Urban Politics in Early Modern Europe (Historical Connections)

Urban Politics in Early Modern Europe

Urban Politics in Early Modern Europe is an important survey of the complex relationships between urban politics and regional and national politics in Europe from 1500 to 1789. In an era when the national state was far less developed than today, crucial decisions about economic, religious and social policy were often settled at the municipal level. Cities were frequently the scenes of sudden tensions or bitter conflicts between ordinary citizens and the urban elites, and the threat of civic unrest often underlay the political dynamics of early modern cities. With vivid descriptions of events in cities in central Europe, England, France, Italy and Spain, this book outlines the forms of political interaction in the early modern city. Urban Politics in Early Modern Europe takes a fascinating comparative approach to the nature of conflict and conflict resolution in early modern communities throughout Europe. Christopher R. Friedrichs is Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. His previous books include The Early Modern City, 1450–1750 (Longman, 1995).

Historical Connections Series editors Tom Scott, University of Liverpool Geoffrey Crossick, University of Essex John Davis, University of Connecticut Joanna Innes, Somerville College, University of Oxford Titles in the series The Decline of Industrial Britain: 1870–1980 Michael Dintenfass The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate Gwynne Lewis The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society and National Unification Lucy Riall The Remaking of the British Working Class: 1840–1940 Mike Savage and Andrew Miles The Rise of Regional Europe Christopher Harvie Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa William Beinart and Peter Coates Popular Politics in Twentieth-Century Europe: Fascist Dictatorships and Liberal Democracies Maria Sophia Quine Medicine in the Making of Modern Britain, 1700–1920 Christopher Lawrence Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The Fascist Style of Rule Alexander J. De Grand Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain and France, 1620–1800 Bob Harris Catholic Politics in Europe, 1918–1945 Martin Conway Popular Politics in Nineteenth Century England Rohan McWilliam Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century Philip Nord

Urban Politics in Early Modern Europe Christopher R. Friedrichs

London and New York

First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 2000 Christopher R. Friedrichs All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Friedrichs, Christopher R., 1947– Urban politics in early modern Europe / Christopher R. Friedrichs. p. cm. – (Historical connections) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Municipal government–Europe–History–16th century. 2. Municipal government– Europe–History–17th century. 3. Municipal government–Europe–History–18th century. I. Series. JS3000.F75 2000 320.8’5’0940903–dc21 99–055453 ISBN 0–415–22985–5 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–11479–9 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-13134-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17857-2 (Glassbook Format)

To Rhoda, as ever with thanks

Contents

Series editors’ preface Acknowledgments Some definitions 1 Urban politics

ix xi xiii 1

2 Who governed?

11

3 Interests and issues

25

4 Forms of political action

35

5 Escalation and intervention

50

6 Urban politics and the state

65

Epilogue

72

Notes Suggestions for further reading Index

74 80 85

Series editors’ preface

Historical Connections is a series of short books on important historical topics and debates, written primarily for those studying and teaching history. The books offer original and challenging works of synthesis that will make new themes accessible, or old themes accessible in new ways, build bridges between different chronological periods and different historical debates, and encourage comparative discussion in history. If the study of history is to remain exciting and creative, then the tendency to fragmentation must be resisted. The inflexibility of older assumptions about the relationship between economic, social, cultural and political history has been exposed by recent historical writing, but the impression has sometimes been left that history is little more than a chapter of accidents. This series will insist on the importance of processes of historical change, and it will explore the connections within history: connections between different layers and forms of historical experience, as well as the connections that resist the fragmentary consequences of new forms of specialism in historical research. Historical Connections will put the search for these connections back at the top of the agenda by exploring new ways of uniting the different strands of historical experience, and by affirming the importance of studying change and movement in history. Geoffrey Crossick John Davis Joanna Innes Tom Scott

Acknowledgments

A book like this arises in part out of discussions and debates with colleagues, students and friends over a long series of years. Their names would be far too numerous to list, but I do want to thank those people who contributed more specifically to the shaping of this book. I am grateful to Tom Scott for inviting me to contribute a volume to the “Historical Connections” series. Thanks are also due to him and to the other editors of this series for their comments on the first draft of this manuscript. I must also thank my friend Josef Konvitz for his very useful comments. Finally, and most importantly, I am, as ever, grateful to my wife, Rhoda Lange Friedrichs, for her assistance and advice in every stage of the conceptualization and writing of this book.

Some definitions

Historians have a love–hate relationship with definitions. On the one hand, definitions are important – indeed, indispensable – for making clear exactly what is being discussed. On the other hand, definitions can become rigid, making it harder to see how things change over time. So while definitions cannot be avoided, we will limit ourselves to defining only four terms – specifically, the four key words or phrases in the title of this book: urban, politics, early modern and Europe. Urban obviously refers to cities and towns. But cities and towns in the time and place covered by this book were often much smaller than they are today. There were, to be sure, some large cities in early modern Europe – such as London or Paris, each of which had roughly half a million inhabitants by the year 1700. Yet the vast majority of cities and towns had only a few thousand inhabitants each. Even so, there were certain things that all urban communities had in common. Unlike villages, whose economic base was agricultural, cities and towns were oriented to commerce, trade, and the production of non-perishable goods. But what truly distinguished cities and towns from villages were the special rights and privileges that had been granted to these communities by some ruler, prince or feudal magnate. These rights and privileges – the right to hold markets and fairs, or to build defensive walls, or to administer the community’s own finances – were the real hallmarks of “urban” status in early modern Europe. Politics is harder to define. Politics in the broadest sense can refer to any interactions among human beings in which one party tries to pressure or persuade another to do what it wants done. In this broad sense, the interaction between parents and children, or husbands and wives, or masters and slaves can all be described as “political.” In this book,

