EUROPEAN EXCEPTIONALISM: A DIFFERENT PATH^37holes in the tissue of bondage that covered the countryside. Stadtluft
machtfrei ran the medieval dictum—city air makes one free. Literally:
when the count of Flanders tried to reclaim a runaway serf whom he
ran across in the market of Bruges, the bourgeois simply drove him and
his bully boys out of the city.
The consequences were felt throughout the society. Under this spe
cial dispensation, cities became poles of attraction, places of refuge,
nodes of exchange with the countryside. Migration to cities improved
the income and status not only of the migrants but of those left behind.
(But not their health. The cities were dirty, crowded, and lent them
selves to easy contagion, so that it was only in-migration that sustained
their numbers and enabled them to grow. ) Serf emancipation in west
ern Europe was directly linked to the rash of franchised villages and
urban communes, and to the density and proximity of these gateways.
Where cities and towns were few and unfree, as in eastern Europe,
serfdom persisted and worsened.
Why did rulers grant such rights to rustics and townsmen, in effect
abandoning (transferring) some of their own powers? Two reasons
above all. First, new land, new crops, trade, and markets brought rev
enue, and revenue brought power.^11 (Also pleasure.) Second, para
doxically, rulers wanted to enhance their power within their own
kingdom: free farmers (note that I do not say "peasants") and towns
men (bourgeois) were the natural enemies of the landed aristocracy and
would support the crown and other great lords in their struggles with
local seigneurs.
Note further that European rulers and enterprising lords who sought
to grow revenues in this manner had to attract participants by the
grant of franchises, freedoms, and privileges—in short, by making
deals. They had to persuade them to come.^12 (That was not the way in
China, where rulers moved thousands and tens of thousands of human
cattle and planted them on the soil, the better to grow things.) These
exemptions from material burdens and grants of economic privilege,
moreover, often led to political concessions and self-government. Here
the initiative came from below, and this too was an essentially European
pattern. Implicit in it was a sense of rights and contract—the right to
negotiate as well as petition—with gains to the freedom and security of
economic activity.
Ironically, then, Europe's great good fortune lay in the fall of Rome
and the weakness and division that ensued. (So much for the lamenta
tions of generations of classicists and Latin teachers.) The Roman
dream of unity, authority, and order (the pax Romana) remained, in-