1 Approaching the Medieval City

‘Tell me, sir, this city – what is it?’, a Christian boy named Iamlikha asks a man on the street after arriving at his hometown, late antique Ephesus.Footnote 1 Iamlikha’s failure to identify his own native city is understandable given the circumstances. The day before, he and seven companions had decided to flee Ephesus and hide in a nearby cave for the night, rather than submit to an order by the Roman Emperor Decius that they sacrifice to the pagan gods. Upon re-entering the city the next morning, Iamlikha had seen, to his profound surprise, the sign of Christ’s cross suspended in proud display above the city gates. He is unable to reconcile this sight with the Ephesus he knows and remembers: a pagan city where the sign of Christ was banned from public space. How can his city have changed so fundamentally in a single day?Footnote 2

Iamlikha’s disturbing encounter with the unfamiliar facade of his hometown is followed by a series of still more unsettling experiences inside the city. When he goes to look for the imperial palace, he finds it closed. When he tries to buy food, he raises the suspicion of the local merchants who do not recognise his coins. Soon the rumour spreads that he has pillaged an ancient treasure-horde. He is apprehended and threatened with punishment. The story reaches its dramatic peak when the boy is brought to the episcopal church, where the bishop and a sophist question Iamlikha about his family and origins. The boy scans the crowd for a familiar face, someone who could identify him as the son of one of Ephesus’ leading citizens, but he does not recognise anyone. His parents, friends, and neighbours have disappeared. It is not until he introduces the crowd to his companions in the cave that the miraculous truth comes to light: what Iamlikha thought to be an overnight absence from Ephesus, has in fact lasted for centuries. The Christian boys went to sleep during the troubled reign of Decius, only to awake under the Christian Emperor Theodosius II, a good two hundred years later.Footnote 3

The above episode can be found in a poetic homily by the sixth-century Syrian bishop Jacob of Serugh.Footnote 4 Jacob’s homily, in Syriac, is among the earliest surviving versions of the tale, known also as ‘The (seven) sleepers of Ephesus’, but the story was retold in many forms and languages. It found its way into the Qur'an as the Surah al-Kahf, the Chapter of the Cave; it was translated into Old English and other Western vernaculars; and it eventually became a popular segment of Jacopo de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea.Footnote 5 Modern scholarship has been equally captivated. In an uncharacteristic display of generosity towards a Christian miracle-story, Edward Gibbon praised the ‘genuine merit of the fable’ and stressed its suitable chronology: the Roman world had well and truly changed during those two centuries of divine sleep.Footnote 6 Peter Brown used the tale as a wishful prelude to his The Making of Late Antiquity (1978), an attempt, in his own words, to ‘enter into [the] surprise’ of these Christian brothers as they beheld the new late antique world that had emerged during their years of slumber.Footnote 7

The present volume, too, accepts the invitation to bring a long-term and comparative perspective to the past, but its appreciation for the story of the Seven Sleepers goes beyond chronology. It rests above all on the central place the story allots to the city, as a physical place, as a community, and as an imaginative concept. On one level, it is a story of urban change and continuity.Footnote 8 It shows what happened to the ancient city as time progressed and new ideologies imposed themselves on the city’s physical landscape. Ephesus’ walls remained but were hung with crosses. Churches developed from private homes into public buildings. The market continued to serve as a central economic place. The city’s administrative centre shifted from the governmental palace to the episcopal complex. The urban topography changed as the resting places of martyrs and saints became focal points of communal devotion and church building outside the city walls.Footnote 9 Yet the story does not just approach the city as a collection of stones, but also as a community of people. Beyond asking whether a citizen of a Roman city would still have recognised their city after two centuries had passed, it asks the more pertinent question whether that citizen would still have belonged in it. The answer is decidedly ambivalent. Religious persecution had made Iamlikha and his companions flee from the community in which they had been born and held formal citizenship.Footnote 10 Upon returning in Christian times their religious affiliation was in alignment, but lack of recognisable kin and poor handling of everyday monetary practices made them suspicious in the eyes of the other townsfolk, who initially rejected their claims to citizenship. Evidently, membership of an urban community hinged on multiple criteria and was guaranteed by multiple agents.Footnote 11 Finally, there is the story’s widespread popularity throughout the Middle Ages. The tale of the Seven Sleepers became enshrined in Christian and Islamic tradition. It was retold on the streets of Baghdad and in the deurbanised landscape of Anglo-Saxon England. The city was thus not merely a place or community, but also an image and concept. Medieval people thought about and imagined the city quite regardless of whether they themselves lived in a city or not. The concept was useful and meaningful outside the context of a specific urban reality.

