The age of the city-state in Europe

Machiavelli, at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era, was attempting to preserve for the city-states of Italy an immunity from molestation on the part of Transalpine Europe which they had [...] enjoyed, without any serious break, for more than two centuries before the apparition of Charles VIII in A.D. 1494. [...]

In other words, since Frederick II’s contest with the Papacy in the middle of the thirteenth century.

He compares Machiavelli’s efforts and the attempts of the Greek city-states, led by Aratus of Sicyon, to extricate themselves from Macedonian entanglements in the third century BC.

And the Italian communes’ withdrawal from European affairs in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries with the Athenian withdrawal from the affairs of Greece in the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries BC. (But did the Italian states “withdraw” or were they merely left alone when the contest between Empire and Papacy was over?)

In the second comparison

the creative minority [in both Italy and Greece] returned to the Society which it had temporarily abandoned in the fullness of time, when its work of creation was accomplished, in order to set its impress upon the whole body social. We have already noticed how the Hellenic Society took an Attic impress after the return of Athens at the beginning of the fifth century B.C. We may now remind ourselves, that our own Western Society took just as strong an Italian impress when Italy returned – not voluntarily, but under protest – at the beginning of the Cinquecento.

Moreover, the actual problems which Athens and Italy solved, in retreat, on their respective societies’ behalf were much the same. Like Attica in Hellas, Lombardy and Tuscany in Western Christendom served, after withdrawal, as a segregated social laboratory in which the experiment of transforming a locally self-sufficient agricultural society into an internationally interdependent commercial and industrial society was successfully carried out. And in the Italian, as in the Athenian, case there was a radical remodelling of traditional institutions in order to bring them into conformity with the newfangled way of life. A commercialized and industrialized Athens changed over, on the political plane, from an aristocratic constitution based on birth to a bourgeois constitution based on property. A commercialized and industrialized Milan or Bologna or Florence or Siena changed over from the prevalent Feudalism of medieval Western Christendom to a new system of direct relations between individual citizens and locally sovereign governments whose sovereignty resided in the citizen themselves. These concrete economic and political inventions, as well as the impalpable and imponderable cultural creations of the Italian genius, were communicated by Italy to Transalpine Europe from the close of the Quattrocento onwards.

At this stage, however, the respective courses of Western and Hellenic history diverge in consequence of one essential point of dissimilarity between the position of the Italian city-states in Western Christendom and the position of Athens in Hellas. Athens was a city-state which had withdrawn from a society of city-states in order to return to a society that had not ceased to consist of city-state units. And accordingly, when Athens became “the education of Hellas”, the process of education was facilitated by the fact that the creative minority and the imitative majority had one important feature in common. They were both alike organized on the city-state pattern; and thus, while the non-Athenian majority of Hellas had to change over from agriculture and aristocracy to industry and democracy in order to catch up with the progress that the creative Athenian minority had made, the majority was not required to make any change in the nature or the scale of the local communities into which it was articulated. It was merely a question of changing a number of agricultural aristocratic city-states into the same number of industrial democratic city-states. There was no question of altering the city-state basis which was the common social heritage of Athens and her Hellenic neighbours.

Whereas when progressive Italian ideas began to spread into northern Europe in the late fifteenth century, they had to be received by a society which was not, on the whole, organised into city-states.

In the relations between the creative Italian minority and the non-Italian majority of Western Christendom, the problem of assimilation was more difficult because in this case there was no corresponding common ground between the two parts of Society. For the city-state pattern, on which the Italian minority was organized, was not the original basis of articulation in Western Christendom. The original basis – the basis on which Western Christendom, in the first chapter of its history, had met the challenge of Chaos and had triumphed over the rival Scandinavian Civilization – was not the city-state but Feudalism. The city-state, in fact, was not one of the original institutions of the Western Society. In Western history, the city-state only emerged in the second chapter; and then it emerged as a newfangled institution of the minority which withdrew and returned in this age. The withdrawal of the Italian minority from political entanglements with Transalpine Christendom was accompanied by a change-over, on the part of the self-segregating Italian communities, from a feudal to a city-state basis. This change in the basis of social articulation was one of the most conspicuous ways in which the Italians differentiated themselves from the majority of Western Christendom in their temporary retreat. There was no simultaneous change in the same sense in the social structure of the Western Society at large; and when the creative Italian minority returned in due course to become “the education of Western Christendom”, the greater part of the Western World was still organized on the original feudal basis, and not on the new city-state basis on which the Italians had built their new model for a progressive Western Society.

