by Joel Kotkin
In this often contentious setting, urban politics of a distinctly modern type now arose. The Medicis of Florence can be seen as precursors of modern urban political bosses. Their power rested largely on their ability to deliver largesse to their factions and the populace at large. They were acutely opportunistic: The Medicis’ primary goal was not the propagation of faith or even the building of a great empire, but achieving for themselves and their city the highest possible level of material wealth.
Throughout northern Italy, urbanites now began to experience a level of affluence that by some modern estimates exceeded that of classical Rome. 21 Niccolò de Rossi, a nobleman studying law in Bologna in the fourteenth century, captured the frankly materialistic spirit of the times:
Money makes the man,
Money makes the stupid pass for bright,
Money buys the treasury of sins,
Money shows.22
IMPERIAL CITIES OVERCOME THE CITY-STATES
Such cynicism revealed what was becoming a critical weakness of the Italian city-states. As they grew more affluent, the Italian cities gradually lost the internal cohesion and intense civic spirit that had undergirded their rise. Having cut themselves off from the ecclesiastical orientation of their medieval past, they also began to lose their classical sense of virtue and moral cohesion. “Blind cupidity,” warned Dante early in the fourteenth century, would doom them:
The new people and sudden gains have begot in Thee, Florence, arrogance and excess so that Thou weepest for it!23
By Dante’s time, many prominent Florentines, Venetians, and Genoese inherited most of their wealth from previous generations. Seeking higher returns, and contemptuous of work, they spent their fortunes either on their pastoral estates or in ventures outside the city.24 As capital flowed elsewhere, formerly comfortable artisans descended into a growing propertyless proletariat. The old guild structure buckled further as the remaining industrialists farmed out their work to unorganized peasants in the countryside or to other countries.25
These internal problems weakened the city-states just as they faced the revival of new imperial centers that were increasingly stirred by strong nationalistic sentiments. By the 1600s, these cities—London, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Vienna—increasingly challenged the supremacy of the city-states. Other, more modest capitals such as Berlin,26 Copenhagen, and Warsaw also began to achieve significant size.27
Like the Sumerian, Phoenician, and Greek city-states before them, Italy’s independent municipalities, particularly as they lost their moral cohesion, could not compete alone against urban centers drawing on broader human and material resources. This proved their undoing. For all their artistic and commercial genius, the Italians lacked the collective will that might have allowed them to ward off the new challengers.
Late Renaissance Italy, if united, was home to 13 million people, a population second only to that of France and more than 50 percent greater than Spain’s. But Italy’s rulers lacked the enlightened self-interest necessary to unite against foreign foes. Instead, as Machiavelli noted in the beginning of the sixteenth century, they “only thought of fleeing instead of defending themselves.”28
Over time, the city-states also lacked the manpower to protect their trade lifelines, overseas possessions, and ultimately their own independence. As early as the thirteenth century, Venice had to rely largely on Greeks and Catalonians to man their fleets.29 The plagues that devastated Europe throughout the Renaissance hit the densely packed, trade-dependent Italian cities particularly hard; between the mid-fourteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the populations of Milan, Venice, Florence, and Genoa were reduced by roughly half.30
These cities recovered less quickly from pestilence than others that could draw on a large agricultural hinterland. Their depleted armies, made up largely of foreign mercenaries, could not match the superior forces of imperial powers such as Spain and France. Slowly, the city-states were swallowed up by these powers. Venice managed to hold on to its independence but was forced to cede parts of its own far-flung archipelago of possessions in the eastern Mediterranean.31
THE IBERIAN ASCENDANCY
The position of the city-states was further eroded by dramatic changes in the pattern of world trade. Burning with Christian passion after their successful defeat of the Moors, the newly emergent nations of Portugal and Spain burst forth onto the oceans, starting in the fifteenth century, with an almost messianic frenzy. They opened up new, alluring markets that would eventually undermine the trade routes long dominated by the Italians and their partners.
Tiny Portugal, a backward and impoverished country with barely a million people, delivered the first crushing blow. Portuguese sailors began to reach westward to the Azores by the 1440s and soon were building colonies along the West African coastline. With Vasco da Gama’s arrival in Calicut in 1498, the tiny nation opened routes around Africa to Asia that threatened the long-standing Italian monopoly over the lucrative spice trade.
Another critical event took place in 1509, a decade before the conquest of Tenochtitlán, when a small Portuguese fleet defeated a large Muslim armada at Diu, outside Gujerat in India. From then on, the control of world trade, and the future of the cities, fell inexorably out of the control of Arabs, Chinese, and other peoples and into the hands of the Portuguese and Spaniards.32
The brutual conquest by Spain and Portugal of the “New World” in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries further undermined Italian commercial preeminence. More and more, the route to riches for ambitious Italians lay in working for the Iberian monarchs. Italians like Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, and Giovanni da Verrazano ranked among the earliest explorers of the vast new domains. The new continents would eventually be named for the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, a onetime agent for the Medici financial interests in Florence.
