As the civic councillors of Florence, Venice, Bruges and Barcelona were alike aware, both urban self-expression and urban political power were always dependent on a local economy prosperous enough to generate exceptional wealth, albeit always unequally, among their citizens. To that extent, it is appropriate enough that economic considerations have come to obsess most modern historians of the fifteenth-century town. In particular, an ever-more sophisticated concentration upon late medieval demographic problems has begun to hold out some hope of discovering approximately how urbanised pre-Reformation Europe actually was. Admittedly, the more closely the original sources for most published population statistics are examined, the more doubts arise as to the reliability of the data, not to mention the additional distortions necessarily created by the highly uneven prevalence of tax evasion, by the vagaries of rural immigration and by extreme yearly variations in birth and mortality rates. Those allowances duly made, it seems clear enough that the fifteenth century was generally not one of impressive demographic expansion among the towns of Christendom, nor indeed in any region thereof. Of the twenty-seven or so urban centres likely to have contained a resident population of more than 40,000 in 1500, only five (Venice, Milan, Naples, Paris and probably Constantinople) seem to have sustained more than 100,000 inhabitants. The other twenty-two largest European cities at that date also include few surprises among their number: they tended to be concentrated either in Italy (Florence, Genoa, Bologna, Brescia, Cremona, Rome, Naples and Palermo) or the Iberian peninsula (Barcelona, Valencia, Cordova, Granada, Seville and Lisbon). To these should be added a few major regional entrepots elsewhere, namely in France (Lyons, Rouen and Toulouse), the German Reich (Cologne and Augsburg), the Low Countries (Ghent and Antwerp) and even one (London) in the kingdom of England. There are, however, reasonable grounds for supposing that nearly all of these major European towns still possessed fewer inhabitants in 1500 than they had done on the eve of the first outbreak of the Black Death in 1348—9. It is accordingly hard to avoid the familiar paradox that one of the most creative ages in the history of the European city had been accompanied by a dramatic fall and then stagnation in the number of the citizens themselves.
However, demographic analysis of late medieval towns has its well-known dangers, above all if it suggests that there need be a direct correlation between the size of a town’s population and its economic productivity and influence. To a limited extent the same reservation must inevitably apply to the scores of middle-ranking regional urban centres — of perhaps a population of between 10,000 and 40,000 — which were usually of more direct significance to members of the predominantly rural population of the period than the ‘metropolitan’ cities already mentioned. During the century and more after the Black Death many of the almost innumerable small market towns of Europe continued to suffer severely from the contraction of the local population they served; but the larger regional centres, like Breslau and Basle, Narbonne and Norwich, were now able to compensate by providing their clients with more diversified economic services, above all by offering a wider range of luxury or semi-luxury goods for sale, than ever before. However, where successive outbreaks of plague made the industrial activities of a particular town impossible to sustain at their customary level, such comparative prosperity gradually ceased to exist. No fifteenth-century town council could ever face with equanimity the decline of its most important manufacturing crafts and their associated retailing facilities. In particular, most of the textile workers of western and central European towns apparently found it progressively more difficult to maintain their traditional production of woollen cloth at pre-Black Death levels. By 1400, Florence, Ghent and Ypres were already providing the best-known examples of serious industrial decline for such a reason; but it is less often appreciated that in the case of many other towns the decline of woollen manufacturing continued well into the fifteenth century. At Louvain in Brabant, for instance, the number of cloths produced fell from over 2,000 pieces a year in 1400 to only 200 pieces in 1500. As a flourishing woollen textile industry was in effect a sine qua non for the prosperity of nearly all late medieval urban communities, the instability of the market for manufactured cloths in the fifteenth century presented many towns with their greatest economic problem. How far the decline in the cloth production of well-established urban centres was compensated for by other manufacturing industries, notably perhaps by linen weaving and the increasingly abundant ‘new draperies’, still remains a controversial issue. However, there seems little doubt that during the course of the century the traditional woollen textile industries of England, the Netherlands and Italy showed a marked tendency to migrate from the town to the rural hinterland. By 1500 the poorer inhabitants of north European towns were often wearing clothing manufactured in the Polish, Silesian or Bohemian countryside.