This situation presented a problem to Western Christendom for which, a priori, there were two conceivable alternative solutions. In order to place itself in a position to adopt the new social inventions which Italy had to offer, Transalpine Europe might either break with its feudal past and rearticulate itself throughout on the Italian city-state basis; or else it might modify the Italian inventions in such a way as to make them workable on the feudal basis and on the kingdom-state scale of the old-fashioned Transalpine World. Theoretically, the problem might be solved along either of these lines. The only thing that was not practically possible was for the Italian inventions, as they stood, to be applied in the Transalpine kingdoms, as they stood, without some far-reaching measure of adaptation on the one side or on the other. In the event, the city-state articulation of the Italian minority was rejected and the Italian inventions were only adopted in Transalpine Europe in so far as they could be applied on the kingdom-state scale. But the alternative solution of rearticulating Transalpine Europe into an Italianized society of city-states was not left untried; and although the experiment eventually proved abortive, it was carried a considerable distance and came within sight of success before it irrevocably failed.

The experiment in northern Europe took place, and began to fail, before “the impalpable and imponderable cultural creations of the Italian genius, were communicated by Italy to Transalpine Europe from the close of the Quattrocento onwards”.

Northern Italy, in fact, was not the only place in Western Christendom in which, during the second chapter of Western history, a creative minority extricated itself from the general political life of the Western Society by building city walls and learning to live a new life of its own behind them. While Italy was the region in which this movement declared itself the most conspicuously, and where it achieved its greatest works of creation, the movement was not exclusively Italian in origin. It was a general movement of the Western Society, which came to the surface wherever it was favoured by the presence of certain social conditions. These conditions were presented in some measure in other parts of Western Christendom besides Italy; and wherever they were to be found, the movement asserted itself.

The main conditions were two: the one economic and the other political. The economic condition was that the emergent city-states should command a sufficient field of commercial and industrial activity – a sufficiency of markets and of sources of supply to enable them to live by commerce and industry instead of continuing to depend upon agriculture. The political condition was that there should be a sufficiently exact equilibrium – or sufficiently prolonged stalemate – in the local Balance of Power between the large-scale Powers of Western Christendom – the Papacy and the Empire and the peripheral kingdoms – to enable new Powers on the small scale of city-states to take possession of the no-man’s-land between the evenly-matched and therefore temporarily immobilized titans. These conditions were fulfilled in the case of Northern Italy; for Northern Italy was the pier-head from which medieval Western Christendom was bound to conduct its overseas trade with the Syriac World and with Orthodox Christendom – two neighbouring worlds which in that age were both larger and richer than Western Christendom itself; and Northern Italy was also the no-man’s-land in the long and stubborn contest for the headship over Western Christendom which was waged between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. These were the conditions under which Northern Italy disengaged herself (circa A.D. 1158-1250) from the mass of Western Christendom as a constellation of virtually sovereign city-states. But the same conditions offered themselves in certain other places with similar results.

In Germany, for example, the rise of city-states was promoted economically by the debouchure, on German soil, of the overland trade-routes from Italy to Transalpine Europe through the Alpine
passes and also by the northward and eastward expansion of Western Christendom – an expansion which gave Germany a sea-board on the Baltic and brought Scandinavia and Poland and Hungary within the radius of the German pioneers of Western trade. At the same time, on the political plane, the rise of city-states in Germany was promoted indirectly by the struggle between the Empire and the Papacy in Italy – a struggle which sapped the strength of the Imperial Power in its German homeland and thus gave an opportunity for the Emperor’s German feudatories to erect themselves into virtually independent princes. The resulting Balance of Power between the princes and the Emperor enabled rising city-states to shake themselves free in Germany as their elder sisters in Italy had been enabled to win their freedom through the Balance of Power between the Empire and the Papacy.

In other words, the Imperial contest with the Papacy allowed the German princes to grow stronger – and the resulting internal balance of power in Germany gave independent cities a space in which to grow.

In Flanders, again, the rise of city-states was promoted economically by the junction on Flemish soil of the overland trade-route from the Mediterranean (over Northern Italy and Southern and Western Germany) with the maritime trade-routes along the Atlantic and North Sea coasts and across the Straits between the Continent and the British Isles. Thereafter, the Flemish city-states were enabled to complete the achievement of their de facto political independence from the authority of the Count of Flanders, who was a feudatory of the Crown of France, by taking sides with the Crown of England in the Hundred Years’ War (incepit A.D. 1337).

