Voracious states and obstructing cities

Conclusions

We have considered the evolution of the relations between cities and states as the product of changing relative power positions. For the towns, these mainly consisted of their population figure, their economic and financial prosperity, their communication facilities, their prerogatives in administrative, economic, fiscal, and judicial matters, and their military force. For the monarchies, the continuity and skills of the rulers mattered, while the dimensions, the cohesion and communication facilities of the territory, the available resources and the pressure of neighboring competitors weighed heavily on their destiny. In a pattern of changing relations, coalitions between the weaker partners in the polity against the mightier were normal.

In most parts of Europe, the urban development took place either spontaneously - outside the feudal power structure - or with the active support of princes. As long as princes and towns found a common rival in the feudal nobility, they were allies to each other's advantage. The more a region was urbanized, the more resources the princes could get from them by bargaining or pressure. Cities thus paid in a way protection costs against the dangerous grip of the nobility. Where no monarch could elevate himself above the rest of the landed aristocracy, as in late medieval Germany, the towns had to secure their trade routes by leagues and treaties with feudal lords. In the case of Northern Italy, the growth and power of the cities were so overwhelming, in the absence of any real overlord, that the nobility merged with the urban elite to dominate the countryside. In other regions, the major trading cities reached a point in their development where their power balanced that of the monarch. In the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this was the case of Aragonese towns, Baltic harbors and Flemish and Brabantine cities.

The fifteenth century was crucial for the expansion of monarchical power. While most towns stagnated economically, the monarchies could build up larger and more efficient state structures, partly by elimination of weaker competitors. “Modern” states claimed functions that had traditionally belonged to the local and territorial prerogatives of the major cities. The list of these prerogatives is astonishingly convergent, from Barcelona to Danzig. “Modern” states expanded their functions in jurisdiction, coinage, economic regulation, fiscality, diplomacy, the violence monopoly. Evidently, they encroached on long-established urban practices, many of them once granted in privileges by former rulers. “Modern” sovereigns, however strove toward full and direct powers and did not hesitate to use their military supremacy to eliminate all intermediary powers, keeping them off the resources.

Wolfgang Reinhard recently proposed a theoretical model of the increase in state power. Combining existing theories, he noticed that their arguments operate at different levels of abstraction without excluding each other. So he left some space for the voluntary action of individuals while situating it within the larger frameworks of political and social systems. Processes on the micro-level (personal ambitions, group egoisms reinforcing state institutions), the meso-level (class antagonisms, tensions between rulers and ruled, interstate competition) and the macro-level (states versus economic and geographical systems) converge to strengthen states.¹ The studies in the present volume fully confirm this mighty vision, albeit from the perspective of cities alone; the three levels of interaction are nevertheless displayed clearly from this viewpoint.

Urban centers did not succeed, however, in creating coherent, and stable power structures alternative to those of the monarchical states, unless

• a. urban potential was extremely high (Northern Italy, the Netherlands) and thus the communications easy and the distances short, or

• b. the feudal power was extremely weak (Italy, Switzerland, Holland). Overwhelmingly mighty cities like Venice, Milan, and Florence created new systems of domination by the capital's elites over the smaller cities and the countryside. This tendency was blocked in the Southern Netherlands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by a dramatic expansion and effort of monarchical power, but it came fully to the fore in the Dutch Republic. In Switzerland, both patterns of domination remained absent and a communal federation survived.²

My central argument is that the requirements and pressures of monarchical states suffocated the metropoles of the European economy. The competition within the state system pushed all political unities toward increasing military expenditure and further reaching bureaucratic control. Both violate the conditions favorable to the early commercial capitalism. It is striking that the core cities of the European economy were always fairly independent from monarchical pressure: at most they bargained, like Barcelona, Prague, Augsburg, Nurnberg, and Antwerp, but never could they fulfill their metropolitan function under the rigorous control of a centralized bureaucracy. Seville, where this seemed a real danger in the seventeenth century, managed to circumvent state regulation by massive fraud. The articles in this volume illustrate the reasons for this incompatibility.

Metropoles and monarchs only could collaborate as long as the latter were not yet unchallenged rulers. As soon as they could think about centralized, bureaucratic, “national,” “modern” states, they had to eliminate the intermediary power structures within their territory. Major cities that had lived on export industries and long-distance trade had necessarily built up such structures in their regions and even beyond. Disturbing these, the monarchs touched the base of the urban prosperity, which they further suffocated by the fiscal overload warfare imposed.

However, even the submission of a high urban potential area by a monarchical state, by conquest, internal war, or heritage, could not lead to the status of dependent towns as we observed in Central Europe after 1450. Accumulated capital, existing social and political structures, and the advance in intensity could not be annihilated by sheer physical violence. We can observe a close correlation between the development of autonomously active representative organizations and urban potential. On the local scale, the mobility in the town councils correlated strongly with the size and the socioeconomic differentiation of a city. In the major ones, artisans had a say in the large councils but the merchants and rentiers kept firm control and fiercely opposed popular revolts in other cities. On the supralocal scale, commercial centers necessarily developed loosely structured consultative organizations in order to regulate the material, judicial and diplomatical aspects of the trade. These intensive negotiations crossed state borders and included all kinds of partners ranging from their own or foreign monarchs to local producers.³

The submission of formerly fairly autonomous cities could only be accomplished by granting substantial parts of the profits to local elites who thus were turned to rentiers. The rhythm of negotiations slowed down and they became more formalistic, but they did not disappear. During the fifteenth century, a tendency toward a higher exclusiveness can be noticed. More conservative elites obviously were prepared to give up the political autonomy of the city for a consolidation of their personal positions.

Urbanization thus fundamentally influenced the shape of “national” states: by facilitating their emergence first, and by obstructing centralization in further stages. On the other hand, monarchies furthered the development of commercial capitalism as long as they were not able to impose their dynastical or imperial chimeras that - unlimited as they are - necessarily exhaust even the most flourishing economy.