In the kingdom of France, about to become the greatest political power on the continent, the ruling elites of the bonnes villes were therefore increasingly conscious that they were no longer in control of their own destinies. Whether or not so bold, and melancholy, a thesis can be applied to western Europe as a whole, it is certainly hard to deny that after 1500 few urban oligarchies anywhere enjoyed the high degree of autonomy and self-confidence so comparatively common among many of their predecessors during the previous two centuries. Indeed, the political history of most fifteenth-century cities, as far as it can be traced amidst their many individual vicissitudes, is probably best interpreted in terms of the rise and fall of such self-confidence. The latter was naturally primarily determined less by the political initiatives of the citizens themselves than by the varying degrees of indifference, neglect or acquisitiveness displayed towards them by their lords and monarchs. As it happened, the unique conjuncture — for half a century after the outbreak of the Great Schism in 1378 — of a divided Papacy, a disintegrating German Reich and a demoralised French monarchy had provided many of the major cities of that period with an opportunity for self-assertion they could hardly resist. Here and there, however, as in Spain and much of northern Germany, urban liberties were strictly subjugated to the will of the prince at a quite early date in the fifteenth century. Within two generations of the enfeoffment of Frederick of Hohenzollern as margrave of Brandenburg in 1417 he and his successors had made a completely successful direct assault on the franchises of towns like Berlin and Frankfurt/Oder. Not the least significant reason for the decline of the authority of the Hanseatic League by 1500 was the exhausting struggle forced upon so many north German towns by their local princes.
Elsewhere in fifteenth-century Europe, most notably in northern Italy and Flanders, the attempts of dukes and princes to impose their authority upon recalcitrant townsmen by armed force tended to be much more intermittent and indeed protracted. It was accordingly often possible, not least in much of Germany itself, for the citizens of many major towns to retain considerable practical independence, sometimes even including the legal right to resist their lord (Widderstandsrecht). By the second half of the fifteenth century delegates from such German towns also often played a leading role in the bewildering variety of representative estates which had come to characterise the government of so many principalities within the Reich. Given the urban patriciate’s natural vested interest in reducing the miseries and economic dislocation caused by war, these assemblies sometimes achieved quite remarkable political successes. In 1492, for example, the estates of Wurttemberg intervened to reunite their duchy after a long period of fratricidal strife; and six years later they carried through a political revolution by deposing their duke for his alleged bad government. However, the limitations of German urban political and military power, even when towns associated themselves with one another in so-called leagues, were already becoming obvious by the end of the century. Only under very special circumstances, as in the extreme case of the town—country alliance against Habsburg oppression which eventually led to the creation of a fully-fledged Swiss Confederation in the early sixteenth century, was there any serious prospect that the towns of Bavaria, Swabia and elsewhere would forget their rivalries sufficiently to attain a common objective.
If the burghers of late medieval German towns have often seemed — to themselves and to posterity — more politically powerful than they actually were, by contrast the citizens of the urban communes of fifteenth-century Italy still exercised greater influence outside their own walls than they sometimes supposed. Thanks to a high degree of literacy and the prevalence of a so-called ‘notarial culture’, large numbers of the inhabitants of the bigger Italian city-states were undoubtedly more ‘politicised’ than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Such political awareness could only be enhanced by the frequency of party divisions within the communities, by the existence of enduring political and military tensions between cities and by the gradual long-term process whereby in the years after 1400 nearly all the smaller city-states of northern Italy fell victim to the territorial appetites of the house of Savoy, of the duchy of Milan, of Genoa, of Florence and of the Republic of Venice. By the end of the century the territorial expansion of these powers, in many ways the logical extension of the Italian city’s traditional obsessive quest for an economically adequate hinterland or contado, had extended the authority of Florence from Pisa to Pistoia and from Volterra to Cortona. Much more spectacular were Venetian acquisitions in the Lombard plain during the eighty years between 1404 and 1484: as these included cities as celebrated as Padua and Vicenza, as Brescia and Bergamo, they inevitably did much to transform the greatest sea-power of medieval Christendom into a land-based empire, too.
Although an Italian townsman’s loyalty to his own city usually remained — as today — little jeopardised by this process of apparent political centralisation, it was clear enough to contemporaries that supreme authority in northern Italy was becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Such a development seems equally apparent within the walls of most Italian cities themselves, especially in the case of the many late medieval communes which fell under the rule or so-called tyranny of hereditary rulers who presented themselves (on more or less dubious grounds) as defenders of their city against external aggression and as custodians of civic peace. A dramatic but not too untypical an example is the way in which Francesco Sforza, a condottiere general married to a bastard daughter of the Visconti family, imposed his authority on most aspects of public life at Milan after he became duke there in 1450. But it would be unwise to exaggerate either the autocracy or even the aggressiveness of the late medieval signoria. After Sforza and the Republic of Venice had come to terms at the Peace of Lodi in 1454, relations between the various north Italian city-states were normally conducted by means of energetic diplomacy rather than by war. In many ways Machiavelli, Guicciardini and others were correct to interpret the period before the long-threatened French invasion in 1494 as a golden age for political liberty in the Italian city. Genuinely radical popular movements were admittedly less common than they had been in the decades immediately before and after 1400; but the existence of a widely diffused civic consciousness, the survival of substantial local franchises and the proximity of a restless nobility continued to provide fifteenth-century Italian townsmen with an endlessly volatile sense of political excitement unmatched elsewhere in Europe.