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however, a narrower definition of politics will be used. “Politics” is defined here as a system of interaction between groups of people. To put it more precisely, politics has to do with the efforts made by groups of people who have some common identity or some common interests and join together to use some form of pressure or persuasion in order to fulfill their wishes or achieve their aims. Cities, with their large number of inhabitants and their rich variety of social and economic functions, have always had groups of this sort that engage in this kind of activity. Exactly how these groups interact is what “urban politics” is all about. Early modern is a term used by historians to refer to a particular period of European history – the epoch between the end of the Middle Ages and the onset of the great political and economic upheaval associated with the coming of the French and Industrial Revolutions. This was a period of dynamic change in Europe. It witnessed the dramatic expansion of Europe’s contact with other parts of the world, the growth of ever more sophisticated economic practices, and a steady increase in the power of central governments as the feudal system of the Middle Ages gave way to the bureaucratic state of modern times. Of course the exact beginning and end of the early modern period is something on which no historians agree. By and large, the beginning is generally put somewhere between 1450 and 1500 and the end falls somewhere in the eighteenth century. But the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are always considered the heart of the early modern era, and these are exactly the centuries that will be emphasized in this book. Europe should be easy to define, but it is not. The events of the 1990s have reminded us that the boundaries of Europe are often contested and always subject to redefinition. The “Europe” of this book encompasses the British Isles and the western and central parts of the European continent. Neither the Balkan region, which was part of the Ottoman Turkish empire during the early modern era, nor the growing Russian empire will be considered here, for their social and political systems were radically different from those of the rest of Europe. Even within Europe as defined here, there were enormous differences between various countries and regions. But there were also some common patterns that cut across national boundaries. One of them – the pattern of urban politics – is the subject of this book.

1 Urban politics

What exactly was urban politics like in early modern Europe? Let us begin by taking a close look at one of the most typical scenes of urban political life in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries: the meeting of a city council. The city we have chosen is Cologne, a major commercial center on the Rhine river in the westernmost part of Germany. Friday 2 October 1545 was an unusual day in only one respect: it was the first day of the city government’s winter schedule, when the thrice-weekly council meetings began at 9 a.m., rather than 8 a.m. as in the summer months. In every other way, however, the order of business that Friday morning was entirely routine. Shortly before 9 o’clock the forty-nine members of the city council – all of them males, most of them middle-aged and well-to-do – gathered in the chapel of the city hall to attend mass. Cologne was a predominantly Catholic city, and all of the council members belonged to that faith, so they worshipped together. When the service ended, the councilors proceeded from the chapel to the city hall’s ornate council chamber. The two mayors of Cologne sat on a raised bench under a crucifix; the remaining council members sat in four long rows, two on each side of the room. A few clerks sat at desks in the center of the council chamber, busily scribbling the minutes that make it possible for modern historians to know exactly what business was transacted on that ordinary Friday morning. Once the council members were seated, the city clerk read the minutes of the previous meeting and then read out the text of letters and petitions which had been received in the last two days. After that, the council members began to consider the items on the day’s agenda. Item by item, the issues were discussed and votes were recorded. The council’s business was conducted in total secrecy. Six guards stood outside the door to make sure that no unauthorized strangers could invade the chamber. Severe

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Urban politics

punishment – including three months in prison – awaited any councilor who revealed anything about the give-and-take of the council’s deliberations. Only the final decisions would be made public. There were six items on this day’s agenda. The first two concerned cases of sexual misconduct by individual inhabitants of the city. To begin with, there was the case of a woman who had been arrested for procuring. The council decided to banish her from Cologne for two years. Then there was a married man who had been caught committing adultery in the city brothel. The normal punishment would be to make him submit to a public humiliation ritual, but in this case the council voted to impose the lesser sentence of one month in jail on bread and water. The third agenda item involved an obscure case of personal misconduct by a local woman and a peddler from outside the city. Both had been arrested but would now be released. The council now turned to a broader social problem: the proliferation of offensive and libelous printed matter in the city. After considering the matter, the council drafted an ordinance to be printed and posted all over Cologne, forbidding printers from producing or selling any such publications. Then the council had to deal with a communication from the Dutch city of Delft, explaining that the labeling on barrels of herring from that city had been changed. The Cologne market inspectors would have to be notified. Finally the council considered a petition from the city’s bakers, who were upset that the price they were allowed to charge for certain types of bread was too low. A slight increase in price was authorized. Now all that was left was to make arrangements for appropriate persons to be notified of the council’s decisions. Once that was done, the meeting could be adjourned and council members could go home for midday dinner. They would meet again on Monday morning.1 Scenes like this were repeated, week after week, year after year, not just in Cologne but in thousands of European cities and towns throughout the early modern era. Every city had a council or, in some cases, a group of interlocking councils, whose members consisted of a small number of generally prosperous men who were sure that they knew what was best for the inhabitants of their community. Urban politics, in their view, was an orderly process of information-gathering and decision-making, designed to provide security, stability and prosperity for the city over which they presided.

Urban politics

3

Yet there were also other, radically different forms of urban politics, as we can see by looking at another characteristic moment of urban political life. Our scene now moves to La Rochelle, a bustling port city on the west coast of France, in the summer of 1614. La Rochelle was also ruled by a city council, the corps de ville – one hundred men who were just as confident as the councilors of Cologne that they knew what was best for their city. But in 1614, many inhabitants of La Rochelle were deeply dissatisfied with the way that their city was being ruled. The specific issues that troubled them need not concern us now – we shall return to them later. But it is important to see what this dissatisfaction eventually led to. For months the disputes between the city council and their opponents among the disaffected citizens had become increasingly bitter. Then, in August 1614, the conflict turned violent. The council’s opponents launched an armed attack on the city hall, seized control of the building, and fanned out through the city to arrest the most hated council members. Seventeen councilors and some forty of their friends and relatives were arrested and thrown into dungeons, where they languished for almost a year. Most of the remaining council members remained nervously in office, but the opposition leaders became the real new rulers of La Rochelle.2 Such occurrences, while not as commonplace as orderly, carefully orchestrated council meetings, were by no means rare in early modern Europe, for urban politics often turned violent. Cologne itself experienced a long series of dramatic conflicts between the Middle Ages and the end of the seventeenth century. There were major uprisings in 1396 and 1481. In 1513, angry citizens seized control of the city government and condemned ten hated members of the council to death by beheading. More disturbances followed, including one in the 1680s that lasted for six years. As they sat securely and serenely in the council chamber imposing sentences, regulating markets, setting bread prices, and expecting obedience from all those they governed, the councilors of Cologne knew that any errors in judgment could have drastic consequences, and that their authority could quickly be challenged. They were only too aware of the danger – and so were the mayors and magistrates of every other city in Europe. The tension between these two poles of urban politics – the normal pattern of authoritarian decision-making by a small cluster of powerful men and the ever-present undercurrent of potential violence and revolt – will form the central problem to be considered in this book. But, of course, this problem can only be understood in the context of a much broader set