This volume adopts a threefold approach to the medieval city, studying it (1) as a physical entity which people experienced, shaped, and built; (2) as a community with which people identified, in which they participated and from which they could feel alienated; and (3) as a concept which people reached for in text, image, and material culture. The underlying premise is that these three layers were interconnected and reinforced each other. Civic ideals found their way into the social and physical landscape of the medieval city. Urban monuments helped instil and define feelings of community. Lived experiences in and around the city could feed back into expectations of proper civic behaviour. One of the central aims of this volume is to explore how, where, and why such interactions occurred in a medieval context. To this end, it adopts a long-term, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural approach. It brings together contributions that range across late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period, covering both the medieval East and West, and representing a wide variety of disciplinary angles and sources.

2 The Medieval City: Stones, People, Concepts

The idea of this volume originated in a segment of the Middle Ages not usually associated with cities and citizens: the early medieval West. Between 2017 and 2023, the members of the NWO VICI project Citizenship Discourses in the Early Middle Ages, 400–1100 undertook a study of the ways post-Roman societies used the Latin language of citizenship.Footnote 12 Ostensibly, prospects were bleak. The barbarian kingdoms that emerged after the disintegration of the Western Empire were less urbanised than Rome’s eastern successors, the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Khalifate.Footnote 13 In some regions, notably the Isles, cities disappeared almost entirely, or had never been there to begin with.Footnote 14 Where cities did remain, local power was in the hands of bishops and royal representatives, with few opportunities for political participation by the city’s population.Footnote 15 It was only with the emergence of the Italian communes in the late eleventh century that civic government once again became a serious alternative to territorial lordship.Footnote 16 Legal understandings of citizenship inherited from the Roman past also seem to have lost much of their force towards the early Middle Ages. Roman citizenship had first and foremost functioned as a legal status.Footnote 17 To be a Roman citizen meant having access to rights and privileges under Roman law, a privilege that the majority of inhabitants of the Roman polity did not have initially. When the Emperor Caracalla granted all free inhabitants of the empire citizenship in 212 CE, he deprived this once coveted status of much of its prestige and relevance. Roman citizenship, so the traditional argument goes, did not come to an end with the fall of the Western Empire, but in the centuries before it.Footnote 18 The citizen as an agent with particular legal rights and entitlements—what Maarten Prak recently called ‘formal citizenship’—did re-emerge in the West eventually, but like the return of urban political autonomy, it is associated with the period post-1000 CE.Footnote 19

The early medieval West, then, was not a civic world. Or so it seemed. For it became evident quickly that the concepts of city (civitas, urbs) and citizen (civis) were far from obsolescent. They continued to be used, widely, persistently, and in a great many different political and literary contexts. It was this continued use and re-use of civic vocabulary that the Citizenship Discourses-project set out to explore. Focusing on the Latin West in the period 400–1100 CE and taking in a wide array of written and material sources, the project sought to map out the mechanisms through which old civic language acquired new meanings and applications, especially in the context of Christianity as the dominant religion.

One crucial insight was the central importance of the Bible as a point of reference and interaction for post-Roman thinking about the city and citizenship. The Old and New Testament constitute a rich source of images, stories, and notions related to cities and their inhabitants.Footnote 20 Ostensibly many of these seem rather negative about earthly citizenship. The Bible provided examples of the city as a locus of sin—such as the Old Testament cities of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Nineveh—and inspired the subversive ideal of the Christian as a stranger (peregrinus) on earth and a citizen (civis) of the heavenly city (Ephesians 2:19; Philippians 3:20; Hebrews 11:13–16).Footnote 21 The project however showed that, far from closing the door on earthly citizenship, such imagery offered post-Roman authors new ways to define their earthly Christian communities in civic terms. Biblical ideals enriched rather than invalidated earthly claims of civic belonging.

