241. Church and State

Link to Table of Contents

A new Empire

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


Book Two
The Carolingian Epoch


Chapter III
The Restoration of the Empire in the West


2. The Empire

p86 ...the power of Charlemagne [Pirenne says Charles gave himself the name "Great," but it is my understanding (from Gibbon?) that it was Church history that added "Great" to the names of individuals who benefited the Church] extended to all countries and all peoples that recognized in the Pope of Rome the Vicar of Christ and the head of the Church. Outside this area was the barbaric world of paganism, the hostile world of Islam, and the old Byzantine Empire: Christian, indeed, but marked by a highly capricious orthodoxy, which was centering itself more and more upon the Patriarch of Constantinople, and ignoring the Pope... Is it surprising that under these circumstances the idea presented itself to the Papacy of profiting by so favorable a conjunction to reconstitute the Roman Empire?  -- but a Roman Empire whose head, crowned by the Pope in the name of God, would owe his power only to the Church, and would exist only to aid the Church in its mission: an Empire which, not being of secular origin, would owe nothing to men, and would not; properly speaking, be a State, but would be conterminous with the community of the faithful, whose temporal organization it would be, directed and inspired by the spiritual authority of the successor of St. Peter... The authority of the Pope and that of the Emperor, while remaining distinct one from the other, would nevertheless be as closely associated as the soul with the flesh in the body. What St. Augustine had desired would be accomplished. The terrestrial State would be but the preparation for the journey to the Celestial City...

p88 ...the Pope alone could dispose of the Imperial crown.
...

...in order that the spiritual and the temporal power should not encroach upon each other... it was necessary that they should be associated, and that they should... keep step in a spirit of intimate and absolute confidence. But charged, as they were, the one with the government of men's souls, and the other with the government of their bodies, who was to indicate the exact limits of their competence?... if the Imperial idea brought the State into the Church, it also brought the Church into the State. And what would happen when the successor of St. Peter felt it incumbent upon him to intervene in the civil government, to correct or guide it?

p89 ...Charles extended his solicitude to the material needs of the clergy... He showered donations upon sees and monasteries... and he made the tithe compulsory throughout the Empire... The so-called Carolingian Renaissance was as the poles removed from the Renaissance properly so-called. There was nothing in common between the two, apart from a renewal of intellectual activity. The true Renaissance, purely secular, steeped itself in the ideas of the classical authors. The Carolingian Renaissance, exclusively ecclesiastical and Christian, regarded the classic authors merely as models of style...

p90 ...The intimate alliance of Church and State was yet another reason why Latin should become the language of the lay administration... without the use of Latin administration by the written word would have been impossible. The Requirements of the State necessitated the use of Latin; it became, and it was destined to remain for centuries, the language of politics and of business, and also the language of science.
...

p92 Charles... abandoned the coining of gold, which had become too rare in the West to keep mints at work. Henceforth only silver monies were minted; and the ratio which he fixed between them continued in use all over Europe until the adoption of the metric system, and is still current in the British Empire... 

Chapter IV
Economic and Social Organization

1. The Disappearance of the Cities and of Commerce

p94 ...In the Roman Empire the cities constituted... the very basis of the State... The country was merely the territory attached to the city; it had no independent existence; it produced only for the city and was ruled by the city. Wherever the Roman State was established it founded cities and set them up as administrative centers... the same word, civitas, was employed to denote the city and the province. And this state of affairs continued until the end of the Byzantine Empire.
...

p95 ...until the middle of the 7th century the Western ports of the Mediterranean were still assiduously frequented by Syrian and Jewish merchants. In the time of Gregory of Tours a Jewish colony of some importance existed at Clermont-Ferrand. The papyrus employed in the Merovingian chancellery was imported from Sicily... But these relations with the Byzantine world came to an end once the preponderance of Islam made it impracticable for Christian traders to risk themselves beyond the waters of Greece and Southern Italy... And just as the Mediterranean was in the power of the Musulmans, so the North Sea was traversed only by the ships of the Scandinavians. [Finally!]... Its [the Carolingian Empire's] only ports -- Quentovic, at the mouth of the Canche, [where Etaples is now, south of Boulogne-sur-Mer] and Duurstede -- still maintained a certain degree of commercial activity until the 9th century, when they were devastated by the Normans, after which they lapsed into complete decadence. From the 8th century onwards Europe existed for three hundred years without any intercourse with the countries overseas.

p96 ...apart from a few local industries, such as the weaving of cloth, which still survived in Flanders, there was an almost total failure of industrial activity, and money no longer circulated.

...Rome seemed lost within the vast circuit which the wall of Aurelian described about what was left of the city. In 848 Pope Leo, to guard against a sudden attack, caused the inhabited portions on the left bank of the Tiber to be enclosed (the "Leonine city" [includes the Vatican]), and turned the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian into a fortress.

p97 In Gaul... the kings... lived all the year round on their domains, passing from one to the other as they emptied the barns and granaries... the administration, on losing its urban character, became nomadic instead of sedentary.