Thus, by the middle of the fourteenth century of the Christian Era, the feudal darkness of the Western World was thickly sown with constellations of city-states; and these constellations were disposed in a commanding formation. At each of two points on opposite fringes of the Western firmament, in Italy and in Flanders, there was a star-cluster of such density that, within its own circumference, it wholly occupied the field of vision with a continuum of stellar light which left no rifts of darkness visible. Between the Italian and the Flemish cluster, across Swabia and the Rhineland, there stretched a star-riband of looser mesh and lesser luminosity, in the likeness of the Milky Way; and from the north-eastern flank of this terrestrial galaxy, in the neighbourhood of Cologne, the star-stream of the Hansa Towns shone out across Westphalia from the banks of the Rhine to the shores of the Baltic. It will be seen that the new cosmos of city-states, which was taking shape in Western Christendom within the framework of the old cosmos of feudal tenures, had increased and multiplied with remarkable vitality during the three centuries or so that had elapsed since the beginning of its creation. The light was shining in the darkness from which it had been divided by the creative act; but the darkness comprehended it not. Would the light prevail over the darkness or the darkness reabsorb the light? The moment had come when the Western Society must choose which world, of these two alternative and incompatible worlds, it was henceforth to be: the old feudal world or a new world of city-states.

Before the end of the fourteenth century this issue had been decided, and decided against the new dispensation. A twentieth-century historian, looking back over the intervening span of Western history to the year 1400, can see plainly in retrospect that, by that date, the brilliant new world of city-states was already doomed to be abortive. But perhaps this decision would have been less readily apparent to a contemporary observer than it is to us to-day; for, although its historical consequences have been momentous, its actual execution was not sensational. The medieval Western cosmos of city-states was not blotted out in any single overwhelming cosmic catastrophe. Its fate was decided by the outcome of a number of local conflicts, no one of which was of oecumenical importance in itself. Their importance was the consequence of their aggregate effect; and this was largely hid from the eyes of the generation that took part in them.

In Italy, the light was dimmed by the destructive War of Chioggia (gerebatur A.D. 1378-81) between the two principal Italian maritime commonwealths, Genoa and Venice: an equivalent of the Atheno-Lacedaemonian War of 431-404 B.C. which left both protagonists permanently enfeebled. The year A.D. 1378 may also be taken as the beginning of an era of chronic and ubiquitous warfare between the Italian city-states on more scientific and professional and therefore more exhausting and ruinous lines than the earlier Italian fashion of conducting hostilities. The hundred and sixteen years between the outbreak of the War of Chioggia and the apparition of Charles VIII (A.D. 1378-1494) were the heyday of the Italian Condottieri.

These were the leaders of mercenary bands who sold their services to city-states in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Thus, in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the Italian city-states were setting themselves seriously to break one another’s strength; and in the same decades the South and West German city-states allowed their strength to be broken by the local feudal princes.

The policy of these German city-states was ambitious. The example of the Swiss Confederation, which had found in its union the strength to contend against the Hapsburg Power since the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, inspired the formation of a Swabian League of Cities in 1376 and a Rhenish League of Cities in 1381. These two leagues entered into an alliance with one another shortly afterwards; and in 1385 this alliance was extended to include some of the leading members of the Swiss Confederation. At the end of the year 1385, the efficacy of this new federal movement among the Central European city-states was put to the test by the outbreak of war between the Swiss Confederation and Leopold Hapsburg; and the Swabian and Rhenish allies of the Swiss proclaimed as their war aim: “Between the Forests of the Vosges, Thuringia, Bohemia, and the Lower Alps shall be a great union of free cities.” If this large aim had been achieved, the fourteenth century of the Christian Era might have seen the ancient feudal body social of Western Christendom riven asunder by a solid wedge of confederated city-states extending right across the middle of Continental Europe from the Mediterranean and the Adriatic to the Channel and the North Sea and the Baltic. In that event, the forces of Feudalism, divided by the enemy in their midst and unable to render one another mutual aid, might eventually have been driven off the field, to leave a new society of city-states in possession. But this prospect was barely opened up before it was decisively blotted out. At the critical moment, the Rhenish and Swabian cities hung back; the Swiss defeated Leopold Hapsburg at Sempach (in A.D. 1386) and “set the seal on their independence” unaided; and two years later, when the Rhenish and the Swabian League found themselves at war, in their turn, with their own local feudal enemies, no Swiss help came to save them from defeat. Both these German Leagues were defeated decisively by the local German princes in A.D. 1388; and thereafter, in 1389, they were formally dissolved – “as contrary to God, the King, the Empire and the Law” – by the Holy Roman Emperor Wenceslas.