In at least some fifteenth-century towns the erosion of their traditional manufacturing base could however be redressed, as will be seen, by industrial innovation in the field of such luxury commodities as merceries, arms and armour and other metal objects. More important still for many of the middle-ranking and smaller towns of Europe was their continued and now often much-expanded role as administrative centres. Here much the most dramatic if unique example is that afforded by the impact of successive popes on the city of Rome after Eugenius IV returned to more or less permanent residence there in 1443. Within fifty years from that date, a previously semi-derelict and chronically undeveloped city had become the undisputed ‘civitas sacerdotalis et regia’ of the known world, with a resident population of some 50,000 inhabitants. Elsewhere in Europe, however, the archbishops and bishops of Christendom — even at Cologne or Mainz — were now usually less important than their chapters in influencing the welfare of their cathedral cities. From Santiago to Salzburg and from Toledo to Trier, the material appetites of those chapters, and of the many other members of the cathedral clergy, often did much to protect urban communities from the complete disintegration of their economic position during the century after the Black Death. In even more cases the proximity of a large Benedictine monastery was so crucial to the welfare of its neighbouring town that the burgesses were utterly dependent for their own livelihood on supplying the monks with provisions and a local labour force. In such cases, as at the cathedral towns of Durham in northern England or of Roskilde in Denmark, the leading members of urban society tended to be neither merchants nor craftsmen but rather family dynasties of clerks or notaries who provided the cathedral chapter with secretarial and legal assistance.
Other cities, usually much less fortunately, owed their prominence in the fifteenth century to their role as garrison towns. Even in Italy the course of military operations was usually too erratic and unpredictable to warrant the creation of permanent new towns for purposes of war alone; but there were many European cities, like Carlisle in north-western England, which lived under the ever-present threat of armed assault and tended to be dominated by members of the local nobility and gentry for that reason. Much more remarkable were the effects of war and politics on the fortunes of Calais, in the more or less secure possession of the English crown throughout the fifteenth century and in many ways the most curious urban community anywhere in Europe during this period. Even at Calais, however, with its large if often transient population and its role as the centre of the English Company of the Staple, political influence was not sufficient to guarantee genuine urban selfsufficiency and growth. Much more significant for the future was the evolution of princely ‘capitals’ in Germany and in eastern Europe. Charles IV’s rapid success in developing a Bohemian political and cultural capital at Prague in the 1340s had an incalculable effect in stimulating the rulers of other central European principalities to do likewise. The University of Prague, for example, was the first university to be founded within the German Reich (1348): by the eve of the Reformation there were almost twenty universities east of the Rhine, all deliberately located by princes in their leading towns. Nor was such an increasingly obsessive search on the part of lay rulers for a permanent capital absent in western Europe, either; but it was in the east, and especially perhaps at Moscow under Ivan III (1462—1505), that it reached its greatest climax.
In fact, neither Prague, Vienna, Cracow nor Moscow was a novel urban creation of the fifteenth century. Indeed it can hardly be a coincidence that fewer ‘new towns’, in either the juridical or economic sense of that ambiguous phrase, seem to have been founded between 1400 and 1500 than at any time since at least the eleventh century. During the later Middle Ages the more peripheral parts of western Europe, like Ireland, Norway and Sweden (where there were only five towns with a population of as many as 1,000 inhabitants) were almost deurbanised. In most of Scandinavia the prospects for a genuinely effective urban network were in effect postponed until the seventeenth century. It seems equally clear that throughout the whole of eastern central Europe even the free royal towns of the region ‘had failed to live up to their earlier promise’. Similarly, the most striking feature of Scottish urban history in the fifteenth century was not at all a widespread urban renaissance but rather ‘the continual rise of Edinburgh’. Nor was Scotland untypical in this respect. As so many of the provincial towns of late medieval Europe continued to wrestle with the problems of a shrinking industrial base and of inadequate recruitment from the surrounding countryside, so the increased concentration of economic influence and political power within the walls of a few already ‘over-mighty’ cities is everywhere apparent. Thus in fifteenth-century Sweden the town of Stockholm contained a population of approximately 7,000 inhabitants, far greater than that of any other town in the country. The ever-increasing dominance of London, and of London merchants, within the kingdom of England provides a striking example of the same phenomenon; but so too — to compare small things with great — does the rise to greater ascendancy than ever before of the outstandingly wealthy family clans of the larger north Italian cities.