A second feature that emerged from the project’s studies was that this interaction with Biblical ideals was more than a scholarly or theoretical exercise: it could have far-reaching implications on how post-Roman communities and their authorities defined who belonged and who did not. The ‘citizen’ in late antique law was progressively defined according to a person’s adherence to the Catholic faith; deviance from the norm meant social, legal, and even physical exclusion from the city. Besides law, liturgy was another important medium through which the boundaries between belonging and exclusion were drawn.Footnote 22 In the context of Mass, where the urban congregation gathered together, the sermon proved to be a particularly powerful tool to reconsider forms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizenship.Footnote 23 Often performed in an urban context, sermons enabled bishops to capitalise on their congregants’ expectations as members of an earthly city in order to shepherd them towards a proper Christian way of life. Through their moral exhortations, they redrew the boundaries of their civic communities along the yardstick of Christian faith and morality.Footnote 24

This brings us to another crucial observation: the importance of participation and responsibility in Christian visions of civic community. To be a citizen in a Christian context meant having to act in the here and now. Late antique and early medieval sources claim a connection between a city’s well-being and the moral conduct of its inhabitants and their rulers. Urban communities were expected to participate in communal religious actions—prayers, processions, public penance—to procure protection for their city in times of distress.Footnote 25 A city could be praised on account of its virtuous and devout citizens; yet, an abundance of vice could be considered a blemish on the city and associated with its physical ruin.Footnote 26 The demand of good citizenship also meant being a good citizen to others: a citizen was expected to keep a watchful and caring eye on other (prospective) members of the Christian community, and to make an ongoing effort to further their physical and spiritual well-being.Footnote 27

The above implies an urban context. However, as the project revealed, the city was but one environment in which the language of citizenship was used in the post-Roman West. Monasteries and royal courts turned out to be other important contexts that relied on civic terminology to set norms of communal belonging and participation. Monks could be framed as soldiers that had to rally to defend their monastic city.Footnote 28 And a king who engulfed his citizens and fatherland in civil war could face the prospect of finding the gates of heavenly peace closed on him.Footnote 29

The outcomes of the project have shown the profits of studying citizenship in the late antique and early medieval West outside the strict framework of ‘Roman citizenship’ with associated rights and duties. Approaching citizenship from the perspective of civic discourse opened new vistas on the relevance and functions that civic notions had and continued to have throughout late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This relevance was not confined to the literary and imaginative domain. Indeed, these notions also fulfilled a crucial role in defining and giving shape to urban and non-urban communities, and could have an impact on a community’s built surroundings.

It is this interconnectedness of stones, people, and concepts that this volume seeks to explore further, through an extension of the project’s scope. For one, this volume will address the question of city, citizen, and citizenship in the medieval world by focusing on a larger chronological timeframe that reaches from late Antiquity towards the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period. In part, such chronological expansion should facilitate historical comparison. How do the citizenship discourses found in early medieval saints’ lives relate to the civic practices encountered in late medieval Italy and Flanders? In part, the comparison is also about method. What happens when an approach developed for the early medieval West is brought to bear on the more heavily urbanised landscapes of the later Middle Ages? Second, the volume moves beyond the confines of Western Christianity, expanding its view from the West to the East and from the Christian to the Islamic world. Though the Byzantine world is less represented in the present volume, a wealth of literature on Byzantine cities and on the concept of people in Constantinople can be referred to here. Such studies have appeared recently in the form both of monographsFootnote 30 and of chapters in comparative volumes.Footnote 31 Thirdly, the project’s original focus on text, image, and terminology is expanded to incorporate a wider array of sources, including material and archaeological evidence. By extension, the contributions to this volume will adopt different emphases and take different points of departure. Some will start from a city’s physical structures; others are most concerned with the city’s inhabitants and their actions; yet others take concepts or visualisations as point of entry. All contributions, however, testify to the interconnectedness of these three facets of ‘the city’.

3 Volume Overview

In line with the above, the contributions following this Introduction (I) are organised under three headers: (II) Monumentalising the City, (III) Participating in the City, and (IV) Imagining the City. These sections approach the city as a physical manifestation, as a community of people, and as a concept, respectively. Within each section, the contributions are ordered in more or less chronological fashion. The volume concludes with an Epilogue (V).

