During the barbarian invasions, when European society broke down into selfsustaining feudal units, the old cities lost most of their commerce along with much of their population. But by the 11th Century, the revival of long-distance trade was stirring up commercial activity at the local level. This process was set in motion by a new breed of traveling men, the professional merchants. When winter halted their journeys, they gathered in crude trading communities which soon grew into thriving towns. Countless people were lured to these settlements by new opportunities for work and profit, and by a freedom born of the trader's mobility. Within a century, these dynamic towns were pioneering such modern institutions as representative government, banking and capitalism.
Walled Burgs and Burghers
Many medieval towns took root beside a burg, or fortified place, situated on a river or seacoast. Here their merchant-founders were both conveniently based for trade and reasonably safe from marauders. Some burgs were small castles. Others were citadels as large as Carcassonne, whose mile-long
Ramparts (above) still ring a broad hilltop in southern France.
Outside the burg, the mercantile settlers built a market and homes—and then enclosed their town, the new burg, in walls of its own. The people within these walls soon acquired a definitive name. To distinguish them from the knights, clerics and
Serfs who resided in old burgs or unwalled villages, the people of the new towns were called burgers in German, burgesses in English, bourgeois in French. At first these terms embraced all economic levels. That they came to denote middle-class affluence was testimony to the new burgs' spectacular success.
World History
