“City Origins” and “Cities and European Civilization”

In this selection from Medieval Cities (1925), noted medieval historian Henri Pirenne describes how, between the death of the emperor Justinian in 565 CE and the Renaissance, European cities’ functions changed totally from what they had been during the Roman Empire, and the cities withered in size to tiny shadows of their former selves. Western Europe descended into several centuries of what used to be called the Dark Ages. Then, beginning in the eleventh century, they began to grow in size and change in function. Their wealth increased, a new kind of economic institution emerged – the guilds – and the populations of medieval cities began to grow. Pirenne emphasizes the role of trade in both the decline of cities at the end of the Roman Empire and their subsequent re-emergence. He argues that as trade stagnated, cities in Europe lost their economic reason for existing and withered and that merchants emerged as a separate class, free of many of the political, legal, social, and economic restrictions that kept medieval society so changeless. As Pirenne makes clear, as the merchant class grew in numbers and influence, they revolutionized the social structure of cities and led to the emergence of a rich, prosperous, and culturally vigorous urban culture that in Italy and France, in England and Belgium, and in Germany and the Netherlands, helped to set the stage for the Renaissance.