Part II, Monumentalising the City, focuses on physical buildings, infrastructures, and monuments in the late antique and medieval city. It looks into the appearance and function of such structures in various urban contexts, while simultaneously asking who was involved in their creation and maintenance, and why. Stones and people are thus closely connected in this section, as indeed is the interaction between physical urban structures and the city as concept or ideal.

The overarching parameters are set in the opening contribution by Javier Martínez Jiménez. He starts with a broad question: what bound the inhabitants of the pre-industrial city together? Beyond functional answers—military safety, economic opportunities, state coercion—Martínez Jiménez emphasises the psychological side of this bond. Cities generated what he calls ‘place-based identities’, a sense of belonging in, and identification with, a shared environment and its local landmarks. Such place-based identity incentivised a city’s inhabitants, and the elite in particular, to make investments towards its survival. Martínez Jiménez goes on to test this model against the late antique and early medieval Visigothic city. Post-Roman Spain was among the more urbanised of the western successor states, but it suffered all the same from dwindling resources, reduced elite spending, and general urban decline. Careful study of archaeological and epigraphical evidence allows Martínez Jiménez to put things in perspective: what changed was the scale and focus of elite investment in their urban surroundings, not the impulse to invest itself. He uncovers a rich cast of elite citizens—city councils, magistrates, bishops, private patrons—who spent resources on the building and upkeep of public monuments. This could involve essential infrastructure inherited from the Roman period, such as aqueducts and streets, but most resources appear to have gone towards Christian buildings: monasteries, funerary basilicas, episcopal complexes, and guest houses. Beyond expressions of elite piety, such Christian monuments served to reinforce a communal identity among the wider populace. Citizens were tied to the newly emerging Christian landscape by their participation in communal rituals such as Mass, burials, weddings, and urban processions. Overall, Martínez Jiménez is optimistic about the early medieval city’s continued ability to forge civic identity through acts of elite spending on urban monuments.

The second contribution, by Peter Brown and Maaike van Berkel, turns to the early Islamic city under the Abbasids. Apart from a different political and religious setting, their contribution encounters different urban proportions. With inhabitant numbers ranging in the hundreds of thousands, Islamic cities such as Basra, Samarra, and Baghdad were significantly larger than anything found in the West at the time. All the same, Brown and Van Berkel face familiar challenges. There is an unhelpful academic paradigm, in this case not of urban decline, but of the Islamic city as chaotic and lacking in coherent planning. They also face piecemeal evidence, leading them creatively to combine archaeological and written sources. Brown and Van Berkel’s central innovation is to approach the early Islamic city through the lens of water management, a felicitous choice as water was not just essential for human survival but also covered a wide range of secondary activities in the Islamic city. The resulting take on Islamic city-planning is a nuanced yet fundamental correction to the lingering paradigm of urban chaos. More than the Visigothic kings, the Abbasid caliphs were actively involved in the financing and planning of urban infrastructure, taking the lead on major irrigation schemes. Yet they were not afraid to delegate. For the organisation of hydraulic infrastructure within the different quarters or cantonments of the city, they ceded responsibility to the tribes or military units at the head of each cantonment. Still other arrangements come into focus on the level of the neighbourhood: commercial water-carriers delivering drinking water to private homes equipped with basins and cisterns; central courtyards with privately owned wells. Water management in the Islamic city, in short, covered a wide range of infrastructural practices. Essential for the city’s functioning and survival, it was neither an exclusively top-down affair nor something that was left unregulated. In the Islamic city, water was a shared responsibility.