Indeed, the emergence of a genuinely novel urban ideology, now usually known as ‘civic humanism’, within the city of Florence at the beginning of the century had been the outcome of exactly such political excitement. More precisely, and according to the most influential explanation of the origins of the Florentine ‘renaissance’, the sudden rise of Giangaleazzo Visconti to mastery over the whole of Lombardy during the 1380s not only confronted Tuscan cities with the prospect of a massive military onslaught but allegedly made several members of the Florentine ruling elite fear for the very survival of their city. As a consequence, Coluccio Salutati (1331—1406) and his exceptionally talented successors as chancellors of Florence responded by creating the most ingenious urban propaganda yet produced in medieval Christendom. On the basis of the highly dubious analogies which it was now possible to draw between early fifteenth-century Florence and Republican Rome, it became relatively easy to argue not only that republicanism was inherently superior to the rule of one prince, but also that the Florentine constitution had inherited the values and virtu advocated so eloquently by Cicero. Not only did Salutati, Leonardo Bruni and many other members of the Florentine intelligentsia extol the moral virtues of republican liberty in Ciceronian terms but they went on, by a logical progression, to advocate the fundamental importance of the via activa rather than the contemplative ideal in private as well as public life. In the words borrowed from Cicero himself which Vittorino da Feltre addressed to a Camaldolese monk later in the century, ‘the whole glory of man lies in activity’.
However, although the fifteenth-century Italian cities, and the early Florentine humanists in particular, were undoubtedly responsible for ‘this enormous change in moral atttitudes’, so profound an ideological upheaval rarely provided European towns with what one might call a coherent political agenda. Even in Florence itself the emergence of such a programme during the years before and after 1400 was as much the result of a unique and transient conjuncture of social and intellectual forces within the internal life of the city as of the fear of military aggression by the Visconti. Sooner or later most substantial cities of late medieval Europe, not least in Italy itself after the French invasion of 1494, had to face the dangers of external intervention at the hands of an over-attentive prince. In few of these cases can it be said that the towns in question managed to develop a radical new urban ideology of opposition on the Florentine or indeed any other model. The German towns of the fifteenth century, for example, despite their considerable degree of practical independence and a series of long-standing myths to the contrary, ‘lived in a state of immense, defensive conservatism’. More revealing still, perhaps, the destructive impact of war and conquest on the city of Paris (under English control from 1420 to 1436) completely failed to produce a sophisticated literature of protest or complaint on the part of the so-called intellectual headquarters of medieval Christendom. However well educated and culturally aware many fifteenth-century townsmen undoubtedly were, by 1500 Florentine ‘civic humanism’ would have seemed increasingly irrelevant to their practical political objectives. At the end of the century Italian Renaissance values had in any case already proved highly adaptable to the purposes of the princely court: and by a final irony the most distinctive ideological movement created within the orbit of the late medieval town had begun to subserve the purposes of kings and nobles rather than town councils. Perhaps only Venice continued to offer post-medieval Europe a significant memorial to the grandiose urban political ambitions it had now lost.
If not a paradigm for the future, what the fifteenth-century town does provide is the first serious opportunity in European history to probe the depths of urban society itself. It is in the field of economic and social analysis, despite the many intractable evidential problems which surround the subject, that recent research has done most to transform the traditional picture of the late medieval city. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the result has often been to make it less rather than more easy to generalise about conditions of life in late medieval towns than it was a generation ago. Some common denominators are, however, already clearly apparent, most obviously perhaps the extreme inequality of wealth in the case of all urban populations for which reasonably reliable statistics survive. Thus, according to the now famous Florentine castato of 1427, the richest 1 per cent of the population within Florence itself (about a hundred households) held over a quarter of the city’s wealth; and in the very different town of Basle a few years later (1446), only 72 of 2,841 (or well under 3 per cent) of recorded heads of household were rich enough to be assessed for taxation purposes at more than 2,500 gulden. Everywhere in western Europe it seems clear that great differences in wealth did indeed underlie the rough and ready distinctions so often made by contemporary burgesses between the bonhomes and the menus communes, or between the potentes and the popolani. However crude and inadequate this bi-partite categorisation of urban society may now seem, it recurs so frequently in town archives from Lubeck to Lucca and Beverley to Bordeaux that it must often have been fundamental to the way in which fifteenth-century townsmen visualised their own social status and political power.