Ruined and depopulated though they were, the cities had not lost all their significance... they remained the centers of the religious organization. ...in the heart of a purely agricultural society, something of the municipal character of the ancient State was preserved by the Church. It was owing to the Church that the cities did not disappear altogether...

236. Proto-Protestantism

Link to Table of Contents

Religion and the cities

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War



Chapter III
The Growth of the Cities and its Consequences

3. Other Consequences
p237 ...The ability to read and write was indispensable to the merchant, and from the 12th century onwards there was no city of any importance without its school. At first the education provided was still entirely Latin... But this was only an intermediate stage... It was obvious that the bourgeois population could not long continue to employ, in its ordinary business affairs, a tongue that was not the language which it spoke. From the beginning of the 12th century the inevitable development took place: the vulgar tongue began to be employed by the urban scribes, and it is characteristic that this innovation made its first appearance in the country whose municipal life was most highly developed: namely, in Flanders. The first document of this kind in our possession is a charter of the corporation (echevinage) of Douai, dated 1204, which is written in the Picard dialect.... From the end of the 12th century an increasing number of... [qualified lay practitioners] entered into the employ of the princes or kings and applied their skill and experience in the service of the State. [Replacing ecclesiastics.] We may say that the first lay personnel in Europe since the disappearance of the Imperial Roman bureaucracy was furnished by the bourgeoisie.

p239 And even while the cities were thus so effectively secularizing the State, they were influencing its very constitution, and this influence constantly increased in the course of the centuries. Everywhere they began to play a greater and greater part in political life, whether, as in France, they helped the king to oppose the pretensions of the great feudal nobles, or whether, as in England, they united with the barons, in order to wrest the first national liberties from the Crown, or whether, as in Italy and Germany, they constituted themselves independent republics. The absence of the bourgeoisie in the Slav States shows what the West owed to it. 

Neither the Church nor civil society could escape its influence. With the renaissance of urban life a period began for the Church in which piety and charity received fresh stimulus, but at the same time formidable problems presented themselves, and it was an age of bloody conflict. Nothing could have been more ardent or more deep-rooted than the religion of the bourgeoisie. Of this we need no other evidence than the associations of all kinds, which in every city devoted themselves to prayer, or to the care of the sick, the poor, the aged, and the widows and orphans. From the end of the 12th century the beguines and begards, who practiced asceticism in secular life, were beginning to spread from city to city. But for the bourgeoisie, the foundation of the new Orders -- the Franciscans (1208) and Dominicans (1215) -- whose spirit inspired the orthodox mysticism of the 13th century, would have been impossible. With these mendicant monks monasticism, for the first time, deserted the country for an urban environment. They lived on the alms of the bourgeoisie; they recruited their ranks from the bourgeoisie; and it was for the sake of the bourgeoisie that they exercised their apostolate, and the success of this was sufficiently proved by the multitude of brothers of the tertiary order, among both the merchants and the artisans, who were associated with the Franciscans.

p240 ...The laymen -- and this was still a novel phenomenon -- collaborated directly in the religious life, claiming their right to play their part in it beside the clergy. This represented a twofold peril to the Church. The first and the most dangerous of these was the threat to orthodoxy. The greater the interest of the bourgeois in the things of religion, the more liable they were to adopt the Manichaean doctrines which, in the 12th century, were spreading into Europe from the East; or to be impressed by the mystical dreams of the "Apostolics" or the "Brother of the Free Spirit." [Jansen and Augustine, again.] It is highly characteristic that the West was not troubled with heresy before the renaissance of the cities. The first and most formidable heresy known to Europe before the advent of Protestantism, that of the Cahars, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism] began to propagate itself in the 11th century, and was therefore precisely contemporaneous with the urban movement. And we must not forget that the sect of the Voudois (Waldenses) was founded by a merchant of Lyons. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldensians] Even after the terrible massacres of the Albigenses the urban populations continued, now in this part of Europe, now in that, to harbor their suspect sects, in which the aspirations of the proletariat tended to orientate mysticism toward confused visions of social transformation, and which dreamed of establishing, on the ruins of the Church and State, in some sort of communistic society, the rule of the just. 

All this went entirely over my head when I first read this.

