Crime was more difficult to control. The intimacy
of town life encouraged theft, and the labyrinth of
streets and alleys provided robbers with multiple es-
cape routes. No police force existed. Most towns had
a watch for night patrols and a militia that could inter-
vene in riots and other disturbances, but competent
thieves were rarely caught and interpersonal violence,
which was fairly common, aroused little concern. If an
encounter stopped short of murder or serious disfig-
urement the authorities were inclined to look the
other way. They were far more concerned with main-
taining the social and economic order and with public
health. Politically, even this was by no means easy.
The close proximity between rich and poor and the
exclusivity of most town governments made social
tension inevitable. Laborers, the urban poor, and even
some of the journeymen lived in grinding poverty.
Entire families often occupied a single, unheated room
and subsisted on inadequate diets while the urban rich
lived with an ostentation that even the feudal aristoc-
racy could rarely equal. The contrast was a fertile
source of discontent. Though riots and revolts were
not always led by the poor but by prosperous malcon-
tents who had been excluded from leadership in the
commune, such people found it easy to play upon the
bitter resentments of those who had nothing to lose
but their lives.
Civil disturbances would reach a peak in the years
after the Black Death, but urban patriciates had long
been fearful of popular revolts. Disgruntled weavers and
other cloth workers in the towns of thirteenth-century
Flanders launched revolts based openly on class war-
fare. Everywhere the apprentices, who shared the vio-
lent impulses of most adolescent males, were available
on call to reinforce the social and economic demands
of the artisans. Riots were common, and rebellion was
suppressed with extreme brutality.
In southern Europe, social tensions were muted
though not eliminated by clientage. The factions that
dominated city politics had tentacles that reached
down to the artisan and the laboring classes. Mutual
obligation, though unequal in its benefits, tended to
moderate class feeling and reduce the social isolation of
the patriciate, which, in Flemish and German towns,
was far more extreme. In spite of this, Venice faced the
specter of revolution in the late thirteenth century, and
the political life of fourteenth-century Florence was
dominated by a struggle between the major and minor
guilds that revealed deep social divisions. Where city
governments were backed by the authority of a strong
monarchy, as in France, England, and Castile, discon-
tent was easier to control.
The commercial revolution of the Middle Ages
marked a turning point in the history of the West.
The years of relative isolation were over. By the mid-
thirteenth century, even the most remote European
villages were touched, at least peripherally, by an
economy that spanned the known world. Trading con-
nections gave Europeans access to the gold and ivory
of Africa, the furs and amber of Russia, and the spices
of the Far East. Even China, at the end of the long Silk
Road across central Asia, was within reach, and a few
Europeans, among whom the Venetian Marco Polo
(1254–1324) is the most famous, traveled there. Few
rural communities were in any sense dependent upon
long distance trade and most were still largely self-
sustaining, but their horizons had been broadened
immeasureably.
The towns, themselves the products of trade, were
the connecting links between the agrarian hinterland in
which most Europeans lived, and the great world out-
side. They were also the cultural and intellectual cata-
lysts for society as a whole. The requirements of
business and of participation in government demanded
literacy. The intensity of urban life encouraged vigor-
ous debate. Some measure of intellectual life therefore
flourished within the city walls. At the same time the
tendency of surplus wealth to concentrate in cities per-
mitted an investment in culture that was far beyond the
capacity of even the greatest agricultural estates. Much
of that investment was inspired by civic pride. If funds
were available, city councils were prepared to support
the building and decoration of churches or other public
buildings and to lay out substantial sums for festivals
and celebrations whose chief purpose was to demon-
strate the superiority of their town over its neighbors.
The absurd competition over the height of church tow-
ers may have been unproductive and at times haz-
ardous, but it symbolized a spirit that produced much
of medieval art and architecture.
Even the strife endemic to medieval towns had its
positive side. Resistance to social injustice reflected the
vitality of ancient ideals. Ordinary people continued to
believe that the town was, or should be, a refuge for
those seeking personal freedom and economic opportu-
nity. They demonstrated by their actions that the Greco-
Roman ideal of civic participation was far from dead.
Medieval cities may often have been deficient and even
brutal in their social arrangements, but they preserved
important values that had no place in the feudal country-
side. As the institutional matrix for creating, preserving,
and disseminating the Western cultural tradition, the
town had, by the thirteenth century, replaced the
monastery.194 Chapter 10