Whether this perceived and persistent fracture within urban society necessarily led to political antagonism and violence inside the walls of a city is, however, a much more debatable matter. In some areas, notably Flanders and northern Italy, endemic class conflict undoubtedly did persist for many decades at a time, although it was generally less conspicuous in the late fifteenth century than it had been in the period of the Florentine Ciompi (1378) or the Parisian Maillotins (1382). Moreover, much of the evidence now available suggests that the ‘commons’ of many fifteenth-century towns, especially in France, England and Germany, were usually content with the government they received at the hands of their ruling elites. Although violence was always liable to erupt over such familiar issues as excessive taxation and disputes between craft guilds, most town councils were aware of the need to restore harmony at times of social conflict by judicial and other means. Those councils often found it more difficult, as does the modern historian, to form a precise impression of the elusive residents within town walls who were not citizens at all, often pauperised or near-pauperised immigrants commonly known as ‘foreigns’. Rarely easy to identify except when they were guilty of violent crime or blatant prostitution, these marginaux probably presented no more of a threat to civic order than do the urban predators of modern New York. However, in many large late medieval cities, as in fifteenth-century Paris, such destitute immigrants did offer a genuinely alternative — but not necessarily revolutionary — urban society, while testifying to the surprising strength of the more or less completely unrecorded urban labour market. Only comparatively small and well-regulated cities could hope to control that market and the sustained immigration from the rural hinterland upon which it depended. But then, as urban mortality can so often be shown to have exceeded that of the surrounding countryside, such immigration was nearly always to be welcomed despite the uncertainties and insecurities it might bring in its train. To that extent, it may well be argued that industrialisation was eventually to bring the European town not ‘crisis’ but stability in its wake, introducing discipline to a previously inherently unstable social order.
How far such instability was genuinely rationalised and ameliorated by the innumerable craft and other guilds which proliferated throughout all fifteenth-century towns remains one of the great unanswered — perhaps unanswerable — questions of urban history. If anything, within a context of great complexity and much regional variation, it seems most likely that the undoubted social and convivial attractions of a craft fraternity to a town’s retailers and manufacturers were not usually matched by any commensurate degree of independent economic or political authority. Increasingly harnessed to the purposes of the civic government as a whole, many guilds — like those of Bruges, Ghent and Lille — transferred their emphasis from craftsmanship to the control of labour and supplies. In any case, the influence which craft and other fraternities often undoubtedly enjoyed tended not to weaken but to strengthen the centrality of the concept and institution of the family within public as well as private life. Admittedly more or less every feature of the fifteenth-century town family or household is also controversial to a degree, not least its size. At Nuremberg in 1431, for example, there was an average of 5.3 members in each household at a time when the equivalent figure for the city of Florence was only 3.8, rising, however, to 4.89 in 1469, to 5.20 in 1480 and to no less than 5.66 in 1552. Although these and similar statistics are uncomfortably dependent upon the reliability of tax figures and the definition of the household itself, they make it clear enough that in many fifteenth-century towns the size of urban families was in a state of endless flux as a result of changes in mortality rates and of the average age at marriage. To complicate the burgess’s life-cycle further, much of the surviving evidence suggests that many townsmen of adequate means were first married at the age of approximately twenty-eight years to brides often a decade or so younger, thus creating a characteristic age imbalance within the structure of many urban families.
Not that the residents of fifteenth-century towns would have expected consistency in such matters. They must certainly have been aware, for example, that most major towns probably included within their ranks, as at Florence in 1427, the phenomenon of the so-called ‘two-tiered system of household’, whereby the households of the richest inhabitants of the city were deliberately expanded to cater for more distant members of the family clan or lignage as well as for numerous servants. Whether or not, as has been argued in the case of Italy, fifteenth-century European towns were often dominated by young rather than old men, it is now clear that their servants, too, played a much more important economic role in the support of their families and the urban economy than has usually been recognized. So too did their wives, daughters and (above all) their widows, especially during the acute periods of labour shortage that followed the plagues of the period. Not surprisingly, it was within the traditional female occupations of washing, cleaning, brewing and baking that women figure most prominently in urban records everywhere. The financial rewards of their industry were usually meagre; and when single women are visible in taxation records at all, as in fifteenth-century Sweden, they tend to appear at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. However, women naturally contributed greatly to family solidarity and, above all, to that obsessive concern with family survival which is the hall-mark of the richest members of all the most fully developed cities of the period. Whether among the famiglia of Tuscany, the alberghi (inns) of Genoa, the paraiges (‘equals’) of Metz, the bankers of Bruges or the geschlechter (families) of Germany, urban rule in the fifteenth century presents us with what was largely ‘an economy of cousins’.