...With the rise of the cities the relations between the secular and the spiritual authority entered upon a new phase. Since the Carolingian epoch the conflicts between the two authorities had been due to the efforts of the kings to subjugate the Church and force it to serve their policy... the question was, which of the two was to be supreme in society. But neither... attempted to deprive its rival of its prerogatives or privileges...In the cities the case was very different... The cities openly attacked the tribunals of the Church, its financial exemptions, and the monopoly which it claimed to exercise in respect to education. From the end of the 12th century there were perpetual conflicts between the communal councils and the chapters and monasteries included within the urban precincts, or even between the councils and the bishop of the diocese. In vain did the Church blast them with her excommunication and interdict: they still persisted in their attitude... However religious and orthodox they might be, they claimed the right to prevent the Church from interfering in the domain of temporal interests. Their spirit was purely secular, and for this reason the urban spirit must be regarded as the prime and remote cause of the Renaissance.

p241 ...Never, until the end of the 17th century, was there such a profound social -- I do not say intellectual -- revolution [in Europe]. Hitherto men had been mainly restricted to the relations of producer and consumer. Now they were increasingly ruled by their political relations. The only circulation in Europe had been that of the Church toward Rome and the religious centers. Now this was accompanied by a lay circulation. Life began to flow toward the coasts, the great rivers, the natural highways. Civilization was purely continental but it was now becoming maritime.

p242 ...The Church continued to dominate the world of ideas, and the soil was still the foundation which supported the noblesse, and even the State. But the roots of the tree which had recently planted itself upon the wall would inevitably... by the mere fact of their growth, dislodge the stones. The cities had no desire to destroy what already existed, but only to make a place for themselves. And gradually this place became larger and larger, so that it presently created a new order of things... From the 7th to the 11th century the movement of history was everywhere analogous. But with the 11th century, what variety! The strength of the bourgeoisie differed from country to country, giving to each a national character of its own, a character previously unknown...

There is a sort of contradiction in the enthusiasm of the cities of the 13th century for the mendicant orders and their capitalistic activities. They were filled with enthusiasm for the ideals of poverty but they sought riches.

That sentence covers a great deal of human history. So Martin Luther was not at all the beginning of the spirit of Protestantism. The great Christian factions were starting to pestering the Church centuries before. At the same time the new commercial class was creating a secular niche for itself while breeding the religious fanaticism that would scare the coming age. Was this an indication of a split within the new urban communities? Or were the same people involved in both trends? I am amazed... and still can't believe this didn't stick with me from when I first read the book.

 

235. Europe transformed

Link to Table of Contents

Growth of the Cities

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War



Chapter III
The Growth of the Cities and its Consequences
1. The Growth of the Cities

p227 ...In Italy, as in Flanders, the maritime commerce, and the inland commerce which was its continuation, resulted in the activity of the seaports: Venice, Pisa, and Genoa in the South; Bruges in the North. Then, behind the seaports, the industrial cities developed: on the one hand, the Lombard communes and Florence; on the other, Ghent, Ypres, and Lille, Douai, and further inland, Valenciennes and Brussels. It was evidently the proximity of the seaports that gave such an extraordinary impetus to the industry of the cities -- an impetus unique in Europe. The Italian and Flemmish ports, with their hinterland, acquired an international importance, and in this way they were unique.

...The Italian merchants visited Flanders from the beginning of the 12th century. But presently the fairs of Champagne became the point of contact, and, so to speak, the Bourse of Italo-Flemish commerce... But these were merely business rendezvous, and no really important cities were founded on the sites of these fairs...

p228 The South of France was not far behind Italy. Marseilles, Montpellier, and Aigues-Mortes played their part in Mediterranean commerce. And behind them were Albi, Cahors, and Toulouse, which gravitated toward them, and prospered without interruption until the Albigensian War. In Spain the port of Barcelona likewise acquired great importance, though it did not produce any very active urban centres in the hinterland. 

Which was also true in Roman times, I believe. Was any of this different than the systems of commerce created by the Greeks, Carthage, and Rome BCE?

Avignon and Lyon develop on the Rhone. Paris is a separate, purely political creation.

Germany had no center of international trade. She was in touch with Italy through the Rhine and the Danube; on the one river Cologne and Strasbourg made their appearance; on the other, Ratisbon and Vienna. The most important of these centres was Cologne, where the Germany of the West and South came into contact with the Germany of the North, and both were in touch with the Low Countries. The Germany of the North... had Hamburg and Bremen on the North Sea, and above all, Lubeck, founded by Henry the Lion, on the Baltic. 

There's much more but I'm not interested in the history of Germany and areas east at the moment.

p229 ...a host of small secondary towns arose, of the same character as the large cities, and living under the same law. It had now become indispensable that each region should have its little urban center. [Why exactly?] The disorganization of the domainal system, and the appearance of free peasants, [from where?] necessarily called into existence -- to replace the "courts" from which the servile population had supplied their needs -- little bourgs, which offered an asylum to the artisans, and served as commercial centers for the great cities. [That part I get.] Their urban life was a spontaneous gift from the great cities. New towns were founded... A host of others led a quiet, semi-urban, semi-agricultural existence; Kreuzburg, where I am writing these lines, received its charter in 1213. These were towns of secondary formation, belonging to a period when the bourgeoisie had established itself, and when the princes, impelled by the advantages which they derived from these towns, were establishing them in all directions. Formerly the traveler passed from monastery to monastery; now he journeyed from town to town; there were towns on all the roads, at intervals of a few leagues, constituting a transition between the great cities, like the little beads of a rosary between the dizaines.

p230 The rise of the town provoked an increase of population, relatively comparable to that which occurred in the 19th century. And even more remarkable than the increase of the urban population were the effects of this multiplication of urban centers on the population of the countryside. Compared with the Carolingian population, we may estimate, roughly, that its strength was doubled. The maximum increase was attained at the beginning of the 14th century. From that time, until the 18th century, there was no essential change. [Huh?]

