Cities, Medieval

Late Antiquity

Medieval Europe began with the fall of the Roman Empire. In the fourth century CE, the emperor Constantine moved the capital and his court from Rome to Byzantium (later renamed Constantinople in his honor, now modern Istanbul). Many nobles and important officials followed the emperor east, resulting in a weakened infrastructure throughout the western portions of the empire (modern France, Spain, Britain, and Italy). This instability, combined with invasions of Germanic tribes from across the Rhine River, caused a depopulation of many urban centers throughout Europe. Cities, formerly centers of culture and community, often lost contact with their neighbors or were simply abandoned.

This urban degradation gradually continued as western Europe fell further outside the control of the empire. Small communities would remain, but they would not come close to their former size and prosperity for a millennium.

Development of the Medieval City

Geographic location helped to determine the development of the medieval city. Originally, the cities on the Mediterranean were located farther away from the Germanic invasions and therefore were able to both internally and collectively preserve some of their cultural continuity. Many of these cities, such as Venice, Naples, and Amalfi, used their proximity to the sea to maintain connections with each other and the Byzantine east. As a result, these cities were able to prosper and even flourish.

The northern portions of the former empire suffered from their location near the German border, and many of the existing cities were sacked or destroyed. For the surviving urban areas, these invasions created a breakdown of trade structures and weakened the bonds between towns. This increased isolation, combined with a lack of incoming trade goods, made the tenuous existence of northern European cities even more fragile.

Many of the Germanic tribes gradually began to establish small, semicohesive kingdoms and communities throughout Europe. Their communities were bonded by kinship and German law, which sought common consensus when faced with factionalism, rather than Roman law, which depended on the arbitration of a powerful centralized state. Two of the most durable were the Visigothic kingdom in Spain and the Merovingian kingdom in France; however, many other tribal bands, including the Ostrogoths, Angles, and Saxons, also interwove their cultural heritage into former weakened, abandoned, or destroyed Roman communities.

Not until the reign of Charlemagne (742–814 CE) did cities begin to reacquire some of their previous significance. Charlemagne's growing empire required a large bureaucracy to sustain it, and cities gradually became administrative and cultural centers. In addition, due to the introduction of the church school, cities became centers of learning. Under Charlemagne's rule, much of the former western empire entered a peaceful, prosperous age. Cities reestablished connections, and a sense of community was restored. Europe began to return to a cultural level that had not been seen since the days of Constantine.

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