4

Urban politics

of questions. Which groups participated in urban politics? How did they define their interests and try to achieve their goals? How was the interaction of groups within cities influenced by pressures from outside? And how was the pattern of urban politics affected by the long-term changes that Europe as a whole experienced in the early modern era? By exploring issues like these, we may come closer to understanding how and why groups of people interacted as they did in the cities and towns of early modern Europe. To start with, we must make clear what was urban about urban politics. All human communities have politics, but urban politics has – and had – its own distinct characteristics. Most people in early modern Europe lived in villages. A village was always subject to the powerful authority of its lord or seigneur. This did not prevent every village from having its own pattern of political interaction, which was shaped by the way in which peasant families with different amounts of wealth or land struggled to conserve their own resources, and those of the village as a whole, against the financial demands made by seigneurs, political authorities, ecclesiastical institutions, creditors and other claimants. But cities were fundamentally different from villages. They were subject to the authority of political overlords, but they almost never had seigneurs, for in most cases they had been liberated from such dependence by the charters that confirmed their privileges and acknowledged their urban status. Although they were affected profoundly by external authorities and pressures, cities were nevertheless far more autonomous than villages. Urban leaders prized this autonomy and constantly looked for ways to increase it. This was one of the factors which shaped the nature of urban politics in early modern Europe. Another distinctive feature of urban politics had to do with the nature of the participants. Every city had a set of inhabitants who made up the acknowledged political community: the group of adult males known as citizens, freemen, bourgeois, Bürger or the like. The members of this group enjoyed more secure or extensive residential and economic rights than other inhabitants. They normally had the right to bear arms and the obligation to serve as members of the civic militia or watch. The degree to which citizens participated in political activity might vary, as we shall see, quite drastically from one city to another. Yet, in every city, the citizens were understood to be the corporate group on whose behalf the city council carried out the job of governing the community. They were the recognized stakeholders of urban society.

Urban politics

5

Though the citizens constituted the recognized political community of any city, they were not the only politically active inhabitants. In some cities, for example, there were householders who had not been granted citizenship – or perhaps had not even sought it – yet who enjoyed clearly defined rights as members of a neighborhood or parish community. There were also journeymen, the skilled workers in each trade who had not yet achieved the status of craft masters (and in some cases never would), but who often had their own organizations through which they could formulate goals and articulate demands. Some cities had small enclaves – usually zones owned or controlled by ecclesiastical institutions – whose inhabitants did not fall entirely under the authority of the city council but still played some part in political life. Moreover, in many cities there were resident members of the aristocracy or officials of the prince or king who would never become citizens but still expected their voices to be heard and their interests to be recognized. In short, political activity was by no means confined to the citizens alone. Yet even so, the great majority of any city’s inhabitants never played any part in the community’s political life. Children, servants, paupers, beggars, casual laborers and seasonal migrants were all subpolitical, because none of them could form themselves into groups that were capable of asserting their interests effectively. Some of these people had parents or masters who were supposed to look after their interests. Some did not. But, either way, they counted only as wards of the political community. The political authorities recognized a moral obligation to help these often defenseless individuals. But they did not perceive of them as members of groups that could make any political claims on the community. Even more importantly, urban politics in early modern Europe was profoundly gendered. Women were excluded from virtually every form of political participation or even political expression in cities. This may seem like a truism, for early modern Europe was a traditional patriarchal society. But, in fact, the urban dimension of women’s exclusion from politics had a special character. After all, women were by no means excluded from all political power in early modern Europe. Many women exercised full and unrestricted political power as regnant queens, and other women held effective power as regents. Conventional attitudes about female weakness did not bar women like Isabella of Castile or Elizabeth I of England or Catherine de Medici from the untrammeled exercise of political power. Yet no woman ever served on a city council, and neither did women participate in any formal way in urban political life. The reason, though obvious, is

6

Urban politics

worth emphasizing. In kingdoms and principalities, supreme political power was based on inheritance. The hereditary principle was so strong that it could easily overcome the conventional aversion to female authority. Thus, in some countries, if no man was available to inherit the throne, political authority was readily passed to the nearest female relative. In other countries, female relatives of hereditary male rulers – their widows, mothers or sisters – might be appointed to rule as regents. But cities were different: the hereditary principle was never the basis for urban authority. A city never had a single ruler. Mayors rotated in and out of office; real authority was always vested in a collective body such as the city council. And collective bodies of every sort in early modern Europe – royal councils, city councils, village assemblies or the like – were always composed of males. Neither could women function as an effective interest group in cities. Of course women were not invisible. Women could be passive citizens, enjoying residential and commercial rights as the wives, widows or daughters of male members of the citizenry. Indeed, individual women often exercised substantial economic power, especially when the men in their families were absent or incapacitated. But except for some religious or charitable organizations, women never formed themselves into gender-based groups. Women as individuals occasionally found their way into the urban administrative records, for example when they submitted petitions or reported on their functions as midwives or market inspectors. But collective political action by women was rare – and when it did occur, it was almost always violent. Women repeatedly participated in food riots and occasionally joined in other forms of violent protest. Women also seized weapons and joined together with men in defending cities from military attack. But when a woman engaged in such actions it was to protect the well-being of her family, or her religious community, or the city as a whole. There is no record of women in cities banding together to defend or promote the interests of women as such. In short, the group of people who engaged in urban politics in early modern Europe was always much smaller than the whole population of a city or town. On the other hand, it was always larger than just the small group of men who sat on the ruling council or councils. In a sense, the political community consisted only of citizens. But in the broader sense it included all those adult men who – by virtue of their status as citizens, householders, journeymen or males of high social rank – identified themselves as members of groups with recognized interests and sufficient influence to make their voices heard. These men were articulate, self-