It would be of great importance to obtain some idea of the relative strength of the urban as compared with the rural population. But this is unfortunately impossible. ...we may be certain, that in all the centers favored by commerce the bourgeois population continued to increase until about the middle of the 14th century. Everywhere the walled enclosures... had to be enlarged, and faubourgs which had been built outside the gates had to be enclosed by walls... The largest cities -- Milan, Paris, Gand -- must have contained about 50,000 inhabitants, more or less. The cities of medium size would have contained from 20,000 to 50,000 inhabitants; the small towns from 2,00 to 5,000...

2. The Consequences for the Rural Population
p231 ...in the Middle Ages... the town was absolutely distinct from the open country. It was divided from it even materially, sheltering behind its moat and walls and its gates. Juridically, it was another world. Directly one entered the gates one became subject to a different law, just as one does to-day on passing from one State to another. Economically the contrast was as great. Not only was the city a centre of commerce and industry, but there was no commerce and no industry elsewhere. In the country they were everywhere prohibited. Every city endeavored to dominate the surrounding countryside, to subjugate it. The country had to provide it with a market, and, at the same time, to guarantee its supplies of foodstuffs. There was not, as there is to-day, constant exchange and interpenetration; there was a contrast, and the subordination of the one element to the other...

The rise of the towns... made it impossible to preserve the domainal system... Having no market in which to see its products, the domain restricted its production to the needs of its own consumption... Now, from the moment the towns made their appearance this special situation ceased to exist... For apart from its merchants and artisans, the urban population was a sterile population -- to employ a favorite formula of 18th century physiocrats. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiocracy] It could live only by sending out of the city for its means of subsistence -- that is, by purchasing them from the cultivators of the soil. It therefore provided them with the outlet for their products which they had hitherto lacked... And so the moral and the economic conditions to which the domainal organization corresponded both disappeared simultaneously. The peasant, whose activity was now solicited by the outer world, no longer regarded his work as a mere burden. Further, as a necessary consequence of the new state of affairs, the seigneur himself was even more conscious of the need of a reformation. For since the prestations of his tenants were fixed by custom, he soon discovered that his resources were dwindling unpleasantly. His revenues were still the same, while his expences were constantly increasing. The towns... by their purchases, were putting money into circulation throughout the countryside; and as money became more and more abundant its value diminished in proportion. The cost of living was continually rising, and the landowners, restricted to fixed revenues, found themselves launched on the road to ruin. For the petty military noblesse, who, as a general thing, possessed only small fiefs which just provided them with a living, the crisis was a veritable catastrophe. A large proportion of the chivalry, so numerous in the 11th century, was overwhelmed by poverty, at the close of the 12th century. 

YES. And what became of them? And this also explains why the landed interests were so eager to monetize some of their lands around the cities. This was the result of the same Invisible Hand that lead to the Enclosures and the Clearances in Britain.

It is difficult to say whether the increase of the population of the rural districts, which manifested itself at the very time when the conditions of rural life were undergoing such a profound modification, should also be referred to the appearance of the towns. After the devastations of the Normans, the Saracens, and the Hungarians, Europe had known a period of relative tranquility, during which the natural excess of births over deaths must insensibly have increased the numbers of the inhabitants. [Might there not also have been a climate explanation for this tranquility and rise in population?] But it is only in the second half of the 11th century that we perceive, in certain parts of Europe, the traces of a malaise due to excess in density of the population, and we are almost bound to believe that in affording the peasants new means of livelihood, the towns... had contributed... to increase their number. However it may be, it is certain that in the Low Countries, for example, the cultivated land, about 1050, was beginning to prove insufficient for the needs of the inhabitants. Moreover, events like the conquest of England in 1066, and the Crusade, evidently justify the supposition that the population was somewhat excessive, at all events in the North of France.

p234 ...From the beginning of the 11th century we have something more than presumption to go upon. The peopling of the regions beyond the Elbe by immigrants from the banks of the Rhine, Holland, and Flanders, evidently cannot be explained save by the superabundance of the rural population of the countries.