When the Florentine merchant, Giovanni Rucellai, made his will in 1465, he instructed his executors that his magnificent palace should always remain (as it still is) the residence of his legitimate descendants. However, few wealthy citizens of fifteenth-century Europe devoted absolutely all of their resources to the welfare of their families, for they were equally well aware that their obligations to the Christian religion were certainly not to be denied. Even Giovanni Rucellai himself commissioned the rebuilding of the upper part of the fagade of Santa Maria Novella by Leone Battista Alberti (1456—70) at his own expense. Santa Maria Novella was — and is — the greatest Dominican church in Tuscany, a perpetual memorial to the critical role still being played by the mendicant orders in almost all major fifteenth-century towns. In northern Italy itself that role has always been obvious, not least because the influence of the friars on the Florentine laity was so critical in creating the intellectual ferment within which radical new modes of thought had begun to appear by 1400. Indeed, the great mendicant churches of the fifteenth century might sometimes do even more than cathedrals to suggest that cities were ‘holy enclaves surrounded by a desacralised countryside’. North of the Alps it is usually a little less easy, partly no doubt because of inadequate evidence, to prove that city religion had come to be organised ‘around the mendicant orders rather than the parish church’. However, the remarkable size and popularity of such now long demolished friars’ churches as the London Greyfriars and Blackfriars, not to mention the fifteen friaries of Bruges, Ghent and Ypres, testify to the significant role still played by the mendicant orders in northern urban religious life.
It seems even more certain that during the course of the fifteenth century the parish churches of Christendom tended to become a much greater centre of attraction to townsmen than had always been the case. During a period of enhanced lay involvement in religious affairs, those churches could offer parishioners and their families a highly flexible and accessible focus for public display, religious devotion and personal commemoration. No doubt for that reason ‘there is no period at which money was lavished so freely on English parish churches as in the fifteenth century’. That generalisation, made with London, Bristol, York and Norwich specifically in mind, can safely be applied to many town churches in Europe ranging from (to take only two spectacular examples at random) the Marienkirche in Lubeck to the Igreza de Jesus at Setubal in Portugal. As the site of the almost innumerable chantry chapels founded by the wealthier members of the urban patriciate, many of these city churches were not only a hive of diverse religious activity but were often highly responsive to lay intervention. In particular, and as so many European towns had become ‘over-churched’ by the fifteenth century, some exceptionally wealthy merchants (like Richard Whittington) were now provided with an opportunity to transform their modest local parish church into a chantry college, in some ways a curious revival of the early medieval eigenkirchen. Elsewhere, as in the case of St Lorenz in Nuremberg, an exceptionally large parish church might become a vast home of civic lay piety whose clergy were directly responsible to the city council itself. Civic initiative in religious affairs is even more evident in the foundation of so many hospitals and almshouses throughout fifteenth-century Christendom; while most of the many confraternities which came to honeycomb the towns of the period were equally generated by the aspirations and values of urban society as a whole.
Whatever the private religious fears and anxieties, no doubt extremely varied, of the townsmen and townswomen of fifteenth-century Europe, there can be little doubt that this increasing involvement in ecclesiastical concerns gave them more rather than less self-assuredness in this world. It could indeed be argued that an increased confidence in ‘lay professionalism’, sometimes regarded as the fourteenth century’s most important influence upon the development of Florence and the other Italian city-states of the early Renaissance, finally proved to be the greatest legacy of all major fifteenth-century towns to the future of Europe after 1500. This was a legacy within which the learning of clerks, particularly the learning of university clerks, played only a minor role; but a legacy in which the availability of notaries and scriveners was absolutely crucial. Ironically enough, the practical education received by late medieval townsmen and their wives is often the most mysterious thing about them; but that a vast extension of urban literacy underlies most of the developments outlined above is clear enough. So, too, is the greater degree of intellectual exhilaration experienced by the townsmen and townswomen who enjoyed that literacy in Florence or Venice as compared to those, in the Low Countries or northern France, whose grasp of written documents came later and less securely. All in all, the original invention and early dissemination of printing (from Johan Gutenberg at Mainz in 1456 to Aldus Manutius at Venice before his death in 1515) therefore deserves its place as the most portentous of all urban achievements in a century when urban achievements have perhaps never been so varied and so impressive. The future history of the printing press is symbolically appropriate, too, of the way in which fifteenth-century cities were soon to lose control of their own initiatives. Christopher Columbus of Genoa and Desiderius Erasmus, ‘Roterodamus’, are most celebrated for the successes they achieved far away from their native cities. By a more fundamental paradox still, the Italian humanists who began by creating the most explosive new urban ideology in European history eventually helped to destroy that community of tastes and interests upon which a common civic mentality must ultimately rest. After 1500, historians who seek to discover a distinctively bourgeois culture within the continent of Europe will find that objective even more elusive to achieve.