The third contribution, by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, turns to the Carolingian city. Contemporary to the Abbasids, the Carolingians ruled over an extensive European empire. But contrary to the Abbasid khalifate, the Carolingian polity is not usually characterised as urban. The Carolingians ruled through palaces, monasteries, and forts, whereas such cities as existed in Europe under their rule were the domain of the bishop. Consulting a variety of contemporary texts, Ottewill-Soulsby contests this established reading of affairs, starting with Charlemagne’s ill-fated foundation of a new city beyond the Rhine in 776, which was razed to the ground two years later by the Saxons. The episode, he shows, is revealing on several levels. Like other post-Roman kings, Charlemagne and his successors were eager to emulate the Roman example of the ruler as city-founder. Wherever the Carolingians engaged in monumental construction of some sort, contemporaries were quick to celebrate their activities using urban analogies. At the same time, they had a flexible understanding of what exactly constituted a city. Delving further into one civic concept in particular, that of civitas, Ottewill-Soulsby shows that Carolingian thinking was heavily indebted to Cicero and Augustine, who had defined civitas not merely as a physical city, but also as a community of people under a shared law or united by love. This allowed the Carolingians to think of all sorts of settlements as civitates: actual cities, monasteries, royal palaces, and in one notable case, a village of dog-headed people thought to exist in the far North. The city was thus more central to Carolingian ambitions than is usually assumed. It was an ideal that helped them articulate what they expected of the various settlements they founded and ruled: what these settlements should look like and how their members should behave.

In the fourth and final contribution to Part II, Merlijn Hurx leads us through the late medieval Low Countries. Adopting an architectural perspective, he studies urban monuments as expressions of civic pride. At first, the reader might feel to have stepped into a different world, one that feels closer somehow to our own present-day urban environments. Many of the monuments he studies are still standing today. That said, Hurx’ underlying concerns are similar to those of the previous contributors. That is: who was involved in creating these urban monuments and why? The question of agency yields rich results for the late medieval Low Countries: to erect a new church in fifteenth-century Delft meant the involvement of several territorial lords, bishops, the town council, city magistrates, the citizens, various guilds, and the builders themselves. We even get to see the bureaucratic procedures accompanying the building-process and the financial agreements underlying them. Hurx refrains from claiming a single ideological purpose for such building projects. Rather, he shows they enabled communication on various levels: a new town hall expressed something about the city to the citizens themselves, it was a form of intra-urban competition, and it was a way to negotiate the city’s relationship to their territorial lord(s). A monument’s size, form, and aesthetics all contributed to such communication. Yet as Hurx reminds us at the end, through the example of a public oath-taking in Bruges, part of their ideological meaning was created by what people did within and in front of such monuments.

Part III of this volume, Participating in the City, is an attempt to get a better understanding of what such ‘doing’ could entail. It explores what it meant to be a citizen in a medieval city in terms of rights and duties and asks who got to set the norms for such participation. At the same time, contributions in this segment also focus on the boundaries between citizens and non-citizens, and the grounds on which such boundaries were drawn.

The first contribution, by Robert Flierman, explores the early medieval reception of two civic traditions: that of Rome and that of Christianity. Ostensibly, the two seem to be at odds. Citizenship in the Roman empire was a means of social differentiation and status; it entailed legal privileges and the right to participate politically in an urban context. Early Christian authors, on the other hand, employed the language of citizenship to articulate a spiritual sense of belonging that cut straight through social and legal ties. The Christian’s principal loyalty should be to a world to come, visualised as a celestial city: the Heavenly Jerusalem. Flierman turns to an early sixth-century hagiographical text—Eugippius’ Commemoratorium Vitae Sancti Severini (Recollections on the Life of the Holy Severinus) to show that these competing visions on citizenship could in fact be reconciled and merged into a single script of civic behaviour. Writing in post-Roman Italy under barbarian rule, Eugippius used the story of Severinus to lay out a model of civic community that revolved around collective responsibility, public piety, Christian orthodoxy, and charity to one’s fellow citizens. He aimed this model at a diverse audience of monks, Roman aristocrats, and city-dwellers—Italy’s Gothic ruling class was notably excluded—inviting each reader to apply it to their own specific circumstances. Only by acting as good citizens on earth and embracing the labours and wanderings that came with such an ordeal, could they hope to find their way to the heavenly fatherland.