Thus, at the moment when the ancient domainal system had had its day, and no longer responded to the needs of a more economically advanced society, there were numbers of men who offered themselves to whomsoever would give them land. The great landowners, and above all the territorial princes, did not fail to profit by so favourable a situation. They possessed plenty of uncultivated land, for it seems that to the west of the Rhine and to the south of the Danube... the great domains had hardly spread beyond the fertile soil already cultivated in the days of the Roman Empire. The rest of the land was untouched forest, heath, and marshland. The time had come to bring this land into cultivation. This great task... was begun in the middle of the 11th century, reached its apogee during the course of the 12th century, and was completed, at a gradually relaxing pace, towards the end of the 13th century. From that period until the end of the 18th century the area of cultivated soil was not sensibly increased in the Occident, and this fact alone shows the importance of the progress effected by internal colonization in the Middle Ages. No doubt the intakes would have been less extensive had agriculture been more advanced... The crisis of the domainal organization could have been avoided had it been possible to increase the fertility of the soil by more rational methods. 

Jane Jacobs maintains that agricultural innovation is also the product of cities. The 18th or 19th century Gentry might have been able to lead agricultural innovation after they had been trained by the city economy (and science) but it would be asking too much of the nobility of the Middle Ages.

p235 In the newly peopled areas, ...The peasant's relations to the landowner were now merely such as arose from his quality of tenant. He paid a rent for the land which he occupied, but his person was free... The area of the "new town" was divided into a certain number of equal units, and these, on payment of quit-rent, could be secured under hereditary title. A charter... recognized the personal liberty of the inhabitants, and determined the powers and the competence of the mayor and the court who were charged with the affairs of the colony and the administration of justice, and defined the respective rights of the seigneur and the peasants as to forestal usage, etc. Thus a new type of village appeared, the village a loi. it no longer had anything in common with the old domainal organization, except for the fact that, like the latter, it presupposed a great property and a small-scale exploitation. For the rest, everything was new. Not only was the peasant a free man, but the pretestations which he had to pay the seigneur, instead of consisting of natural products, were usually payable in money... All over Europe there was a new growth of villages, and the very form of their names, ending in sart in the French-speaking countries, and in kerk, kirche, rode, rath in countries where German was spoken, still enable us to distinguish them from their neighbors in the long-settled regions. 

The Church played a considerable part in this great cultural task of the 12th century. She entrusted the work to the new orders of Cistercians and Premonstrants... the latter founded by St Bernard in 1113, [Footnote: Citeaux (not far from Dijon) was founded in 1098 by Robert de Molesnes, but it did not become the center of a movement until Saint Bernard entered it in 1113.] and the former by Saint Norbert in 1119 -- resumed the ascetic propaganda which the Benedictines had abandoned. In order that the prescription of manual labor be applied in all its rigor, they established themselves, by preference, in uncultivated regions where there was land to be cleared and drained. The princes made haste to help on the pius work by ceding tracts of moor and marshland to the monks. The two orders played a great part in draining the Flemish polders and bringing the soil of Eastern Germany into cultivation. The domains which they constituted there were of a completely novel type, in which we see, for the first time in the Middle Ages, the principle of large-scale agricultural exploitation. Instead of being parcelled out in family holdings, the newly-cleared area were organized into great farms, which were worked by "convert brothers" or free peasants under the direction of a monk. The cultivation of cereals or the breeding of cattle was practiced, not as formerly, with a view to immediate consumption by the convent, but for the purpose of sale in the markets... The profits realized enabled the monks to acquire more land, and to continue the work of bringing it into cultivation... [The proprietors of the old style domains are forced to monetize their holdings to raise cash. Quit-rent and similar methods free the peasants and allow the landowners to survive the inflation of money.] One may say that from the beginning of the 13th century the rural population, in Western and Central Europe, had become or was in the process of becoming a population of free peasants. And this great transformation was accomplished without violence, without the co-operation of principles and theories, as an inevitable consequence of the revival of trade and the appearance of the towns, which, by providing agriculture with the outlets of which it had hitherto been deprived, had compelled it to modify its traditional organization and to adopt freer and more flexible forms of exploitation. Economic progress had destroyed the social patronage which the seigneur had hitherto exercised over his men. In proportion as liberty was substituted for serfdom the landowner put off his old paternal character, and material interest tended to become the sole criterion of his relations with his tenants.