Although many contemporary London, Parisian and Florentine observers often seem to have doubted the fact, it now seems clear enough that it was the most substantial of European cities before the Black Death which remained best placed to face the serious economic challenges of the fifteenth century. In particular, it was Genoa, Florence, Milan and Venice which emerged as the greatest residuary legatees of the demographic disasters which had engulfed their markets and themselves so often and so mercilessly. As the demand for basic foodstuffs declined throughout much of western Christendom, so the market for more luxurious manufactured goods and the commodities of international trade — a market which only the largest commercial centres could fully satisfy — became even more significant than it had always been. Such was the opportunity seized, in dramatic and often spectacular fashion, by the already well-experienced Italian merchants of the age. Despite the intermittently serious competition presented by the ports of Catalonia and southern France, to all intents and purposes the Mediterranean remained an ‘Italian lake’ until the crippling reverses suffered by the Venetians (including the loss of their strategic headquarters at Modon in the Morea) during the Turkish War of 1499—1503. Nevertheless, the ability of the Venetian and Genoese merchants of the fifteenth century to withstand the ultimately inexorable pressure of the Ottoman Empire for so long is only one of many symptoms of a resilience which made them famous throughout Europe. Perhaps the collapse of the Medici bank at Florence in 1494, less than twenty years after the liquidation of its most important agencies at London, Bruges and Avignon, suggests that by then even the richest Italian cities were suffering from a lack of capital for intensive industrial and commercial investment. However, the Italian urban cloth industry still continued to flourish, even if its exports were primarily confined within the Mediterranean basin, to the kingdom of Naples, to Rome and not least to the Ottoman Empire itself. By 1489 the Florentine government was able to send to Egypt highly worked cloth and other luxury items of the sort which — ironically enough — had been the pride of Islam itself a century earlier.
Wherever technical expertise and technological initiative were at a premium, the workshops of northern Italian cities accordingly continued to impress — and often astound — visitors from elsewhere. During a period sometimes categorised as Europe’s ‘first age of iron’, the reputation of Milanese arms and armour continued to withstand increasingly severe competition from Augsburg and other southern German towns: it is, for example, in a contemporary suit of arms of the highest Milanese workmanship that Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, was represented in his celebrated life-size coppereffigy of c. 1449. Shipbuilding, like the production of arms, armour and artillery, was naturally among the most cost-intensive fields of entrepreneurial experiment in the major Italian cities of the period; but so too was investment in new ways of increasing energy itself. In 1416 an engineer from Rhodes applied to the city of Venice for a monopoly in the use of a new type of fulling mill, ‘probably the first case of a patent granted to an inventor’. In yet another and more neglected field of invention, recently described as being quite as significant as the mechanical loom or the steam engine, it was Florence which by the 1450s had become the undisputed ‘optical capital of the world’. In 1462 the duke of Milan was already ordering expensive Florentine eyeglasses by the hundred to give as presents to his friends and courtiers. At yet another extreme, the success of fifteenth-century Italian cities in applying reason as well as technical facility to that most fundamental of urban preoccupations, town defence, gradually revolutionised the art of war from the Mediterranean to the English Channel. Between 1485 and 1495 Ivan III of Moscow was already employing military architects from Bologna and elsewhere to rebuild the Kremlin as an enormous north Italian fortress erected in the heart of Russia.
