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Cornell University Press, 1991.
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Leveel, Pierre. Histoire de la Touraine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967.
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America, 1929.
TOWNS
. As the Roman Empire declined after A.D. 165, all cities, stricken by high taxes and
plague, decayed, but unevenly. As interprovincial trade diminished, Marseille shrank, but
Lyon, a capital as well as emporium, was but-tressed by increasing bureaucratization.
After 406, Germanic invasions threatened urban life, but under the Merovingians eastern
merchants continued to function until the Muslims seized the Mediterranean, after which
gold coinage and papyrus virtually disappeared. Although shrunken walls protected
cathedrals and their adjuncts, trading towns and secular administrative centers virtually
disappeared. Muslim occupation diminished Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Narbonne on the
Garonne route. With about 20,000 inhabitants, only Paris, which held off the Norsemen
in 885, and Orléans, another river port as well as a monastic center, escaped significant
disruption. Near Tours, downstream from Orléans, the Franks stopped the Muslims in
732, but Norsemen sacked the place in 853 and 903.
In the short-lived Carolingian revival, Duurstede and Quentovic developed along the
Scheldt and Rhine estuaries, formerly limes but now imperial arteries. Their trading with
England and Scandinavia sparked a revival that better coinage and a “renaissance” attest,
but the fragmentation of the empire and the Viking raids destroyed them and all other
important ports, while Muslims wrecked southern commerce. Feudalization of coinage in
the 10th century also impeded trade. Peddlers conveyed salt, metals, and a few luxury
items that seeped from Venice. Territorial principalities developed around Rouen in
Normandy and Bordeaux in Aquitaine, but no town surpassed 10,000 inhabitants between
the 8th century and the year 1000.
Cessation of invasions, greater political stability, warmer climate, and an agricultural
revolution thereafter fostered trade and urban growth. Old Roman sites revived, as
itinerant merchants wintered under their protective walls or those of propitiously located
castles. They gradually established settled mercantile communities that outstripped the
adjacent fortified area. The merchants profited from oriental goods, available after
Christian shipping reopened the Mediterranean, and northerners brought Baltic products
to Flanders to trade for eastern luxuries at the fairs of Champagne. Though Flemish
weavers surpassed other craftsmen and Lombard bankers excelled Jewish pawn-brokers,
French towns also developed guilds. Unlike their Italian counterparts, French communes,
backed by guilds, rarely included nobility. Before the disasters of the 14th century, the
general population trebled but many towns multiplied tenfold, although three-quarters of
them still had fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. Among them were thirty-nine bastides
founded by Alphonse of Poitiers and the more significant centers of Aigues-Mortes and
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