Good citizenship is the subject also of the second contribution within this segment, by Josephine van den Bent and Angela Isoldi. Their study returns to the issue of water management in the Islamic world, but rather than looking at urban infrastructure as a whole, they focus on water-related charity by individual citizens. Alms-giving was an important, indeed mandatory, act for Muslims. In the context of the Islamic city, providing drinking-water to the community through a permanent charitable endowment (waqf) was simultaneously an act of great piety and a means of social communication. Taking Abbasid Baghdad and Mamluk Caïro as their case studies, Van den Bent and Isoldi explore the practical forms of such endowments and who was involved in them. The evidence for Baghdad is limited but suggestive: court-connected men and women, born to a low status, seeking to cement their social elevation by providing their fellow citizens with access to drinking-water by building ponds and tanks. The evidence for the Mamluk Caïro period is more copious, bespeaking a civic environment in which urban dignitaries were morally expected to make water endowments, which typically took the form of underground cisterns, filled by water-carriers and staffed by janitors tasked with cleaning and distribution. In part, as Van den Bent and Isoldi show, this new charitable norm was informed by environmental urgency, as recession of the Nile made drinking-water less accessible to the common citizen. Yet political and religious motives remained pronounced as well: many cisterns were intended to be conspicuous landmarks in the urban landscape, decorated with ornate facades and integrated in larger religious building-complexes.

Spending resources on the well-being of fellow citizens was one way to signal and cement one’s civic status. Using the right language was another. The third contribution, by Marco Mostert, poses the question to what extent literacy could function as a boundary that separated citizens from non-citizens in the medieval world. Taking late medieval Scandinavia as a case study, he arrives at several conclusions. The classical ideological distinction between the cultural town-dweller and the uncultured peasant was not very salient in a Scandinavian context. In part, because towns were quite small and functioned within a dominantly rural society, in part because continued usage of runes allowed for literacy without formal schooling. Where Mostert does see the emergence of writing-related boundaries is within the cities themselves. These boundaries were associated, first, with knowledge of written Latin as opposed to the vernaculars, and second, with having access to written administrative procedures. Writing was undeniably associated with power in the Scandinavian towns. Their status and rights as towns were recorded in charters. Their political and legal procedures relied on written forms. Citizens had to be formally enrolled on a citizen-list. Town scribes functioned as important keepers of communal records and institutional history. Overall, Mostert thus stresses practical boundaries over ideological ones: having access to the right documents was more socially distinctive in Scandinavian towns than being perceived as a literate person.

With the next two contributions, by Claire Weeda and Rob Meens respectively, we move once again to the high and late medieval Low Countries. Both are concerned with the boundaries between citizens and non-citizens, though they focus on different sides of the divide. Weeda looks in from the city’s social periphery. Her study explores the ambivalent civic status of the so-called ribalds, a loosely defined social group of able-bodied paupers who moved from city to city in search of temporary work. Weeda traces their appearance back to the twelfth century where they appear in a military context, as foot soldiers tasked with the more dishonourable tasks of digging latrines, carrying off the fallen, and pillaging conquered cities. By the thirteenth century, they also appear within the cities themselves, removing waste, cleaning ditches, and declogging waterways. Legally, the ribalds were non-citizens. Their involvement in dirty and dishonourable work also made them an object of widespread moral censure. In practice, however, they were indispensable for the civic health of the late medieval city. As Weeda pointedly asserts, in an urban environment increasingly concerned with pollution and cleanliness, removing dirt constituted a hallmark of civic participation. Much the same could be said of the ribald’s involvement in urban armies and militias. Despite relying on them in essential ways, cities took care to maintain and even exploit the ribalds’ outsider status. At urban festivals and postwar celebrations, the ribalds were publicly ridiculed, allowing the citizens to dissociate themselves from the ribalds’ dishonourable toils and reconfirm their own civic honour and status. In both practical and ideological terms, the non-citizen proved crucial for the city’s well-being.

Whereas Weeda seeks to understand medieval citizenship by studying those excluded from it, Meens turns to those on the inside. His contribution is a detailed case study of Galbert of Bruges’ history of the murder of the Flemish count Charles the Good in 1127. An urban notary who was himself present in Bruges during the assassination, Galbert offers an insider’s view on a city in turmoil. Yet as Meens suggests, his history might also be read as an attempt to call his fellow citizens to order and reinstate a sense of community among them. Galbert pursued various narrative strategies to this end. He almost exclusively spoke about the citizens of Bruges in collective terms, papering over social divisions and political factions, including the fact that many in the city had supported the murder. To reinforce this suggestion of civic cohesion, he offered his readers a number of enemies and threats, such as the provost Bertulf, whom Galbert held responsible for the assassination, and the ill-behaved and villainous citizens of Gent. Apart from such overt boundary-setting, Meens also discerns more implicit forms of exclusion in Galbert’s narrative: women did not have an active role in Galbert’s conception of the citizen body, nor did the unfree.