Nowhere was the ascendancy of the north Italian merchant more remarkable, and to have greater long-term consequences, than in the sphere of trading and banking organisation. In a century when economic circumstances were often less than propitious for sustained commercial success, in their different ways the leading citizens of Venice, Genoa and Florence weathered a succession of crises by means of a sophisticated pratica della mercatura unrivalled north of the Alps. Above all, perhaps, north Italian businessmen found it possible to combine extreme complexity of commercial techniques (a wide variety of partnership contracts, the insurance of goods in transit, the use of monopolies, the ubiquity of credit arrangements) with an approach to trading sufficiently flexible and small scale to foster a genuinely entrepreneurial spirit. To take only the most famous example, during Cosimo de’ Medici’s period of political ascendancy (1434—64), the Medici bank in Florence became something of a central holding company with important subsidiary and almost autonomous branches dispersed throughout much of Europe. The Florentine mercantile companies accordingly pioneered the critical transition, fully visible by the fifteenth century, whereby the money changers of the most commercially active European towns developed into what amounted to directors of private banks. Not surprisingly, even north Italian bankers sometimes failed to cope satisfactorily with international exchange problems and the chronic, if intermittent, bullion shortages of the period. Nevertheless, their financial skills and their high degree of literacy ensured that in most respects they remained the unquestionable financial elite of late medieval European urban activity.
Certainly no citizens of fifteenth-century Christendom were more influential than these Italian merchants; and by 1500 they were settled in resident communities within at least twenty towns outside Italy itself, ranging from southern Germany (Augsburg, Ulm, Ravensburg, Nuremberg and Trent) and the Iberian peninsula (Barcelona, Valencia, Seville and Lisbon) to the most important commercial centres in north-west Europe (London, Paris, Rouen, Bruges and Antwerp). In these and the other major urban centres north of the Alps at the end of the century, patterns of urban development are usually much more mysterious than in Italy itself, still often impossible to explain, indeed, except in highly localised terms. Perhaps the most interesting, and most neglected, example of such uncertainties in Europe as a whole is provided by the obscurity which still tends to shroud the history of the very large number of substantial cities in Spain and Portugal. By the fifteenth century there are grounds for believing that over 15 per cent of the total population in the Iberian peninsula were town dwellers. Always a heavily urbanised region of Europe, the gradual reconquest of southern Spain from the Moors (culminating in the surrender of Granada in 1492) was accompanied by increased urban and demographic expansion. By the end of the fifteenth century, trade through the Iberian ports was almost exclusively in the hands of local merchants. Admittedly, Catalonia’s previously important commercial relations with the eastern Mediterranean diminished in the years after 1450, partly because of fierce competition from the Genoese and partly because of periods of high mortality and political conflict in Barcelona. The most prosperous city in Aragon had accordingly now become Valencia, the site of a reborn silk industry with close links to Granada. Much more significant for the future was dramatic urban expansion along the Atlantic littoral, where Seville, Cadiz and Lisbon were already thriving ports before the great maritime discoveries of the 1490s. In 1503 Ferdinand V of Aragon had no difficulty in appreciating that Seville, the site of the largest Gothic church in the world, was also ideally suited to be the site of the Casa de Contratacion: no European city was to have greater responsibility for the relations between the old and the new worlds.
More important for the fifteenth century, however, and long before the Genoese Christopher Columbus returned to the Spanish court in March 1493 with news of his great discovery, was the comparatively sudden emergence of long-established south German cities as the industrial giants of the European continent. One of the less predictable triumphs of business acumen in fifteenth-century Europe, the famous trading companies of Augsburg, Ravensburg and Nuremberg owed much of their success to their freedom from external intervention and even more to their proximity to the copper and silver mines of Slovakia, Hungary, Bohemia and the Tyrol. Accordingly, the metallurgical industries of Nuremberg in particular provided much of northern Europe with such invaluable commodities as body armour and crossbows, as compasses and hand mirrors. Like nearly all business partnerships of the fifteenth century, the Great Company of Ravensburg (1380—1530), the Stromer of Nuremberg (1340—1490) and the Welser and Fugger of Augsburg traded in all the products for which a market existed. However, although their economic horizons were vast, the fortunes and very survival of these south German companies were dangerously dependent upon the continued existence of the urban family structures which had brought them into being. By contrast, German urban craftsmen, fortunate no doubt to be so often the inhabitants of imperial or ‘free’ cities, were even more fortunate in being able to profit from a growing demand throughout northern Europe for the products of the latest technology. It was such craftsmen, for example, who did more than their counterparts elsewhere to popularise the use of mechanical clocks as these were adopted with such enthusiasm by cathedrals and municipalities everywhere in the years before and after 1400.
