Page 247 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

diversity takes place in the way of dress, furniture, vessels, and household equipment. Such are the townsmen, who earn their living in industry or trade.
Q What did the biographer of Godric and Ibn Khaldun see as valuable in mercantile activity? What reservations did they have about trade? How are the two perspectives alike? How are they different, and how do you explain the differences? What generalizations can you make about Christian and Muslim attitudes toward trade?
Sources: Life of Saint Godric. From Reginald of Durham, “Life of St. Godric,” in G. G. Coulton, ed., Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918), pp. 415–20. Ibn Khaldun, Prolegomena. From An Arab Philosophy of History, ed. and trans. by Charles Issawi. New York: Darwin Press, 1987. Reprinted by permission of the Darwin Press.
that only members of the wealthiest and most power- ful families, who came to be called the patricians, were elected.
City governments kept close watch over the activities of their community. To care for the welfare of the com- munity, a government might regulate air and water pol- lution; provide water barrels and delegate responsibility to people in every section of the town to fight fires, which were an ever-present danger; construct ware- houses to stockpile grain in the event of food emergen- cies; and set the standards of weights and measures used in the various local industries. Urban crime was not a major problem in the towns of the High Middle Ages because their relatively small size made it difficult for criminals to operate openly. Nevertheless, medieval urban governments did organize town guards to patrol the streets by night and the city walls by day. People caught committing criminal acts were quickly tried for their offenses. Serious offenses, such as murder, were punished by execution, usually by hanging. Lesser crimes were punished by fines, flogging, or branding.
Medieval cities remained relatively small in compari- son with either ancient or modern cities. A large trad- ing city would have about 5,000 inhabitants. By 1300, London was the largest city in England, with 80,000 people or more. On the continent north of the Alps, only a few great urban centers of commerce, such as Bruges and Ghent, had a population close to 40,000. Italian cities tended to be larger, with Venice, Florence, Genoa, Milan, and Naples numbering almost 100,000 inhabitants each. Even the largest European city, how- ever, seemed insignificant alongside the Byzantine capi- tal of Constantinople or the Arab cities of Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo. For a long time to come, Europe remained predominantly rural, but in the long run, the
rise of towns and the growth of trade laid the founda- tions for the eventual transformation of Europe from a rural agricultural society to an urban industrial one.
Life in the Medieval City
Medieval towns were surrounded by stone walls that were expensive to build, so the space within was precious and tightly filled. This gave medieval cities their charac- teristic appearance of narrow, winding streets with the houses crowded against each other and the second and third stories of the dwellings built out over the streets. Because buildings were constructed mostly of wood before the fourteenth century and candles and wood fires were used for light and heat, the danger of fire was great. Medieval cities burned rapidly once a fire started.
Most of the people who lived in cities were mer- chants involved in trade and artisans engaged in manu- facturing of some kind (see Images of Everyday Life on p. 210). Generally, merchants and artisans had their own sections within a city. The merchant area included warehouses, inns, and taverns. Artisan sections were usually divided along craft lines; each craft had its own street where its activity was pursued.
The physical environment of many medieval cities was not pleasant. They were often dirty and rife with smells from animal and human wastes deposited in backyard privies or on the streets. Air pollution was also a fact of life, not only from the ubiquitous wood fires but also from the burning of coal, a cheap fuel that was employed industrially by lime burners, brew- ers, and dyers, as well as by poor people who could not afford to purchase wood. Cities were also unable to stop water pollution, especially from the tanning and animal-slaughtering industries. Butchers dumped blood
The New World of Trade and Cities 209
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