Urban politics

7

conscious and well informed. The rate of literacy among these men was high and their level of political awareness even higher. They were also, in many cases, highly bigoted. They were hostile to foreigners, outsiders, beggars, and just about anybody else whose religion, language or customs differed from their own. They were deeply suspicious – and often with good reason – about the honesty and wisdom of the people who ruled over them. Their attitudes – and, sometimes, their anger – contributed to making politics such a dynamic and unpredictable process in the history of early modern European cities. Much is known about urban politics in early modern Europe. But most of what historians have written about this topic is highly empirical, having to do with the history of particular towns and cities. By contrast, sociologists and political scientists who study urban politics in modern societies often take a highly theoretical approach to the subject. Much of this theoretical discussion is very abstract and need hardly concern us here. But some knowledge of the major approaches used in interpreting urban politics today may be useful in helping us to think more clearly about urban politics in early modern times. Most discussions of urban politics in modern societies fall into one of two major camps: the elitist and the pluralist approach. Both of these approaches represent an attempt to respond to a commonplace but disturbing observation: in cities in democratic countries, the right to vote for civic officials and participate in civic affairs is held by almost all adult men and women – yet in actual fact ordinary citizens seem to have little direct influence over the way their cities are governed. What accounts for this? The elitist approach takes many different forms, but basically it points to one basic answer: despite democratic elections, a city is really controlled by a “power structure” of wealthy individuals and influential groups who make all the crucial decisions. This power structure normally links together economic elites and political officials. The rich do not generally hold office and the elected officials are not necessarily rich – but these two groups always work hand-in-hand with each other. Even politicians who come to power by promising changes and reforms soon discover that they must collaborate with the established economic and social elites in order to achieve their goals and remain in power. One way or other, the elitist approach always sees power in cities flowing down from above; in the blunt words of one recent theoretician, “cities are governed autocratically.”3

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Urban politics

The pluralist approach is not a mirror-image of the elitist approach. It does not see power as simply flowing up from below. But it does look at urban politics very differently. The pluralist school was essentially founded by the American political scientist Robert Dahl, who studied the workings of urban politics in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1950s. Dahl’s book Who Governs?, though published almost forty years ago, is still remarkably influential.4 Dahl recognized that all cities have elites, but he emphasized that in modern cities elites rarely enjoy a concentration of economic, social and political power – the very fact that different individuals may occupy the positions of social, economic or political leadership will tend to diminish the role of a “power structure.” Dahl also recognized that political power is generally exercised by a small stratum of active professional politicians. But this, he argued, is because most of the time most citizens are politically passive, since they do not care deeply about how their community is governed. From time to time, however, specific issues emerge that particular groups of citizens consider vitally important to their well-being. When that happens, they marshal whatever resources they have– money, personal connections, access to the media and of course their voting power in the next elections – to exert pressure on political leaders. These resources, though normally latent, are powerful when they are used, and political leaders find that they must respond to the pressure. But as issues change, so do the clusters of citizens who bestir themselves to use their resources. Thus there are no permanent divisions or factions among the citizens. Each new issue – about schools, or taxes, or streets, or urban development – will create a new coalition of citizens who feel strongly enough about that particular topic to use all the resources at their command to achieve the goals they have in mind. Civic leaders must always keep on their toes, because they never know what new issue will rouse normally indifferent citizens to rediscover their potential power to influence the outcome of affairs. The pluralist interpretation of urban politics has, predictably enough, undergone many elaborations and fragmentations since it was first formulated by Robert Dahl. But the basic approach has remained the same: power in cities tends to be fragmented and dispersed, but almost all inhabitants have some resources to bring to bear when issues matter sufficiently to them, so urban politics amounts to a constant, unpredictable interplay of different interests.5 Although they are presented as alternative ways of understanding modern urban politics, the elitist and pluralist perspectives can both help us

Urban politics

9

to understand the character of urban politics in early modern times. Certainly, most early modern cities had a definable power structure – and generally, in fact, that power structure was much more tightly integrated than in modern cities. It was entirely typical for members of the economic and social elite, such as the city’s wealthiest and most prestigious merchants, to occupy many or even most of the seats on the city council. Social rank, wealth and political office were often combined to an extent unimaginable today. Since modern societies at least pay lip service to the idea of democracy, the “power structure” detected by some modern political scientists often has to operate from behind the scenes. But the power structure of early modern cities was unabashedly visible to all. Civic rulers took for granted that a city’s richest inhabitants should control the government. These men felt no self-consciousness about holding political power, and openly demanded deference and obedience from the rest of the community. Yet the pluralist approach is also highly relevant to understanding the early modern city. For even citizens and other householders who did not hold political power commanded considerable political resources. They enjoyed the moral power of being acknowledged members of the political community. They belonged to groups and subcommunities that generated a sense of shared identity, articulated common interests, and forged strategies for achieving their aims. In many cities the citizens were armed. Trained to use force to defend the city from external attack, they could potentially use the same force to defend their own interests – and sometimes they did so. Their access to political resources and their willingness to use them meant that politics in early modern cities often involved exactly the interplay of interests that the pluralist approach emphasizes. Yet these political resources were not evenly distributed among all inhabitants of the community. They were disproportionately concentrated among the adult male citizens and other established householders. Women, children and socially weak males commanded few political resources or, in many cases, none at all. Thus they were, for all practical purposes, excluded from urban politics. Of course modern theorists remind us that even oppressed and excluded individuals always practice some type of politics. This is what the influential anthropologist James Scott calls “infrapolitics” – the “circumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups” which “takes place at a level we rarely recognize as political.”6 Scott speaks of the

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“hidden transcript” – the subversive words and gestures of everyday resistance that oppressed groups recognize in each other but which are only dimly noted, if at all, by the dominant groups. All this must have taken place in early modern cities. No doubt women, children, servants and beggars all had their secret ways of showing each other that the respect they were obliged to show to husbands, parents, masters and benefactors was only feigned. But in early modern cities the hidden transcript almost always remained hidden, for these subordinated groups almost never commanded the resources to convert resentment into resistance. The politics of early modern cities was pre-eminently a politics of adult males, men whose everyday experience of command as husbands, fathers and masters gave them the confidence to identify their interests and pursue their aims with the vigor and expressiveness that were so characteristic of European urban life.

