Read Online The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) by Joel Kotkin - Free Book Online
Authors: Joel Kotkin
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surveying the devastation. “Now loneliness, desolation and mourning reign.” 14
Following the fall of Rome, city life in Western Europe began slowly to fade. For centuries there developed what one historian calls a “simplification” of culture, a moving inward, “a time of narrowing horizons, of the strengthening of local roots, and the consolidating of old loyalties.” 15
Deurbanization did not happen at once and everywhere. Pockets of Roman city life persisted in some areas for centuries. Sporadic attempts were made to restore the empire. But by the seventh century A.D., the old trade links between the old imperial cities were severed. The great port of Marseilles, thriving for centuries after the empire’s collapse, fell into disrepair.
Western Europe and nearby parts of North Africa now devolved into a mosaic of warring barbarian fiefdoms. Virtually all the West’s great cities, from Carthage to Rome and Milan, experienced deep population declines. 16 In the periphery of the empire, the losses were, if anything, more catastrophic and lasting. Trier, a bustling German provincial capital with a population of roughly sixty thousand in the early fourth century A.D., devolved into a set of rural villages clustered around a cathedral. As late as 1300, after the restoration of walls and an improvement in the economy, the city still was home to barely eight thousand people. 17
In most places, the older urban civilization all but evaporated. Less than 5 percent of all the people in Catholic Europe during the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. lived in towns of any size. One French bishop, wandering the increasingly deserted villages of his diocese, noted that “everywhere we find churches whose roofs have fallen in and whose doors are broken and come off their hinges.” Animals wandered the aisles up to the altars. Grass grew through the floors. “All,” the churchman noted, “is neglect.” 18
CONSTANTINOPLE: URBAN SURVIVOR
Constantinople, the former Greek Byzantium, now stood as the last great redoubt of classical urbanism. Declared the imperial capital by Constantine around A.D. 326, the city stood astride the Bosporus, separating Europe from Asia. Secure behind its walls and with its magnificent harbor, Constantinople survived the barbarian onslaught. Within a century, its population expanded from roughly fifty thousand residents to over three hundred thousand, easily exceeding that of decaying Rome, Antioch, or Alexandria. 19 At its peak in the sixth century A.D., it stood as Europe’s dominant city, approaching half a million people, and controlled a huge empire ranging from the Adriatic to Mesopotamia and from the Black Sea to the horn of Africa.
Unlike Rome, which cultivated older cities and founded new ones, Constantinople flourished at a time when other cities in Europe and the Near East were in decline. “Oh, to be in the city!” was a refrain heard often by Byzantines when forced, by necessities of business or government, to travel to the far-flung, dispirited, and often depopulated provincial towns. 20
Constantinople proclaimed itself the new Rome, yet it was never to achieve the scale and imperial breadth of its predecessor. In his Chronographica, the eleventh-century historian Michael Psellus compared Constantinople to “a baser metal” devolved from “the golden streams of the past.” 21 Cut off from the West, the city experienced, in the words of Henri Pirenne, a “progressive orientalization.” Indeed, visitors from the West noted all the signs: powerful court eunuchs, elaborate court rituals, an increasing despotic centralization of power. 22
Perhaps even worse, Constantinople turned away from the classical world’s cosmopolitan notions, particularly on issues of religion. The imperial regime increasingly persecuted Jews, Christian “heretics,” and pagans. The historian Procopius observed of Emperor Justinian: “He did not think that the slaying of men was murder
Following the fall of Rome, city life in Western Europe began slowly to fade. For centuries there developed what one historian calls a “simplification” of culture, a moving inward, “a time of narrowing horizons, of the strengthening of local roots, and the consolidating of old loyalties.” 15
Deurbanization did not happen at once and everywhere. Pockets of Roman city life persisted in some areas for centuries. Sporadic attempts were made to restore the empire. But by the seventh century A.D., the old trade links between the old imperial cities were severed. The great port of Marseilles, thriving for centuries after the empire’s collapse, fell into disrepair.
Western Europe and nearby parts of North Africa now devolved into a mosaic of warring barbarian fiefdoms. Virtually all the West’s great cities, from Carthage to Rome and Milan, experienced deep population declines. 16 In the periphery of the empire, the losses were, if anything, more catastrophic and lasting. Trier, a bustling German provincial capital with a population of roughly sixty thousand in the early fourth century A.D., devolved into a set of rural villages clustered around a cathedral. As late as 1300, after the restoration of walls and an improvement in the economy, the city still was home to barely eight thousand people. 17
In most places, the older urban civilization all but evaporated. Less than 5 percent of all the people in Catholic Europe during the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. lived in towns of any size. One French bishop, wandering the increasingly deserted villages of his diocese, noted that “everywhere we find churches whose roofs have fallen in and whose doors are broken and come off their hinges.” Animals wandered the aisles up to the altars. Grass grew through the floors. “All,” the churchman noted, “is neglect.” 18
CONSTANTINOPLE: URBAN SURVIVOR
Constantinople, the former Greek Byzantium, now stood as the last great redoubt of classical urbanism. Declared the imperial capital by Constantine around A.D. 326, the city stood astride the Bosporus, separating Europe from Asia. Secure behind its walls and with its magnificent harbor, Constantinople survived the barbarian onslaught. Within a century, its population expanded from roughly fifty thousand residents to over three hundred thousand, easily exceeding that of decaying Rome, Antioch, or Alexandria. 19 At its peak in the sixth century A.D., it stood as Europe’s dominant city, approaching half a million people, and controlled a huge empire ranging from the Adriatic to Mesopotamia and from the Black Sea to the horn of Africa.
Unlike Rome, which cultivated older cities and founded new ones, Constantinople flourished at a time when other cities in Europe and the Near East were in decline. “Oh, to be in the city!” was a refrain heard often by Byzantines when forced, by necessities of business or government, to travel to the far-flung, dispirited, and often depopulated provincial towns. 20
Constantinople proclaimed itself the new Rome, yet it was never to achieve the scale and imperial breadth of its predecessor. In his Chronographica, the eleventh-century historian Michael Psellus compared Constantinople to “a baser metal” devolved from “the golden streams of the past.” 21 Cut off from the West, the city experienced, in the words of Henri Pirenne, a “progressive orientalization.” Indeed, visitors from the West noted all the signs: powerful court eunuchs, elaborate court rituals, an increasing despotic centralization of power. 22
Perhaps even worse, Constantinople turned away from the classical world’s cosmopolitan notions, particularly on issues of religion. The imperial regime increasingly persecuted Jews, Christian “heretics,” and pagans. The historian Procopius observed of Emperor Justinian: “He did not think that the slaying of men was murder
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