234. Cities & bourgeoisie

Link to Table of Contents

A History of Europe

by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


2. The Cities
p220 ...Toward the close of the 11th century... The princes began to realize that they had more to lose than to gain by persisting in their opposition to the movement. For while it undermined their local authority and imperiled certain of their domainal revenues, it more than made up for these drawbacks by the supplementary payments received in the shape of market tolls, and the inestimable advantage of a constant influx of corn and wares of every kind, and of money. [The same advantage capitalism offers today. So many people -- now and then -- curse the "invisible hand" that feeds them.] By the beginning of the 12th century certain princes had frankly [maybe not the best word when talking about Frankish princes] adopted a progressive policy, and were seeking to attract the merchants by the promise of immunities and privileges. In short, whether by agreement or by force, the claims of the bourgeoisie were everywhere triumphant, just as the parliamentary system was everywhere triumphant in the Europe of the 19th century... [Huh? Is he overstating the triumph of parliamentarism in 19th century Europe or attempting to indicate that the "triumph" was nuanced and uneven from place to place?] Just as continental parliamentarism was an adaptation of English and Belgian institutions to the special conditions of each country, so the urban institutions, although they exhibited, from town to town, peculiarities resulting from the nature of the local environment, might none the less be referred, on the whole, to two dominant types:... that of the cities of Northern Italy, and... of the cities of the Low Countries and Northern France. Here, as in respect of the domainal regime, the feudal system, the Cluniac reformation, and chivalry, Germany and the other regions of central Europe merely followed the impulse that reached them from the West. [Just from the Low Countries? Or is he considering Northern Italy part of "the West"?]

p221 ...the towns of the Middle Ages presented everywhere the same essential features... the mediaeval city was a fortified agglomeration inhabited by a free population engaged in trade and industry, possessing a special law, and provided with a more or less highly developed jurisdiction and communal autonomy. The city enjoyed immunities which did not exist in the surrounding country; which amounts to saying that it had a morally privileged personality. It was constituted, indeed, on the basis of privilege. The bourgeois or burgers, like the noble, possessed a special juridical status: bourgeois and noble, in different directions, were equally removed from the villein, the peasant, who until the end of the ancien regime remained, in the majority of European countries, outside political society.

p223 However, the privileged condition of the bourgeois was very different in its nature from that of the noble. The noble was, in reality, the old landowning freeman. His privilege, in some sort negative, arose from the fact that the mass of the people had lapsed into servitude under him. He had not ascended; he merely belonged to a minority which had kept its place amidst a general social decline. [Wasn't this distinction also based on conquest and ethnicity? Especially in France?] The privileges of the bourgeois, on the contrary, were very definitely positive. The bourgeois was a parvenu, who, of necessity, had made for himself a place in society which was finally recognized and guaranteed by the law. The domainal regime, which set the noble over the head of the peasant, at the same time bound them together by so strong a mutual tie that even to this day, after so many centuries, traces of it survive. The bourgeois, on the other hand, was a stranger both to the noble and to the peasant; both distrusted him and regarded him with hostility, and of this also the traces have not entirely disappeared. The bourgeois moved and had his being in a wholly different sphere. The contrast between him and them was the contrast between the agricultural and commercial and industrial life... [There is also a very important difference when it comes to the Environment. People -- peasants and lords both -- tied to the land have an interest in the health of the land. The bourgeois lacks that kind of interest in any particular piece of land. The consequences of which are obvious to see. The bourgeois,] was a mobile and active element; the traffic of the country was in his hands, and he was an agent of transformation. He was not indispensable to human existence; it was possible to live without him. He was essentially an agent of social progress and civilization. 

...The nobility and the clergy constituted homogeneous classes, all of whose members participated in the same esprit de corps, and were conscious of their mutual solidarity. The case of the bourgeois was very different. Living in segregated groups in the various cities, in them the spirit of class was replaced by the local spirit, or was at all events subordinated to it. Each city was a little separate world in itself; there were no limits to its exclusivism and its protectionism. Each did its utmost to favor its own trade and industry at the expense of the other cities. Each endeavored to become self-sufficient and to produce all that it needed. Each endeavored to extend its authority over the surrounding countryside, in order to assure itself of sufficient supplies of food. If it occurred to the cities to act in concert, to conclude temporary or permanent leagues. like the London Hansa, and at a later date, the German Hansa, they did so in order to take action against a common enemy, or for the sake of a common utility, but within its own walls each had room only for its own burgesses; the foreigner could trade there only through the medium of his brokers, and was always liable to expulsion. In order to live there he had to acquire burgess rights. And all of this is readily comprehensible. It was merely a question of local mercantilism... Urban exclusivism came to an end only when the towns were united in the superior unity of the State, just as the State will perhaps one day disappear in the unity of human society.

Typical Belgian pro-EU sentiment :-| 



San Francisco, in it's early days, provides a surprisingly valuable example of a city developing on its own. Even after it became part of the United States, it was so isolated that all the logic of local mercantilism applied just as much as it had in the Middle Ages. It wasn't the role of the State, but the revolution in transportation that put the city on the dire path advocated by David Ricardo. The completion of the transcontinental railroad was marked by a depression as cheaper goods flowed in replacing local jobs.

Pirenne, above, does a good job of describing what cities, by their economic nature, do. Unless you can create an economic equivalent of the Roman political system -- whereby cities can participate in the success of a dominant city -- cities are engaged in a war of one against all until a Darwinian economic process eventually produces a winner.

