Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans – Episode 68 – The Cities

I am afraid this is going to be a short one. The UK is in the midst of a heatwave and so the History of the Germans headquarters moved to the seaside, a place not conducive to historical research. Plus, we are setting off on holiday on Wednesday. So just a quick run through of the German cities.

In recognition of this under delivery I will not do the full length Patreon plea today, just if you guys want to become patrons of the show, you know where to find it, and if not, check the show notes.

Let’s go straight in.

Last week we looked at the foundation of one of these “new cities”, specifically Freiburg. These new foundations were a main feature of Germany. The number of cities rose from around 150 in the 10th century to 3000 by 1320. After 1320 and specifically after the Black death the number of cities stagnated and pre-modern urbanisation was pretty much complete, apart from the ~200 added by 1800 mainly as princely residences, garrison towns or refugee settlement.

In the High Middle Ages about 20% of the German population lived in towns or cities, rising to 25% by 1800. That is a much lower number than the great urbanised landscapes of Flanders where nearly 40-50% were already living in the large centres like Ghent or Bruges.

Urbanisation was constrained by the problem of feeding so many people. Before the agrarian revolution in the 18th century one medium sized village could produce enough surplus to feed about 25 city dwellers. Large cities were dependent upon the import of grain to operate, which in turn meant access to trade routes, which usually operated along rivers and the coast.

The central socio-economic unit of the empire was the Household, a concept that stemmed from the concept of the Hide in Merovingian times. The Hide was a package of rights and resources that were meant to sustain a its’ members, organise production and reproduction. A household could be a family, but monastic communities were also households.

It all evolved around the physical house which was given a semi sacred character. Still today there are special rituals during the construction of houses, such as the topping out ceremony. The Household provided safety and warmth. It, and in particular the Pater Familias, the Hausvater, was responsible to ensure the material wellbeing of all its members. In return Household members owed obedience and had a moral obligation to uphold the reputation of the Household.

Households were initially established in villages but were also the key organisational structure in the cities. Taxation and other obligations were tied to the household, not the individual.

Civic self-government was based on the community of households. The rights and privileges or freedoms of the city were held by the community of the households, not by any individual.

These rights and freedoms as we have seen in the case of Freiburg were sometimes freely given by the territorial ruler or the empire to support the growth of the new settlement. But even in established cities, the process of granting rights was not always controversial. Self-government of the cities relieved the territorial lord from spending tome and resources on providing justice and security as he was obliged to. It was a bit of a give and take on both sides.

The other key source of city freedoms was the weakness and fragmentation of central power. The emperor and many of the princes were constantly short of money and soldiers. Cities were happy to help in exchange for more freedom to run themselves as they please, the transfer of market rights, bridges and mints etc. etc. pp. No imperial dynasty had developed a clear strategy for dealing with cities. Sometimes they supported them, mainly when they had a common enemy and sometimes, they suppressed their ambitions when it was convenient or possible. And then we have the constant conflict between pope and emperor. A city whose demand for some right or privilege had been rebuffed by the imperial chancellery could head over to the archbishop, or in case of many Italian cities, to the pope himself and get him to sign the piece of paper.

And once you had a piece of paper in a world that got increasingly reliant on written documents but had no clearly defined delineation of responsibilities was worth much more than its weight in gold.

And then the world got more and more sophisticated. The model of piecemeal rights and privileges is gradually being replaced by a more general system of civic rights. These rights of cities regulate the governance of the city, the right to raise taxes and require free labour to undertake important tasks ranging from street cleaning to building and maintaining city walls. Towns were able to make up their own rules and wrestled lower and sometimes higher jurisdiction out of the hands of the counts.

Cities became legal entities in their own right and so could own the city hall, breweries, mills, smithies, poorhouses and more controversially for the time, land and castles outside the walls of the city. These communes as a group had become entities that could stand alongside the territorial princes.

The governance structure in German cities was adopted from their Northern Italian neighbours. In Northern Italy city management had been modelled on ancient Rome, or what they thought ancient Rome was like. Hence the administrative control lay in the hand of consuls, initially vassals of the local bishop but increasingly elected officials. At the time Barbarossa comes to Lombardy, practically all cities he encounters are having consular governments. By 1200 so do many major cities north of the Alp like Cologne, Lubeck and Utrecht.

In German the consuls were called the Rat and was made up of normally a small number of men say 9-12 who had administrative responsibilities. To control them a larger assembly of the eminent citizens would be in charge of controlling the Rat. The three German city states that still exist, Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin mirror that structure with a Senate as the executive function, led by a Burgermeister as primus inter pares and a Burgerschaft assembly that passes the laws and controls the senate.

These city constitutions were often copied as new cities were founded. The constitution of Magdeburg stood godparent to almost 100 cities east of the Elbe. The tiny city of Soest in Westphalia claims to have the oldest German Stadtrecht that was picked up by about 65 cities. One of those was Lubeck where many merchants from Soest had settled. The Laws of Lubeck spread across the Baltic sea, being adopted as far away as Riga and Nowgorod.

Membership to the assembly and the Rat was not open to anyone. Only the important, as in wealthy, households could participate in civil self government. Cologne was most explicit. Its leadership was called the Richerzeche, the “guild of the rich”. Roles in the Rat and assembly were usually honorific, i.e., did not bring any kind of salary with it. That may sound all noble, but was largely designed to keep the riff-raff out.

Office-holding had become increasingly complex and time consuming as the cities grew. To relieve the burden the cities began building up their own bureaucracy of salaried officials who would do the actual work under guidance of the patricians.