At about the same time, misfortunes of equal gravity befell the older and larger and stronger North German League of the Hansa, and also the Flemish cluster of city-states.

Flanders – which, as a stronghold of the new city-state regime in Western Christendom, was only second in importance to Italy itself – became subject in A.D. 1384 to a new line of Counts of the House of Burgundy; and in these Burgundian princes the Flemish burghers found their masters. It had been one thing to assert their civic liberties against the feudal lordship of a Count of Flanders who had no external resources beyond the fitful support of his usually embarrassed suzerain the King of France. It was quite another thing for them to contend with a Power which commanded the resources of territories outside Flanders itself and which was learning to make the most of these resources by applying the new-fangled Italian military and fiscal and administrative methods to an old-fashioned Transalpine feudal principality. From the establishment of Burgundian rule in Flanders in A.D. 1384 down to the incorporation of Flanders into Revolutionary France in A.D. 1795, the Flemish city-states remained subject to the House of Burgundy and its successive heirs, the Spanish and the Austrian Hapsburgs.

As for the Hansa League, it was overtaken before the end of the fourteenth century by the nemesis of the political pressure which, in furtherance of its commercial interests, it had brought to bear upon the converted barbarians on the northern and eastern periphery of an expanding Western Christendom. The ci-devant barbarians, finding themselves outmatched in efficiency by the Hansa and its partners the Teutonic Order, brought their quantitative superiority into play to compensate for their qualitative inferiority, and thereby succeeded in redressing the unequal balance. The political union of Lithuania with Poland in A.D. 1386 was as great a blow to the Hansa Towns as it was to the Teutonic Knights; and the subsequent union of the three Scandinavian Kingdoms in A.D. 1397 completed the Hansa’s discomfiture. For the next five centuries, the history of the Hansa Towns is the history of their successive absorption into other bodies politic of different structure and larger build. And the long process was completed in A.D. 1866 when the last three survivors – Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen – decided to merge themselves in the North German Confederation. Indeed, that merger may be regarded as the extinction of the last three stars of the innumerable host of city-states which had covered the face of Western Christendom five centuries earlier.

I have not cluttered this intricate passage by quoting its footnotes, but five are worth adding here.

Apropos Italy as a bridge to the Syriac (in effect, Islamic) and Orthodox Christian worlds, he adds:

Italy was the physical bridge between Western Christendom and these two alien worlds; for when Western and Orthodox Christendom emerged simultaneously from the interregnum that followed the break-up of the Roman Empire, the Italian Peninsula was partitioned between them; and, thereafter, the possession of the Orthodox Christian part of Italy – that is, the “heel” and the “toe” and the Island of Sicily – was disputed between Orthodox Christendom and the re-emergent colonial Syriac Society of North-West Africa.

Apropos the establishment of Burgundian rule in Flanders in 1384, he adds:

In the same year, 1384, in which the House of Burgundy acquired the Country of Flanders, it enlarged its home territory – the French Duchy of Burgundy – by acquiring both the French Country of Nevers and the Imperial Country of Burgundy.

Apropos its introduction of “Italian military and fiscal and administrative methods” to the “old-fashioned Transalpine feudal principality” which the County of Flanders had been:

The House of Burgundy was a pioneer among the Transalpine dynasties which set themselves, in the fifteenth century, to transform their feudal principalities into autocracies by devices borrowed from Italy.

Apropos the Hansa’s discomfiture, he adds:

The arrest of the expansion of the German city-states into the Baltic which was brought about by the political unification of the Scandinavians and of the Polono-Lithuanians in the fourteenth century of the Christian Era may be compared with the similar arrest of the expansion of the Greek city-states into the Western Mediterranean which was brought to a standstill in the sixth century B.C. by the political unification of the Etruscans and of the Transmarine Phoenicians.

And apropos the extinction of the political independence of the Hansa survivors in 1866:

The final completion of the process ought possibly to be dated in this year 1933, when Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen, together with all the other Länder of the German Reich, have lost the last vestige of their political individuality in the course of the German National-Socialist Revolution.

A Study of History, Vol III, OUP, 1934

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Criticism of Toynbee