quick with figures, for commerce had become big business. Successful merchants no longer trudged from town to town, selling their goods for cash. They sat in their city
Offices and supervised a team of accountants. They sent money by bills of exchange (guaranteed by one of the great banking houses in Florence or Genoa), insured their cargoes, and insisted on double-entry bookkeeping, which kept them up to date on their financial situation. The Italian peninsula was far more advanced than the rest of Europe in these commercial developments, and Florence—with thirty-three merchant banks in the fifteenth century—was the counting house of Italy. By 1345, some
10,000 young Florentines were learning to read, while more than 1,000 youths were studying arithmetic.
Prosperity and education stimulated curiosity. A wide range of inventions originated in the medieval era, from the striking clock to eyeglasses. People also began experimenting with gunpowder, a Chinese import that was to transform both the science of warfare and the nature of the city. But one area of study was to overshadow all others and result in a fundamental change in the way people regarded the world and their role in it. Strangely, it was an attempt to capture the past that led to the transformation of medieval culture.
Throughout the Middle Ages, scholars had marveled at the achievements of the Roman empire. It was not until the relatively tranquil and prosperous fourteenth century, however, that the study of antiquity made a significant impact on medieval life. While delving into the classical past—often through Muslim translations of ancient treatises—Italian scholars rediscovered an older world of philosophy, literature, and fine arts untouched by Christian tradition. Artists such as Giotto and
A winged lion, the traditional emblem of Saint Mark and the adopted symbol of Venice, recalls the saint's reputed interment there in 829. In the background of this painting by Vittore Carpaccio stands the Doge's Palace, from where the Venetian government controlled Europe's first maritime empire. After the sacking of the city's political and trading mentor, Constantinople, Venetian merchant ships dominated the seas, and colonies were established throughout the Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean. As one observer recorded in the late thirteenth century, "Merchandise passes through this noble city as water flows through fountains."
Michelangelo examined the medieval world with fresh eyes and created works of art that, though inspired by classical civilization, were no less products of their own time. Renaissance—or "rebirth"— this movement has been called. Its influence extended to the city as well.
More than any other nation, the Italians were inordinately proud of their cities. During the Renaissance, they began to see the possibilities of re-creating the architectural marvels that lay in ruins all around them. Architects studied the dimensions of surviving Roman buildings and pored over the work of Vitruvius, whose treatise on architecture, dating from the first century BC, was one of the key textbooks of the Renaissance.
Florentine officials, in particular, eagerly embraced the new ideas of Renaissance architects and town planners. The beauty of their city was an obsession with the Florentines. They welcomed opportunities for straightening and broadening the streets, opening up gracious vistas, clearing the piazzas of untidy shops, and erecting symmetrical palaces in place of the medieval buildings that leaned drunkenly over the pavement. Space and symmetry were the first two commandments of Renaissance town planning.
Private development was also altering the face of Renaissance Florence. The wealthy banking and merchant families, a self-styled aristocracy that essentially ruled the city, demanded houses constructed in the new classical style. Dozens of private palaces, portentous monuments to wealth and vanity, were raised throughout the fifteenth century. Some were individual works of art, but many were grossly at odds with their surroundings. Politically and aesthetically, the private palaces heralded the demise of the medieval city.
By the sixteenth century, a few privileged families had taken over civic administration, depriving ordinary citizens of any role in their destiny. City air no longer brought freedom. Indeed, the original pressing need to live in the city was fast diminishing, for city walls were no longer a guarantee of security. New artillery could shatter medieval fortifications. Powerless to defend themselves against besieging armies, cities surrendered their hard-won freedoms to larger political groupings. The age of the nation-state had arrived. Increasingly, power was concentrated in the nation's capital, a showpiece for ostentatious architecture and grandiose city plans. Medieval cities—the vigorous, independent communities that had transformed the fortunes of the Continent—had become victims of their own success. There was no place for them in the emerging states of modern Europe.
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"Earth has not anything to show more fair," declared the poet William Wordsworth on observing the panorama of London in the early nineteenth century. But for every such accolade to the glamour, glory, or energy of cities, there has been equal condemnation of their squalor, ugliness, and inhumanity. For centuries, artists and writers have acted as antennae of civic emotion, reaching above dry statistics to pick up citizens' own visions of their manmade environment.
As Western civilization emerged from the wreckage of the Roman Empire, so artists steadfastly portrayed the rosy ideals of their age. For medieval citizens, the heavenly city of Jerusalem—always shown as an implausible, glittering, European town-scape—combined urban ambition with religious fervor. Later, the striving of Renaissance architects and town planners to re-create the ideals of classical antiquity was reflected on the canvases of the time: Orderly, serene streets stretched down lines of perfect perspective to capture a golden mean of proportion. Even when these imaginary vistas were replaced by less-fanciful panoramas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, buildings were still shown at their immaculate best, the streets around them teeming with well-scrubbed, healthy poor.
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, however, reality began to blister the veneer of idealism. Cities took on a life of their own, becoming self-propagating conglomerations that defied the boundaries imposed by any single creative vision. In the 1840s, the French poet Charles Baudelaire called for artists to represent "scenes of highlife and of the thousands of uprooted lives that haunt the underworld of a great city." It was not long before his cry was answered.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the monolithic certainty of past ideals had been replaced by an acknowledgment of a city's diversity and of the emotions it could arouse in its inhabitants. London, the splendid capital city that had delighted Wordsworth in 1802, had taken on a different tone just a century later. In 1905, the author Ford 'Madox Ford described how, beneath "thunderclouds, the clouds of buildings, the clouds of corporations— there hurries still the great swarm of tiny men and women, each one hugging desperately his own soul, his own hopes, his own passions, his own individuality."
Both beauty and beast, the modern metropolis had become an entity built as much out of the hopes and fears of its inhabitants as of solid bricks and mortar.
Painted on a wooden chest around 1500, an imaginary Renaissance cityscape shows the geometric symmetry that was intended to represent the perfection of the cosmos and of God.
Painted in 1840 by Anglo-American artist Thomas Cole, The Architect's Dream keeps the harsh reality of industry at bay with a melodramatic fantasy of past splendors.
In an ominous vision of 1914, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by Italian artist Giorgio Ue Chirico, a hoop-rolling girl runs a shadowy gantlet of threat.
Buildings, bridges, and billboards overlap lo create an image of urban restlessness, confidence, and diversity in Fernan Leger's 1919 interpretation entitled The City.
In C. R. W. Nevinson's The Soul of J Soulless City, the dream becomes a nightmare. In this 1920 vista of New York City, a railroad carries the viewer into claustrophobic canyons of skyscrapers that have obliterated nature and have made human emotion invisible.
World History