2 Who governed?

Every city and town in Europe had its own constitution – not a single written document, but a set of rules and practices about the organization of municipal government, which, in most cases, had developed over the course of centuries. Most of the cities which existed in early modern Europe had been founded much earlier, during the Middle Ages, and the political arrangements in force by the sixteenth century were normally the outcome of a long process of evolution. Two factors combined to shape the constitution of any given city. One was the series of privileges and charters which had been granted to the city by its various overlords. The other was the history of tensions and conflicts among the citizens. Thus, the way that any particular city was governed reflected a combination of arrangements which had been decreed or granted by rulers and agreements that had been negotiated – sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently – by the inhabitants themselves. The superficial result of this process was that each city’s constitution was unique. Municipal leaders were often proud of these distinct arrangements, and a favorite hobby of humanistically or historically inclined civic leaders was to compose elaborate descriptions of their own city’s constitution and its storied evolution. It is easy to be impressed by the endless variety of structures and practices that typified political procedures and processes in different European cities. Yet all of these differences masked some fundamental uniformities in the way in which European cities were governed in the early modern era. With only rare exceptions (the most important one was Venice), every European city had an acknowledged overlord. Sometimes the overlord lived within the city itself – as, for example, in Rome, where the Pope dwelt not only as the ecclesiastical leader of the Catholic church but also as the secular ruler of the large papal states in central Italy. More often,

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some officials who answered directly to the overlord were stationed permanently in the city and expected to play a part in governing it. In many cases the overlord was a remote presence, whose influence was sporadic and unpredictable. Yet virtually always there was somebody – whether emperor, king, duke, bishop, prince or the like – whom the city had to recognize as the superior authority. In every city, however, the main organ of government was a council whose members were drawn from the ranks of the citizenry itself. Some cities had only one council. Others had more than one – but if so, the various councils were almost always clearly ranked in terms of power and prestige. In London, for example, supreme power was vested in the Court of Aldermen, with only twenty-six members. Next came the Common Council, with over 200 members. Then came the Common Hall, whose membership numbered in the thousands. The members of Common Council and Common Hall participated vigorously in the city’s political life, but everybody knew that most power lay with the twenty-six aldermen. Countless European cities had a roughly comparable pattern: a city council that represented the real locus of political authority, a larger council with more members but less to do, and a great assembly, which might include all male citizens but met only on rare occasions. Sometimes the pattern was more complex. The constitution of Venice, with its intricately interlocking network of councils and committees and its endless array of political offices, was a puzzle both to visitors and, no doubt, to many Venetians themselves. Who could remember, after all, that the Council of Ten actually had seventeen members and routinely summoned fifteen or more additional persons to attend its meetings? Meanwhile, six members of the Council of Ten, along with four other dignitaries, made up the Signoria, an important body, which, unlike the Council of Ten, really did have ten members. Countless other governmental bodies, large and small, had memberships that overlapped with each other. Attempts to construct an orderly flow-chart of Venetian government in the early modern era almost always end in frustration.1 But even in Venice there was one body – the Senate – which clearly corresponded in function and importance with the city councils that could be found in almost every urban community. These city councils came in many different sizes: typically there might be anything from a dozen members to a hundred or more. But not all councilors were equal. Usually there was a small, elite group of influential members – an inner or privy council – who met more frequently and

Who governed?

13

handled the most difficult decisions. Moreover, there would always be one or two council members who held the highest rank in the city as mayor, échevin, Bürgermeister, Stettmeister or the like. Sometimes mayors served for life; more often the position was a rotating one. But it was never hereditary. For this reflected one of the fundamental ways in which cities differed from the feudal society out of which they had emerged. In the feudal order, power was an individual attribute, transmitted by blood relationships. A king passed his title on to his heir – as did the humblest rural seigneur. By contrast, power in cities was always exercised collectively. Occasionally, powerful personalities might bend the rules so that certain offices in some cities became quasi-hereditary. But such situations were regarded as exceptions and often caused resentment. For in fact it was a fundamental norm of European urban life that cities were supposed to be ruled by men who had obtained their power not by inheritance but by some process of election or selection. Once chosen, such men often served for life. But there still had to be a procedure by which they were named in the first place. How exactly did these elections or selections of office-holders take place? Here again there was a staggering variety of constitutional forms. The only constant was that no matter which system a city followed, there were always some people who were passionately committed to making sure the same rules were scrupulously followed year after year. For the right to have municipal officials selected in the traditional manner was one of the most important freedoms or liberties a city enjoyed, quite as significant as the right to hold markets or maintain a system of fortifications. Often the rules were challenged or overturned – but if so, it was usually by fiat from above or by force from below. There were countless cities where vacancies were filled by a system of co-option whose details, like so many other items of council business, were shrouded in secrecy. In some cases, the existing councilmen would simply select a new person to join their ranks. Elsewhere the council would appoint a nominating committee to do the job. In other cities, nominating committees were chosen by some form of public election. Yet there were also cities all over Europe in which public officials were directly chosen by some type of competitive election. Each city had its own customs. There is no obvious pattern to explain why electoral procedures were so radically different from one city to the next. But wherever elections did take place, those who were eligible to participate attached enormous importance to their right to do so.

14

Who governed?