Such technological skill was a less notable feature of the northern German cities of the period; and, for that as well as more fundamental reasons, throughout the fifteenth century many towns within the Hanseatic League were hard put to maintain their cohesion and prosperity in a situation of gradually diminishing returns. Naval and political pressures from south, west and east gradually restricted the sphere of operations of north German merchants themselves; and in 1478 Ivan III’s conquest of Novgorod (where in 1336 there had been as many as 160 Hanseatic traders settled within the Peterhof) deprived northern Europe of its most important outpost in the east. However, it is a common error to write off the considerable economic power of the Hanseatic League long before it had actually begun to disintegrate. The diplomatic and naval reverses which they undoubtedly suffered often had the effect of reviving cohesion among those sixty or so Wendish towns on the southern Baltic coast which formed the core of the Hanseatic League. Despite the latter’s notorious military and constitutional fragility (during the second half of the fifteenth century the League’s general assembly or Hansetag only met once every six or seven years), from 1400 onwards it showed considerable tenacity in fighting what perhaps only in retrospect seems a losing battle. By means of an adroit combination of piracy on the one side and aggressive diplomacy on the other, English attempts to penetrate the Baltic were usually held in check; and as late as 1449 nearly half the fleet trading for salt in the Bay of Bourgneuf was comprised of Hanseatic ships. Although never sizeable cities by Italian standards, towards the close of the fifteenth century Lubeck (always at the centre of the League’s operations), Bremen and Hamburg were all benefiting from substantial immigration from the north German countryside and had resident populations of over 20,000. Nevertheless, by the 1490s when Ivan III confiscated the goods of all Germans resident at the Peterhof, and Danzig was becoming an important port in its own right, the international power of the merchant oligarchies who ruled the Hanseatic towns was already in obvious decline.
By contrast, if there is any one development which did more than others to alter the patterns of urban development in northern Europe during the late fifteenth century, the rapid growth and subsequent ascendancy of Dutch shipping is perhaps the most neglected but most influential of all. Increasingly more successful in handling the carrying trade across the North Sea than their English rivals, by the end of the century cheaply built ships from Holland and Zeeland dominated north Atlantic as well as Baltic waters. Although such intensive maritime activity rapidly began to transform the nature of urban life in the northern Netherlands, it did not necessarily create large new towns as such. As late as 1498, the town of Leyden, which owed its fortunes almost entirely to its woollen industry, was still much the largest town (14,240 inhabitants) in the whole of Holland and Zeeland. Nevertheless, there is no doubt at all that the fifteenth century witnessed the progressive urbanisation of the northern Low Countries at the gradual expense of the once highly industrialised cities of Flanders (Ghent, Ypres, Douai and Lille) and Artois (Saint-Omer and Arras itself). Even Bruges, at the height of its influence as a commercial and banking centre as well as an entrepot for the sale of luxury goods during the first decades of the century, was soon to lose its primacy to Antwerp. As late as the 1470s, both the English economy and English visual culture, too, were heavily dependent upon an extraordinary variety of expensive imports from Bruges, ranging from alum and dyestuffs to devotional paintings and highly accomplished illuminated manuscripts. During the next thirty years, however, Antwerp was not only to replace but to overshadow Bruges as the greatest international emporium northern Europe had yet seen.