By the seventeenth century, Lisbon, insignificant just two hundred years earlier, had emerged as a major city, the leading port and administrative center for Portugal’s far-flung empire. With a population of more than one hundred thousand, Lisbon now took on airs of a great imperial capital, influencing events on a global scale.33
In Spain, newly acquired riches accelerated the growth of the port of Seville as well as the capital cities of Valladolid and, later, Madrid. Conquests within Europe, both in Italy itself and in the Netherlands, added to the wealth of the Spanish court. Private homes and public buildings now reflected their empire’s enormous riches. The Escorial monastery complex outside Madrid, started in 1563, was lavishly decorated with the rewards of empire, the rich woods of the Americas, the steel workmanship of Milan, and the tapestries of Flanders.34
PARIS: THE ULTIMATE EUROPEAN CAPITAL CITY
The most enduring of these new capital cities evolved not on the peninsula, but in France, the largest, richest, and most coherent continental European empire. Paris’s earliest roots lay with the old Roman settlement on an island in the Seine. Largely deserted in the early centuries after Rome, the city survived as an ecclesiastical center. At the close of the tenth century, the Capetian dynasty designated the city as its administrative center.
Capetian kings, benefiting from their rich and growing domain, laid the foundations of a great capital. King Philip Augustus in the twelfth century paved Paris streets for the first time, developed a new central market at Les Halles, and constructed stronger protective walls around the city. Work on Notre Dame Cathedral was begun, although not completed until late in the thirteenth century. By then, the city’s population had swelled to roughly 150,000, the largest in Catholic Europe.35
Paris lacked the commercial dynamism of its Italian competitors and even of its smaller national rival, Lyon. Its great advantage lay elsewhere, in the expansive power of the monarchy, the flourishing of its university, and its importance as a center of spiritual thought.36 Like imperial cities in contemporary China, Paris flourished as a city of bureaucrats, priests, students, and scholars; its merchant class grew not as much from exporting goods as by ser
vicing the elites now clustered there.37
Long dynastic struggles, followed by bitter religious wars, slowed the city’s development until the end of the sixteenth century. Only the conversion in 1594 of the first Bourbon monarch, Henry IV, from Protestantism to the Catholic faith assured both the unity of the kingdom and the city’s imperial destiny. “Paris vaut bien une Messe,” he is said to have explained: Paris is well worth a Mass.
Henry IV was determined to make Paris a capital worthy of a great empire. He cleaned up the filthy streets, expanded the Louvre, and constructed several public squares along the Italian model. Nobles now flocked to the city. Bureaucracies expanded, and artisans migrated to serve the needs of an expanding population, which doubled over the next century to roughly half a million.38
By the 1670s, Paris was bulging past its ancient walls. Although sometimes alarmed by the capital’s unruly growth, the rulers sought to embellish its façades. Even as Louis XIV moved his own residence to the suburb of Versailles, his chief minister, Colbert, encircled the city with tree-lined boulevards and began work on the Invalides military hospital, numerous arches of triumph, and the circular Place des Victoires, with a looming statue of Louis covered in twenty-four-karat gold leaf.
Paris aimed now to become the world’s great capital city, the new Rome. “Nothing,” Colbert suggested, “marks the greatness of princes better than the buildings that compel people to look at them in awe. . . .” Unfortunately, such magnificence also helped to both bankrupt the nation’s treasury and impoverish its common people. To prevent starvation and rioting in the capital, grain was requisitioned from the surrounding countryside. Not surprisingly, the rest of the country often regarded Paris as the “bloodsucking Babylon,” growing great at their expense.39
Yet for all the jealousy and hatred Paris inspired within France, by the seventeenth century, the city had emerged as continental Europe’s primary artistic and cultural capital.40 Throughout the next three centuries, Paris would be considered a paragon of urban centralization and magnificence. Traditions of highly centralized rule—from the monarchy through modern times—have allowed French officials to spend an enormous percentage of the nation’s resources on the capital.41
Napoleon I, the great architect of modern France, made clear his determination to turn Paris into “something fabulous, colossal and unprecedented.” His grandiose plans, however, were sidelined by his defeat in 1815 by the allied powers. The true transformation of the capital instead occurred under his nephew Louis Napoleon. Shortly after taking power in 1851, Louis Napoleon declared Paris “the heart of France. Let us put all our efforts into embellishing this great city.”
Under Napoleon’s ambitious and often ruthless prefect, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Paris was organized along broad boulevards brilliantly adorned with magnificent grands travaux and well-designed parks. Distinctly French ideas of city building, layout, and architecture would influence city builders from Vienna to Washington, D.C., Buenos Aires, and Hanoi.42
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CITIES OF MAMMON
For all the magnificence of Paris, and the other emerging capitals across Europe, the keys to the urban future lay elsewhere. Securing a sacred place and political power remained critical to the growth of cities, but increasingly the best prospects now belonged to those cities whose greatness rested not on God or the power of the state, but on the relentless and successful pursuit of mammon.