It would be pointless to try to survey the entire landscape of urban electoral practices, but a few examples can help to suggest the enormous variety of systems to be found in European cities. Take, for example, the western French city of Nantes. Throughout the seventeenth century, the leading municipal officials of Nantes were chosen by annual elections in which hundreds of adult male householders might participate. The electoral system was spelled out in a decree issued by the king of France in 1598. The public had no input in choosing candidates – the list of nominees for each major office was prepared by the mayor and councilors themselves. But these lists were then submitted to an assembly of voters who could freely specify their preferences. Following the assembly, a list of the three highest vote-winners for each position was submitted to the king, who would make the final choice. Normally, though not always, the king chose the name at the top of each list. Though their power to select their leaders was obviously limited, the householders of Nantes relished the chance to participate in the system. In the well-documented election of 1685, for example, 423 men attended the assembly.2 This was still only a tiny fraction of the city’s 20,000 or more inhabitants – but it did represent a sizeable portion of the adult male householders. In Dijon, the capital of the French province of Burgundy, there were annual elections for the office of mayor – an exceptionally influential position, because after he was elected the mayor chose the twenty members of the city council who would serve with him for the following year. Every year in June the elections were held in a convent near the city’s great cathedral. At six in the morning on the appointed day, the outgoing members of the council and other municipal dignitaries would gather to announce their nominees for the position of mayor. Then the city’s male householders would be permitted to enter the convent, one by one, to vote – in public, by voice – on the candidates. At the end of the day, the candidate with the largest number of votes was declared the winner. The turnout was sometimes huge: between 1580 and 1610, the number of voters sometimes fell just short of 2,000. Voting days were always festive occasions, and in fact there was often a whiff of corruption about the elections – there were constant complaints that voters were being bribed with food, drink, or small sums of money. In 1612, a property requirement was introduced to prevent the poorest (and most bribable) householders from participating. But hundreds were still able to vote.3 In the north German city of Braunschweig, popular input came not so much in the council elections which took place every three years, but

Who governed?

15

rather in the elections for “burgher captains.” In the sixteenth century the Braunschweig council had 103 members. Seventy-eight of these councilmen represented the city’s fourteen major guilds and were chosen by the guild leaders. But the remaining twenty-five council members represented the “commons” – the citizens who did not belong to a guild. These twenty-five council members were chosen by the “burgher captains.” There were twenty-eight of these burgher captains, two for each of the city’s fourteen neighborhoods, and they were elected at three-year intervals by the householders of each neighborhood who did not belong to any guild.4 Thus, through their choice of burgher captains the “common” citizens had at least some influence on the eventual composition of the city council. The great south German city of Nuremberg typified a system in which the choice of the city’s leaders was handled by a small, almost selfselecting in-group. Nuremberg’s true city council – the “small council” – had forty-two seats, of which all but eight were always reserved for members of families who belonged to the city’s social elite, the patriciate. There was also, as in many cities, a much bigger but less influential “large council” of ordinary citizens. Most vacancies on the all-important small council were filled each year by a nominating committee consisting of just five men – three members of the large council who were chosen by the small council, plus two members of the small council who were chosen by the large council. It was a closed, cozy system that made only the slightest concession to “popular” input in the selection of political leaders.5 Nuremberg was often compared with Venice, and with good reason. In both cities, political power was largely monopolized by members of a specific list of elite families. And in Venice too, the electoral system was based on a system of nominating committees. But there were more elections in Venice, and more committees. Both the right to hold office and the right to participate in elections in Venice were rigidly confined to adult male members of the Venetian patriciate – a group which, at its peak in the sixteenth century, numbered over 2,000. At times it seemed that even this number was hardly sufficient to fill posts in the various councils and committees that made up the government of Venice – all the more so because the members of these councils were being rotated constantly in and out of office. As a result, there was a seemingly endless cycle of elections. Most of these elections were carried out at meetings of the Great Council of Venice, to which all adult male patricians belonged. But the councilors could only choose from among those candidates who had been

16

Who governed?

duly nominated. In the closed world of the Venetian patricians, everyone knew everyone – they saw each other day after day on the Rialto, or at St Mark’s, or passing by in gondolas – but there was an obsessive concern that personal contacts should not lead to favoritism or vote-fixing. Choosing the members of the nominating committee by lot was supposed to prevent this. To make sure that the actual voting in the Great Council would not be tainted, young boys were appointed as ballotini to collect the ballots.6 The most important election in Venice was that of the Doge, who, once elected, would serve for life as the city’s prince. The forty-one members of the committee entrusted with choosing the Doge were selected by an intricate cycle of balloting and lot-drawing that took almost a week to complete. It was so important that the ballot-boy in this case be completely untainted that at the beginning of the process a government official was instructed to walk out the door of the basilica of St Mark’s and select the first boy he saw to serve as ballotino. As a symbol of electoral incorruptibility, the ballotino later had the honor of marching in front of the Doge during the prince’s formal processions through the streets of Venice.7 Yet none of this helped. The elections in Venice were riddled with corruption. Though you didn’t know precisely who would end up on a nominating committee, you could try to influence anybody you thought might be chosen – and many office-hungry patricians did exactly that. In the words of one penetrating study of Venetian politics, “lobbying and cheating dogged elections at every stage.” Even the ballotini were sometimes persuaded to tamper with the ballot urns.8 The notion of using children as a symbol of electoral incorruptibility may have been rare, but it was not confined to Venice. The small English port city of Great Yarmouth used a similar system. Like many English towns, Great Yarmouth had a council of aldermen and a larger common council. Municipal officers for the coming year were selected by a nominating committee which consisted of twelve members of the common council. By the late seventeenth century, the procedure for selecting these twelve nominators had become standardized. The names of thirty-six common councilors were written on slips of paper and distributed into four different hats, nine in each hat. Then a child was made to stand on a table so that all could see him, and told to pull three names out of each hat. The twelve men thus selected were locked into a room with no food or water until they had agreed on who should serve for the coming year.9

Who governed?