The rise of Antwerp to great city status between the 1470s and the 1540s was generally regarded by contemporaries as the most dramatic urban phenomenon of their age. Quite how such a comparatively small Scheldt port, with a population of not much more than 5,000 at the beginning of the fifteenth century, came to dominate the trading activities of all the important commercial nations in Europe is not in fact quite as easy to explain as is often assumed. As late as 1450, when the population of the town had risen to approximately 20,000, it would still have been impossible to predict its forthcoming economic ‘take-off’ as the greatest urban community in the Netherlands. In retrospect, however, it is clear that the burgesses of Antwerp were about to have both political and geographical advantages on their side. The progressive silting of the Zwin hindered maritime access to Bruges just at the time when the Brugeois themselves made the major political mistake of antagonising their overlords, the Valois dukes of Burgundy and their successor, the future Emperor Maximilian. By contrast, the previous limitations of Antwerp’s position as a port (it was — and is — some ninety kilometres from the open sea) were ameliorated by a natural improvement of navigational conditions along the western Scheldt. It was for this reason above all that by 1500 the many neighbouring ports on and around the Rhine estuary, Middelburg, Bergen-op-Zoom, Veere and Arnemuiden, no longer offered a serious alternative to Antwerp as the commercial metropolis of northern Europe. More decisive still was the decision of the Portuguese royal factor to market the products of his countrymen’s oceanic enterprises in Antwerp rather than Bruges. The first consignment of pepper and other oriental goods reached Antwerp from Lisbon in August 1501. By that date, moreover, Antwerp had already become the preferred centre of commercial interchange for English, south German and Portuguese merchants alike. To that extent, and despite its very considerable cloth and herring industries, the sudden prosperity of Antwerp was largely the result of forces and initiatives outside its own control. Although not in fact the ‘capitalistic’ or ‘proto-modern’ city so often eulogised by Henri Pirenne and others, Antwerp none the less experienced a phenomenal expansion in the years before and after 1500 which testifies to its ability to sponsor a new and exhilarating stage in the concentration of international trade.
What the late Fernand Braudel once termed ‘une meilleure organisation des activites urbaines’ is similarly evident, although on a much smaller scale, within the kingdom of France as the latter began to recover from the disasters of the Hundred Years War. It may be doubted whether Louis XI’s exhortatory ‘dialogues’ with the merchants of his realm had any appreciable effect on the economic fortunes of French provincial towns; but at least the closing years of the fifteenth century were ones of considerable regional recovery, based on an expanding rural market for the urban goods produced or sold in the scores of small walled towns scattered throughout France. Above all, perhaps, this was the period when — at long last — the ports of the French kingdom began to play an appreciable role in European commerce. The growth of Marseilles, only now beginning to adopt a major role in Mediterranean trade, together with the increased prosperity of Bordeaux and Rouen, of Dieppe and Saint-Malo, all pointed the way towards Francis I’s creation of the new royal port of Havre-de-Grace (Le Havre) in 1516 and Jacques Cartier’s tentative foundation of a New France across the Atlantic eighteen years later. On the other hand, although most French provincial towns enhanced their role as administrative and social centres during the closing decades of the fifteenth century, it has been argued with some justice that the urban scene in France at the end of the Middle Ages was fraught with lost opportunities. ‘The industrial revolution apparently ready to occur by 1540 did not in fact take place.’ According to their most learned historian, the development of the ‘bonnes villes’ of France from the late fifteenth century onwards is therefore essentially a case study in the ‘trahisons des bourgeois’ when confronted with the centralising appetites of a powerful state. As in England, where there were admittedly less valuable prizes to be won, the leading members of French urban society came to be increasingly preoccupied with the status that went with office under the crown and preferred to invest the profits of urban trade and manufactures in landed property. To that extent, the self-assured communities of townsmen who had constituted the bonnes villes of late medieval France were perhaps already divided against themselves and in a state of terminal decline. The bourgeois gentilbomme was about to replace the simple bourgeois as the more influential figure in the history of French art, culture and letters.