The size of these cities varied considerably. Cologne was by now the largest city with about 40,000 inhabitants. BTW, Cologne obviously features regularly on the podcast, but it has a fantastically interesting history all by itself. Willem Fromm has dedicated a whole podcast to the history of his hometown. It is available in English as The History of Cologne and in German as the Geschichte der Stadt Koln. I had intended to point you guys into his direction for a while, but now I finally get around to doing it.

Where were we. Yes, the size of the cities. On the one hand we have the large ones like Cologne, but on the other we have quite small ones. The city of Weikersheim near where my family lives is a place of 4000 people today and maybe half that in the Middle Ages. The main market for these small cities was the local area. It had a market and as we noticed before, most villages had no artisans themselves. Hence if you needed an artisan to do a apiece of work you could not do yourself, you go to your local market town. A place like Weikersheim would not have many, if any merchants and they did not produce anything for the long-distance trade.

At the other end of the spectrum are the great trade cities. The main trade routes in 1200 were the two great shipping routes, the first across the Mediterranean, specifically from Constantinople and Cairo to Northern Italy, and then the northern routes between Bordeaux in south west France along the coast, through the channel and then into the Baltic. The connection between these two routes was by land, following the Rhone and the Rhine River from Milan to Flanders. The great rhenish cities of Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Mainz, Cologne, Utrecht, Nijmwegen were perfectly placed to benefit. Trade into the east also grew. Some routes, like the land connection between Hamburg and Lubeck were just more efficient and less dangerous than going across the Danish peninsula. Places like Magdeburg, Nurnberg and Vienna flourished.

Apart from shipping luxury goods from the East to western europe, a big chunk of the trade involved distributing goods made in the cities to broader markets. There is little direct information about what these things were in around 1200. Most confusingly we do not even know what the dominant industry in Milan, the largest and most sophisticated Italian city actually was. For some we know, Lucca made silk and Florence became famous for its dyes, Ghent, Bruges and other cities in Flanders weaved cloth and Bordeaux shipped wine north to England. Amongst the German cities Augsburg will become famous for its armouries and Nuremberg for art and mechanical goods including pocket watches. But by 1200 we do not know much about the industrial activity in German cities.

Though this is a bit out of scope for the topic of cities in around 1200, it is interesting to take a look at how cities in Germany developed from here and how that differs from both Italy and France.

In Italy the city leadership took possession of the lands around the city, the Contado and by 1200 had already wiped out most territorial lordships. Within the cities the oligarchies shut out all newcomers despite occasional violent uprisings. Violence was a permanent feature of Italian cities where different factions, often Guelfs versus Ghibellines fought each other for supremacy from their inner-city fortresses. Over time individual rulers would take control of the city, some through slow erosion of republican institutions as the Medici had done. Others had arrived as neutral foreigners, put in charge by the divided citizenry to bring peace to the streets. These individuals often inherited the local enmities between neighbouring cities which they conquered and over the 14th and 15th centuries the Italian city states became territorial principalities.

In Germany no city state became a territorial principality. The only principality in the Holy Roman Empire named after a city was the duchy of Brunswick but that was just a naming convention to give the House of Welf princely rank. German cities also developed oligarchies and they blocked access to outsiders. Minimum wealth requirements to participate in elections tightened and in some places were completely replaced by co-opting of friends and family into the Rat. But that is where it stopped.

The reason for this relative stability may have to do with the fact that cities in Germany did not directly control their surrounding countryside as a matter of course. Some did, like Nuremberg and Rothenburg, but most preferred a combination of co-operation and economic control to outright territorial lordship. That reduced the level of violence between cities and between cities and lords, which presumably also meant the internal tensions in the cities were less pronounced.

German cities were also dominated by burghers who did not come from or adopt the ways of the aristocracy. The chivalric code that drove many Italian city leaders to seek a contest in arms simply did not apply. Artisans and merchants very much prefer the sound of the cash register following a peaceful exchange of goods to the stirring bank of steel on steel.

Plus, the cities were often small. Peter Wilson gives the example of the town of Wildberg in Wurttemberg> It had 1328 inhabitants in 1707 across 300 households. These 300 households would share 95 different official positions in the town. Basically, everyone was in some way or another either currently or potentially involved in the management of the community.

What both Italian and German cities have in common is that they had some autonomy vis a vis the king/emperor and even their territorial overlords. Those cities that had no territorial overlord were so-called imperial cities, reporting nominally to the emperor but largely free to do what they liked. Territorial cities had a lot more constraints but could still rely on various guaranteed rights and privileges to maintain a level of independence.

In France cities enjoyed a time of great prosperity and relative freedom during the High Middle Ages. Northern French cities competed for the biggest, tallest and most beautiful cathedral. But after the black death most of them fell under control of the king and were gradually sapped of energy as Paris pulled in all the talent.

Medieval Germany never had a city of 100,000 inhabitants like Paris, London, Milan or Venice. But it a had a lot of medium sized cities between 20 and 40,000 souls. By 1800 the empire had 3 cities with over 100,000 inhabitants, Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna, no comparison to London at 1 million. But then it had 7 imperial cities and 27 territorial towns with more than 15,000 whilst England had only 2 at the time.

And that has remained the structure of the country. There is no megacity where everything happens but many sizeable centres, often specialised in particular industries with its own culture and history that is their source of pride.

I am sorry, but this is all for today. I am off on holiday tomorrow and there will be new episodes, no worries, but not quite at the same regularity you are used to. Normal service resumes in September. Until then I hope you will cope with the heatwave and see you soon.