17

Almost every European city had some kind of filtering system to insure that those already in power would play a major part in determining who would hold positions of authority in the future. The great and growing metropolis of London was no exception to this rule. Yet the extent of popular participation in the electoral system of London was probably greater than that of any other major city. Admittedly, the inhabitants of the ever-growing suburbs that ringed the traditional City of London were only partially integrated into this system. But within the City itself, vast numbers of male householders took part in some form of electoral politics. London was huge, and much of its political life took place on the neighborhood level. All male householders who paid their taxes were entitled to vote for officials of their local ward, precinct or parish. But to take part in city-wide politics you had to belong to a guild, which made you a freeman of London. This was by no means an exclusive rank; in fact a good three-quarters of all householders were freemen. Many freemen, in turn, eventually acquired the more exalted status of liverymen. Only liverymen could participate in electing the Lord Mayor or the city’s Members of Parliament. But even ordinary freemen had a hand in city politics. All freemen, for example, were eligible to participate in electing members of the Court of Common Hall. The freemen also played a role in choosing members of the more powerful Court of Aldermen. There was one alderman for each of the city’s twenty-six wards; when a vacancy occurred, the freemen of that ward could nominate four eligible candidates to fill the position, though the aldermen themselves would make the final choice.10 With so many positions to be filled and so many different configurations of eligible electors, one might think it was difficult for people to keep track of who was eligible to vote for what. But male Londoners of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries knew exactly what their voting rights were and relished the chance to use them. They were passionate, disputatious, opinionated electors – but so, in fact, were the patricians of Venice, the commoners of Braunschweig, the householders of Nantes, and just about any other European males who happened to live in towns whose customs or constitutions gave them the right to participate in electoral politics. Considering the variety of ways in which people were chosen for high political office in early modern cities, one might imagine that the social profile of these office-holders would have looked rather different from one city to the next. But in fact this was not the case. Research on dozens of European cities has shown that the characteristics of the highest municipal

18

Who governed?

officers – the mayors and city council members – tended to be remarkably uniform. In most cities, most of the time, most of the mayors and councilmen had much in common. Above all, they were almost always the rich men of their communities. Of course what passed for rich in one city did not necessarily pass for rich in another. The wealthiest man in, say, Great Yarmouth might not have cut a very impressive figure in London. Neither should one imagine that if a city council had twenty-five seats the twenty-five wealthiest members of the community would actually have occupied them. For one thing, almost every city barred close relatives from sitting on a council at the same time – so if there were two or three rich brothers, only one could serve. In addition, in some cities a certain number of council seats were reserved for specific neighborhoods, occupations or guilds. This meant that men from poorer districts or trades might also sit on the council – although almost invariably these reserved seats would go to the wealthiest available representatives of the neighborhood, occupation or guild concerned. Occasionally a record of long service to the city or a reputation for exceptional wisdom might compensate for a diminished purse. But, on the whole, most members of most councils belonged to a small upper crust of well-to-do and high-status members of the community. Sometimes this was the result of specific rules. London was particularly blatant in this regard. In the seventeenth century you were only eligible to be elected as an alderman if you owned property worth £10,000 or more. Few cities had such specific requirements. In most cases the wealth requirement was an unwritten rule. But it was almost always there. Why was this? One reason was identified a hundred years ago by the great social theorist Max Weber. He called it Abkömmlichkeit, an untranslatable German term that could best be rendered as “ability to get away.” Weber meant this quite literally: one had to be able to leave one’s home, workshop or counting house to attend council meetings and carry out the time-consuming administrative tasks which were routinely assigned to civic leaders.11 Cities had salaried bureaucrats, but municipal officeholding was mostly volunteer work: council members were usually paid little or nothing for doing their job. There were exceptions, of course. Sometimes council members did get fees for attending meetings and in a few towns the mayors or other top officials were paid generously for their work. In Barcelona, for example, the top five magistrates received such handsome salaries that in 1635 a member of the regional aristocracy actually renounced his noble status in order to qualify for one of the

Who governed?

19

municipal offices.12 Yet, more often, exactly the opposite was the case: generally council members received scant remuneration, and holding a high municipal office could actually become a financial burden if the office-holder was expected to entertain lavishly or give generously to charity. Certainly a poor craft master could afford neither the time nor the loss of income which election to a civic office might entail. By contrast, a wealthy craftsman with well-trained assistants, a prosperous merchant, or – best of all – a rentier living off his investments and rental income would be far better equipped than a hard-working shoemaker or weaver to devote his time to civic service. But that was not the only reason why most council members were wealthy. Another was deference. Even firebrands who agitated for changes in the councils’ decisions generally assumed that cities should be ruled by a social elite. Humbler members of society did not necessarily believe that their interests would best be served by officeholders who shared their own modest social profile. They often thought that somebody of high social rank would be better positioned to function effectively and would be more likely to be taken seriously than someone just like themselves. Observing the composition of municipal councils in early modern Europe, historians often use the term “oligarchy” – government by the few. This makes sense, because the term aptly suggests the way in which formal political power was concentrated in the hands of a small group of likeminded men. But historians are on shakier ground when, as they often do, they speak of a steady trend towards oligarchization in European cities of the early modern era. This implies an unbroken linear movement from a medieval system in which political authority in cities was more “open” to one in which power was increasingly “closed.” But in fact, by the late Middle Ages the political structure of most cities already was oligarchical. What appears to have been a trend in early modern times was, actually, more often a long-established fact. To speak of oligarchy, however, should not conjure up the image of a specific knot of families controlling political power from one generation to the next. This was the case in some cities, but only where – as in Nuremberg or Venice – there existed a formal list of families whose members had the exclusive right to hold certain offices. In fact such cities were rare. Most cities were not large enough to insure that the ruling families could maintain their grip from one generation to the next. Families died out. Even Venice, with its huge number of noble families, had, by the eighteenth century, begun to have trouble filling political offices, as the

20

Who governed?