I can't tell if he's suggesting that the bourgeois are also responsible for Nationalistic tendencies; at a minimum, they are destructive of the cohesive nature of Catholic Europe that was the norm before the Reformation. I keep wanting to object that the great Houses of Europe were also agents of heterogeneity, but I'm thinking of later centuries. These remain the "Dark" Ages for me. But really, were the Houses disputing Burgundy and other places really less mutually hostile than the burgers? 

And here's an interesting thought: These economic revolutions of the 10th-12th centuries can, I think, be seen as setting the stage for the Black Death which followed in the 14th century. Would the plague have been able to enter Europe before the Crusades? Not easily. And didn't the labor shortage following the Black Death strengthen the hand of the bourgeoisie (and capitalism)?

The moral result of this exclusivism was an extraordinary solidarity among the burgesses. Body and soul, they belonged to their little local patrie, and with them there reappeared... a civic sentiment. Each burgess was obliged... to take part in the defense of the city: to take up arms for it, to give his life to it. The knights of Frederick Barbarossa were astounded to find that the shopkeepers and merchants of the Lombard cities were able to hold their own against them. In that campaign there were examples of civic virtue which remind one of ancient Greece. Other burgesses gave their fortunes to their city, commuted the market tolls, or founded hospitals. The wealthy gave without stint or reckoning, and no doubt they were inspired by charity as much as by pride.

For the rich men were the rulers. The burgesses of the cities enjoyed civil equality and liberty, but not social equality. The bourgeoisie, deriving from commerce, remained under the influence and the leadership of the wealthiest. Under the name of "grands" or "patricians," they kept the administration and jurisdiction of the city in their own hands. The urban government was a plutocratic government, and it actually ended, in the 13th century, by becoming oligarchic, the same familiars holding power in perpetuity. Yet nothing could have been more remarkable than these governments. They were responsible for the creation of urban administration: that is, the first civil and secular administration known in Europe. It was their work from the top to bottom. This has not been sufficiently considered: it should be realized that they had no model, and had to invent everything: financial system, systems of book-keeping, schools, commercial and industrial regulations, the first rudiments of a health service, public works, market-places, canals, posts, urban boundaries, water supply -- all this was their work. And it was they too who erected the buildings which even to-day are the glory of so many cities.

p224 Beneath them, the rest of the urban population consisted of artisans, and it was they who formed the majority in every city. As a rule they were foremen or small employers, masters, with one or two journeymen under them, who constituted an active and independent bourgeoisie. While wholesale trade was free, there developed, for the protection of the artisans. a social policy which was a masterpiece no less interesting, in its way, than the Gothic cathedrals; and of which the last traces have only recently disappeared. Its object was the maintenance of all these petty lives which constituted the strength of the city, and to secure its regular revictualling. Each citizen was a producer and a consumer, and regulation intervened in respect of both production and consumption. The municipal authority undertook to protect the consumer. To this end it revived the old municipal regulations [Roman?] of which some traces had perhaps survived in Italy. Nothing could have been more admirable than the precautions taken against "dishonest" products, fraud, and falsification. [This reminds me of the (not un-controversial) measures taken by the Swiss to manage the cheese production there. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Cheese_Union ] The consumer was protected in the twofold interest of the local bourgeoisie and of the city's good repute in the outer world.

As for the producer, he protected himself by the trade corporations or guilds which made their appearance as early as the 12th century. Their essential purpose was to prevent competition, and it was this that rendered them so odious to the liberal economy of the 19th century. [This also applies to the Swiss and cheese.] Every producer had to earn his living; therefore he had to retain his customers. He must accordingly sell his wares at the same price as his comrades, and he must make them in the same way. The trade or handicraft was originally a voluntary association, like our syndicates or trade unions. But it boycotted the "yellow" workers who did not apply for membership, and it was finally recognized by the public authority. Let us note that this organization had nothing in common with the association of workers whose purpose is negotiation with the employer. It was an obligatory syndicate of petty burgesses. It was created... for the benefit of the small independent producer. In most of the cities of the Middle Ages there was no proletariat. The craftsmen worked for the local market and reserved it for themselves. Their numbers were maintained in proportion to the number of their customers. They had complete control of the situation. In this sense, they had solved the social problem. But they had solved it only where the city was a "closed state," a situation that was not so general as one might suppose. For there was one industry at least -- the cloth industry in Flanders and in Florence -- whose products supplied not the local, but the European market. In this industry there could be no limitation of production, nor was it possible for the small employer to acquire his raw material for himself. Here he was in the power of the great merchant, so that in his industry there was a division between capital and labour which we do not find elsewhere... in the cloth industry the "master" was not an independent producer; he worked for wages, so that here we find something closely resembling the "cottage industry" of our own age. Trade organizations existed, but in this case it was far from protecting the artisan efficiently, as it could not affect the conditions of marketing or of capital investment. Hence there were strikes, conflicts of salaried workers, an exodus of weavers from Ghent, and industrial crises. Hence the uneasy, unruly, turbulent, Utopian spirit that characterized the weavers from the 12th century onwards, and made them the adepts of a naive communism which was allied with mystical or heretical ideals...

