Mediterranean Cities

The Mediterranean as a Bridge: Cities from Antiquity to the Renaissance

The Mediterranean was the cradle of Europe, according to a mythical narrative placing its epicenter on the island of Crete to the south of Hellas. Even before the period of written history, civilizations around the Mediterranean were distinctively urban. There were only a few rural monuments in the Minoan civilization, and that was also true of all Aegean civilizations, including the Cycladic and the Mycenian ones. Towns were animated by the sea as ports of trade and centers of weaving and other crafts, until the city-state emerged: the Greek polis, then the Latin urbs and civitas.

Miletus had earlier developed much of Greek civilization and scientific wisdom, but the most impressive early Mediterranean city was Athens in [Page 494]the fifth century BC, which has been a riddle for the density and excellence of intellectual, political, and cultural development in a mere century. In ancient Athens, a citizen, politis, was the resident of the city, polis, which developed a political culture of democracy, contrasting with earlier but also later periods of the same and other city-states. Renaissance Venice and Florence were enlightened tyrannies or paternalistic societies.

After the classical period, the Macedonian Empire constituted the first pan-Mediterranean empire; it transformed spatialities from city-states and their colonies to empires and their capital cities and introduced multicultural imaginations through interaction with the Orient after the wars, which also shifted the identities of conquerors. Alexander the Great expanded Hellas into Asia and created a Europe with an Oriental thrust, mapping from the Nile to the Indus, and the opposite spatiality of Rome, which soon would face to the West and return to the Mediterranean. Alexander introduced and in fact built capital cities, after living through a functional differentiation among three Macedonian ones: Pella was the main capital, political–administrative seat, and birthplace of the kings; Vergina was the economic–cultural capital; and Dion was the religious one. The seven Alexandrias (named after Alexander the Great), from the Nile through the Persian Gulf to the junction of the Acesines and Indus rivers, were also capital cities in their respective regions. However, the impressive Macedonian Empire was fragmented after Alexander's death at 32 in 322 BC.

...