EUROPE’S EXPANDING URBAN ORDER
The new routes to Asia and the Americas constituted only part of a vastly expanding field of economic endeavor for cities. New European markets also were opening up in what had been the remotest hinterlands in Roman times. The urban imprint on the continent now expanded for the first time in a millennium. Villages were becoming towns and some towns cities, with their own cathedrals and central markets. Urban centers arose from the upper Rhineland to Riga, Gdaćnsk, and the steppes of Russia.1
For the first time since the classical period, Europe’s level of urbanization surpassed that of Asia and the Near East.2 Between 1500 and 1650, the number of towns of over 10,000 almost doubled to nearly two hundred; the overall percentage of urban dwellers grew from 7.4 to 10 percent. The ranks of new cities over 100,000 also increased dramatically. Even long-suffering Rome enjoyed an urban renaissance, growing from 17,000 people in the 1370s to roughly 124,000 in 1650. 3
The key issue now lay in which cities would be best positioned within the growing urban network. Paris and the other sparkling capital cities, although exemplars of advanced urban form and magnificence, remained essentially parasitic, drawing largely on their own hinterlands. History would favor those cities that seized control of the primary avenues to a widening world.
THE FAILURE OF THE IBERIAN EMPIRES
The most likely beneficiaries of the expanding European economy would seem to have been the cities with control over the most extensive overseas empires. But Lisbon, Seville, and, later, Madrid failed to develop the commercial savvy allowing them to reap fully what they had so impetuously sown. 4
Cultural values stood at the core of this failure. Men like Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz’s captain and conqueror of Tenochtitlán, were more like medieval knights than builders of cities and economies. Like other conquistadores, Cortés strove primarily for glory, God, and precious metals.5
A fierce but ultimately debilitating religious intolerance accompanied this swaggering Iberian sensibility. For centuries, Jews and recent converts, known as New Christians, had played pivotal roles in the commercial and professional lives of Europe’s burgeoning cities, nowhere more so than in Spain. 6
Aware of the importance of the Jews to their commerce, some cities, including Seville, Barcelona, and Valencia, protested against the Inquisition. The increasingly absolutist Spanish state, sweeping away the last vestiges of municipal powers, overwhelmed all municipal resistance. Following the expulsion order of 1492, over 180,000 Jews and New Christians left the country. Concerning that fateful year, the historian Barnet Litvinoff observed: “With the voyage of Columbus, Spain gained a continent; with the expulsion of the Jews, they lost a limb.”7
The remnants of Spain’s commercial middle class, operating in a country where the church and aristocrats controlled much of the capital, largely lacked the business skills to take full advantage of the new opportunities before them.8 Wealth poured into Spain, largely through Seville, only to end up in the hands of Italian middlemen and merchants. Even the exports to Spain’s colonies were, for the most part, produced elsewhere. The empire’s gold, mortgaged to foreigners to finance incessant wars and purchase luxury goods for the aristocracy, became its curse.9
Chronic food shortages, the hemorrhage of young men sent to die in foreign wars, massive public debt, emigration, and, finally, an epidemic at the end of the seventeenth century drastically reduced the size of Spanish cities. Having doubled in the sixteenth century to over nine hundred thousand, the number of people in Spanish cities larger than ten thousand dropped by a third by 1650. By the seventeenth century, Naples, Spain’s largest Italian possession and a great port city, easily surpassed any Spanish city in both industry and population.10
THE EMERGENCE OF THE NORTH
In contrast, the cities of the north—Antwerp, Amsterdam, and ultimately London—benefited mightily from the rapid expansion of world trade. While the urban centers of Spain and Portugal declined through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, those in the Netherlands grew fourfold and in Britain by more than six times.11
The decisive weapons for this ascendancy were not those employed by intrepid explorers or warriors; rather, they lay in the more mundane arts of bankers, merchants, and skilled artisans.12 It was not Spain, with its brave soldiers and intrepid missionaries, that garnered the commercial fruits of empire, but Antwerp and the other commercially oriented cities of the Netherlands.13
Had the Hapsburg ruler Charles V accepted the principle of tolerance, Spain, through control of these cities, may still h
ave dominated the rising European urban economy. Instead, the regime’s desire to impose Catholicism turned its productive and heavily Protestant northern cities into, as one Spanish general put it, “the graveyard of Europe.”
The Great Revolt of 1572, when large portions of the Netherlands rose up against Spain, represented the critical turning point. The Spanish commander, the Duke of Alba, waged a merciless campaign against the Protestants. Although the northern part of the Netherlands resisted successfully, the south remained under Catholic control.
Alba’s war had disastrous effects on Spain’s commercial prospects. The predominantly Protestant merchant classes now fled those areas under Spanish control. Antwerp, sacked by Spanish troops in 1576, declined, while much of its talent, money, and business acumen shifted to the newly independent cities of the north.14
AMSTERDAM: THE FIRST GREAT MODERN COMMERCIAL CITY
At the end of the war with Spain, Amsterdam emerged the most important of the newly independent Protestant cities. In contrast with most contemporary European cities, Amsterdam was dominated not by aristocrats or priests, but by profit-seeking merchants and tradesmen. The quintessential Dutchman was described by one seventeenth-century British writer as “Nick Frog,” the “son of the mud, who worships Mammon.”15