Mechanisms of civic inclusion and exclusion are further explored in the last contribution to Part III, by Rozanne Versendaal, which deals with urban festive culture as a context of civic participation and community-building. Versendaal looks specifically at a type of parodic texts, so-called mandements joyeux or joyful ordinances, and their societal uses in fifteenth-century Burgundy and Northern France. Modelled on the strict textual conventions of diplomatic missives, the mandements were highly literary documents. Yet they could reach a wide audience: they were meant to be performed during urban festivals in front of a large urban crowd, with citizens themselves being part of the performance. Beyond parodying well-known diplomatic conventions, mandements joyeux engaged in what Versendaal terms ‘citizenship discourse’: they enabled citizens and their authorities to enter into a staged conversation about communal values and contemporary issues. Versendaal thus stresses their situational nature. One of her two central case studies, the Mandement de froidure by Jean Molinet, was performed in Valenciennes in 1460, prior to the Lenten Fast. This mandement saw a King of Drinks calling his male and female soldiers to arms using exuberant and sexually explicit imagery, lampooning the religious restrictions associated with Lentfasting in what Versendaal considers a remarkably inclusive manner. Such calls for unity among the citizens of Valenciennes and surrounding towns take on additional political significance when we consider Molinet’s close association with the dukes of Burgundy: the unifying message of his Mandement de froidure fitted the growing ducal ambition at the time to further integrate their disparate domains. The citizenship discourse of mandements joyeux, Versendaal concludes, offered room to several distinct voices, who could engage in social criticism but could also support the claims of worldly authorities.

Part IV, Imagining the City, turns from participation to imagination. The principal focus here is not on cities or citizenship per se, but on those who used such concepts, wrote about them, and visualised and depicted them. From scriptural cities in medieval exegesis, to imagined itineraries to Rome, this section aims to understand how, why, and in what contexts medieval individuals and communities reached for the concept of the city. Naturally, this context could be that of the physical city, generating a complex interaction between how the city was imagined and how it was organised, experienced, and lived. At the same time, this section seeks to address how medieval thinking on the ideal city and civic community could take place also in non-urban contexts: the periphery, the monastery.

The first contribution, by Merel de Bruin-van de Beek, looks at civic imagery in late antique sermons. She deals specifically with the sermon corpus of Maximus of Turin, whose preaching, as De Bruin-van de Beek shows, contains examples of a constant interplay between the real and the imagined city. In the first sermon that De Bruin-van de Beek discusses, we see how Maximus engaged with the ongoing threat of hostilities looming over Turin. While sympathising with his congregants in their anxiety, he at the same time recognises Turin’s predicament as an opportunity for communal introspection. After all, the present dangers were but a prefiguration of the Final Judgement. Beyond defending their city physically, the citizens of Turin should thus take care to fortify their spiritual defences. Here Maximus drew from the people’s present experiences as well as Scripture to project the soul as a city that had to be protected with all manners of religious action and virtuous conduct. Scripture also allowed Maximus to assert his own authority as a preacher within the Christian community of Turin. Just as God had placed the prophet Ezekiel as a watchman over the People of Israel to look out from the urban heights for enemies and to provide timely warnings to the citizens, so Maximus was responsible to God for spiritually guarding Christ’s flock by pointing out sin and the danger of God’s future judgement. For Maximus, the city was thus at once a communal reality and a rhetorical resource. A persuasive Christian bishop, De Bruin-van de Beek shows, was able to think along both lines.