p226 With the rise of the towns and the constitution of the bourgeoisie the formation of European society was completed; such as it was to remain until the end of the ancien regime. Clergy, noblesse, bourgeoisie -- these made the trinity that ruled human destinies and played its part in political life. The agricultural people, below the privileged classes, were restricted to their function of food producers until the day when civil equality, and to some extent political equality, should become the common possession of all. For one cannot too strongly insist on the fact that the bourgeoisie was an exclusive and privileged class. It was in this respect that the cities of the Middle Ages differed essentially from the cities of the Roman Empire, whose inhabitants, whatever the standard of their social life, were all in enjoyment of the same rights. The Roman world never knew anything analogous to the European bourgeoisie; nor has the New World seen its like. When the American cities were founded the moment had passed when each social profession had its peculiar law; there were merely free human beings. [No comment.] In our days the word bourgeoisie, which we continue to employ, is completely diverted from its original sense. It denotes a social class of heterogeneous origin which has no common quality except that it is the class which possesses wealth. Of the bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages nothing remains, just as nothing remains of the nobility of the Middle Ages. 

213. City streets

Life resumes

My day-after-HSB rest day is now past (I really didn't have any kind of cramps or post event distress, yay!) and I started the top-to-bottom cleaning of my building. It's still a little smoky here due to all the wild fires up north, but the wind is changing now and it's getting cooler -- good cleaning weather.

There's actually a number of HOA tasks on the near horizon. End of the year documents to create, our annual fire inspection to schedule. When I get home I'm going to test our emergency lights again. Really, it doesn't amount to that much. I need a new book.

Some things that have been sitting in my notes for a while now...

SOMA

Sitting at the 4th street Peet's, needed a little oak and granite. Walked here the long way through the middle of the Financial District and the new "Downtown" SOMA. Work is progressing on Salesforce Tower and the Transbay Transit Center but neither is on the cusp of opening. 

Walking past some other projects that are still in early stages of construction, I was thinking that the best thing about the over budget Transit Center is that it gave the authorities political cover for going higher-density than SF is usually comfortable with. It's still too soon to be able to envision what this new neighborhood will look like when built out in (maybe) ten years, but it will be something new for SF.

And while I'm downtown, here's something I wrote about cities. 

Why I love cities

And by cities I mean truly urban streets. Yesterday my plan had been to eat lunch and work in a cafe out by Lincoln Park, but I had forgotten they only accept cash and I didn't have enough cash for lunch. I had enough for iced tea and a snack, and that was fine.

But today I walked down to the Peet's on Market (because I also need to buy some more septic-tank-cleaning-enzyme-stuff) and, when I got in line I realized I had even less cash and using a card for under $5 is just silly. But this is downtown and my bank has ATMs directly across Market, and there's even one of the grand, older branches a block away. In fact, I have the option of at least a half dozen Wells Fargo ATM machines within about a block radius. 

Yesterday I could have paid a fee and used a third party ATM machine if I was desperate, but in a proper city the services you want tend to be magically available thanks to the "invisible hand" of the free market. (I'm misusing Adam Smith's concept here, but just a little. And, while not affirming his theory, my variation -- that business entities, while attempting to maximize their business, end up providing services where they are most wanted, I think is true and is particularly visible in urban areas. Starbucks -- I'm looking at one directly across the street -- is the best example of this at the moment. A block from here there are two Starbucks locations directly across 4th Street from each other. One has been there forever and serves the convention trade and people flowing in and out of the massive parking garage that houses the cafe. The other is new and associated with the Target store. They both look busy every time I'm in the area.)

This is why it drives me nuts when neighborhood interests reject increased density for fear of traffic. Yes, "traffic," in the sense of cars on the road doesn't effect me personally because I don't have a car, but traffic in the sense of people, foot-traffic, on the streets is the main factor in determining the value of urban real estate. 

And, Yes, developments like La Defense are a spectacular and indefensible waste of foot-traffic density. But here, around Union Square, most of the buildings and the urban design is 19th century (pre-City Beautiful!) and the exorbitant cost of real estate has driven landlords to maximize rents by creating as much retail space as possible accessible to the sidewalks. The best example of this being the Metreon, which had to be completely redesigned to take advantage of all the sidewalk frontage they were wasting.

The worst frontage wasters in the area now are the convention center and some of the newer hotels, but even the Hilton is attempting to do what Macys did and rent out spaces on their perimeter to retail tenants. Unfortunately for them, they are on the Tenderloin side of Union Square and, for the moment, much of their foot traffic is interested mostly in their chemicals of choice and social services.