The second contribution, by Megan Welton, dives further into Christian uses of civic rhetoric, underlining that such rhetoric did not necessarily require an urban setting or audience. Taking the reader through four successive textual genres used in the post-Roman West—biblical exegesis, liturgy, saints’ lives, and letters—Welton shows that the image of the city could present itself to any medieval Christian who thought about ‘community’, whether that community was an actual city, a church, a monastery, a kingdom, or the Christian Church at large. This flexibility recalls the remarks by Ottewill-Soulsby on Carolingian usage of the term civitas. But where Ottewill-Soulsby stressed the importance of Cicero and Augustine, Welton reiterates the importance of the Bible as a shared point of reference, above all the Book of Revelation, with its detailed description of Heavenly Jerusalem. This description offered the Christian a promise of Salvation and an ideal model of earthly community. Furthermore, it catered to a deep-seated need to think about morality and virtue in material terms, for example, the saints as the gems studding the walls of the Heavenly City, setting a bright example to the living, or the Church as a wall that can never be brought low by the battering ram of heresy. The analogy of the city and its constituent parts—walls, towers, gates, adornments—could make abstract Christian ideals concrete.

The final two contributions, by Klazina Staat and Natalia Petrovskaia respectively, move from the Heavenly Jerusalem towards that other archetypical city in western medieval thinking: Rome. Both focus not on the city itself, but on how Rome was imagined in text and image. Staat’s case study is a well-known Carolingian composite manuscript: Stiftsbibliothek Einsiedeln, codex 326 (1076), which contains a rich collection of texts on Rome, including an anthology of inscriptions, a list of city-walks, a description of the walls, a description of Roman liturgical rites, and a collection of poetic texts. Its patent concern with Roman monuments and urban space have led many to believe the manuscript was a guide for pilgrims. Combining careful study of the manuscript with recent scholarship on Carolingian perceptions of Rome, Staat arrives at a different conclusion: the manuscript was intended to be used in a monastic context. It made Rome accessible—‘bringing Rome home’, in her words—to monks who would probably never visit the city in person, but nevertheless sought to enter the city mentally, and witness the rich heritage on display there: Rome’s buildings, her imperial ideology, her literature, her religious festivities and rituals. The Carolingians knew Rome as an actual city, with physical monuments and ongoing political relevance, but they simultaneously thought of Rome as an ideal they sought to imitate and emulate. Staat unearths an up-and-close example of how such imitation and emulation was facilitated.

Natalia Petrovskaia’s contribution, lastly, compares an imagined literary journey to and from Rome, the Dream of Maxen Wledic (ca. 1215–1217), with a set of real travel-accounts by Gerald of Wales (1146–1223). Both texts originated in a medieval Welsh context, in one and the same intellectual milieu, despite being composed in different languages. Petrovskaia asks how members of this Welsh milieu would have conceptualised the city and the roads towards it. Her texts reveal several concerns. First, both showcase a casual familiarity with Rome and the roads and places along the way. Rome was not perceived as a distant or alien place. Travel to the city took place regularly, to the extent that even fictional accounts played with their readers’ expectations of these places. Second, and somewhat contrary to Staat’s Carolingian case study, both Welsh stories were more interested in human interactions than in physical monuments. They conceived of space as something that was given meaning by those interacting with it. Finally, these texts, and the Dream of Maxen Wledic in particular, bespeak a political agenda. The story re-imagines the Roman past by showing Britain to have conquered Rome rather than the other way around. In doing so, thus Petrovskaia, the author sought to reclaim Welsh autonomy in the face of Anglo-Norman oppression.

The three research lines of the volume are brought together in the Epilogue (V). Els Rose, who instigated and headed the Citizenship Discourses project, takes up the task. Her contribution reflects on the volume as a whole and maps out directions for future research. Taking the language of citizenship as a point of departure, she emphasises the performative potential inherent in that language, and hence, the scholarly need to explore that performative potential further. Language, used in a performative context, gains the capacity not merely to organise, but also to realise. For civic language, thus Rose, this means looking beyond the strictly legal and political understanding of citizenship as a collection of rights and duties guaranteed on an institutional level, towards its symbolic uses to effect change and communicate new models of community. It also means paying attention to the non-citizen—the outsider, the migrant, the refugee—who may not or not yet be a citizen before the law, but can speak and act out the language all the same. Rose singles out communal ritual and worship as a particularly fruitful direction for future research on medieval citizenship. Leading the reader through striking examples from the Western and Eastern Christian liturgy, she stresses the ‘transformative force’ of civic language in this context. As ongoing participants in the Christian cult, Christians were continuously ‘re-writing’ the civitas, which could include its buildings, its citizens, and its ideals.