pool of available adult male patricians shrank slowly to a little more than a thousand.13 Obviously most cities could not even contemplate limiting council seats to particular clans. Kinship mattered. Often when a father died his son was chosen to fill the vacant seat. If there was no son, a nephew or son-in-law might do instead. In some cities, especially in France, council members tried to institutionalize such practices by formally “resigning” their seats in favor of a younger relative. Occasionally a family would keep its hand in government for many generations. In the German city of Nördlingen, members of the Frickinger family were active in city politics from the fourteenth century down to the twentieth, and between 1546 and 1778 they were represented on the city council for six generations in a row.14 But such cases were striking precisely because of their rarity. For, in fact, city councils could only maintain their authority by constantly admitting “new men” to their ranks – men whose grandfathers may have been modest artisans or less, but who themselves had achieved the wealth and social standing appropriate for members of the city government. Most cities were indeed governed by an oligarchy – but it was wealth, not pedigree, that gave these men both their seats on the council and the confidence that they had every right to occupy them. The city council governed – but, much as it might have liked to, it never governed alone. Every city council could only exercise its authority by a process of negotiation with other political forces. For the sake of clarity, it is easiest to think of these other forces as pressing against the council’s own power from above, from below – and, in many cases, from the side. The fact that city councils faced political pressures simultaneously from above and below was due, in part, to the way in which city governments had evolved. Most city governments had their origins in the medieval commune, an association of citizens who had sworn an oath of mutual cooperation and support. These oaths, with their egalitarian overtones, had tended over time to be transformed into something that the council members found more congenial: an oath of loyalty sworn by citizens to the city and its government. But the citizens always remembered that the magistrates’ political legitimacy derived, in some way, from the citizens themselves. Yet at the same time, as we have seen, virtually every city also stood under the authority of an overlord. Medieval communes and their spokesmen had persistently sought confirmation of their privileges of selfgovernment and self-administration from these overlords. Often the ensuing charters spelled out exactly what powers the councils could

Who governed?

21

exercise over the city’s inhabitants. This was, of course, immensely useful for the council members – but it also reinforced the overlords’ confidence that they themselves were the ultimate source of any council’s authority. The circumstance that city councils thus derived their legitimacy both from above and from below was a conundrum for the handful of political theorists who worried about such things. But it was also a tool in the hands of both overlords and citizens in their dealings with the magistrates. The relationship between cities and their overlords was constantly subject to change because the overlords themselves were never permanent. Even when a ruler died and was succeeded by his undisputed heir, a city would rush to have the new ruler reconfirm all the privileges granted by his predecessor. But often things were not so simple. Dynasties died out or were overthrown. Civil wars erupted, pitting two claimants against each other. Wars of conquest placed entire regions under new rule. Cities themselves were often major military targets. They were attacked or besieged. The way that civic leaders responded to such situations was almost always pragmatic. The magistrates were rarely legitimists who would support one ruler over another simply because he seemed to have a better claim to his title. It hardly mattered whether the city was dealing with a king descended from ten generations of crowned heads or with a military adventurer whom nobody had heard of: an army encamped before the city gates conferred legitimacy quickly enough. The magistrates’ only concern was to preserve the city’s existing privileges – or possibly, if conditions permitted, to extract a few more. The city fathers would willingly deal with any overlord, old or new, who would guarantee or extend the city’s existing rights. Often, however, the overlord wanted to do just the opposite: to raise new loans or levy new taxes, install a garrison or force his own religious convictions upon the community. When such situations developed, the magistrates had to make some difficult decisions. Was the overlord bluffing, or would he back up his demands by force? Were the issues at stake even worth fighting for? Should the city accede or resist? As practical men of affairs, magistrates usually made the right choice. But sometimes they miscalculated, and when they did, they – or the whole city – might pay a stiff price. An angry overlord might revoke the city’s charters, dismiss the council, appoint new councilors, and revise the rules for choosing members in the future. If the city actively resisted, the punishments could be even more severe.

22

Who governed?

Some rulers insisted on the permanent presence of one of their own officials in the city. This, in fact, was exactly the situation that municipal leaders had struggled to eliminate in the Middle Ages, but in some countries the practice was still in force or was even revived in the early modern era. Among the most prominent officials of this sort were the Spanish corregidores. During the reign of Queen Isabella of Castile in the late fifteenth century, the number of these officials multiplied as a corregidor was assigned to almost every important city in Isabella’s realm.15 The corregidor was expected to supervise local officials, dispense justice, oversee economic affairs and ensure that the urban infrastructure was maintained. Of course local magistrates resented these officials and conspired to limit their power; most corregidores soon discovered that they could only function effectively by cooperating closely with the local elites. But they did become a permanent fixture in many Spanish towns. Neither was Spain alone. By the seventeenth century royal intendants had become an equally familiar presence in many of the largest cities in France. One way or another, every city council was unceasingly aware of the pressure from above. But there was also pressure from below. In the first place, every city had an institutional framework through which citizens who did not belong to the council could still participate in some form of decision-making. Most cities had a large council which, even if its members were simply appointed by the smaller council, represented a broad cross-section of the citizenry. In some cities there were assemblies to which all male citizens might be summoned. And there were other organizations – guilds, militia companies, parish committees, neighborhood associations – which could function as pressure groups for their members. Beyond all this, however, there was the citizens’ own belief that the council members in some way were functioning only as their trustees in running the city’s affairs. One of the major challenges for council members was to make sure this belief remained reassuringly abstract and dormant – for if it was allowed to crystallize, as we shall see, it could become a major threat to the council’s own authority. Neither was this all. Councils did not just have to deal with political and institutional pressures from above and below. In many cities they faced lateral pressures as well, for often there were parallel institutions within the city itself that impinged on or even challenged the council’s authority. Some of these institutions were ecclesiastical. There were, for example, hundreds of bishops in Europe – and each bishop claimed some special rights in the city that served as his episcopal seat. Sometimes the bishop

Who governed?

23

himself was the city’s overlord. More often, he simply asserted the authority to name certain city officials or have his own minions participate in meetings. And often bishops or ecclesiastical institutions claimed direct authority over specific zones inside the city walls – the cathedral precincts, for example – where the council exercised little or no control. In the parts of Europe that became Protestant during the Reformation, bishops either lost some of their power or disappeared entirely, while urban clergymen often came under the authority of the city councils. But this rarely prevented ministers from claiming independent authority over many aspects of everyday life. Even in Protestant towns the church often continued to function as a quasi-autonomous source of power. Other parallel institutions were judicial in character. This was especially typical of France, where almost every large city had a royal judicial court. Though established by the crown, these courts did not primarily function as instruments of royal power. Once the judges had received – or, to be more precise, purchased – their appointments from the king, they were scarcely subject to royal control. In fact the judges’ orientation was strongly local – for most of them, after all, came from the city itself or from the surrounding region. Neither were their activities confined to trying cases. Often these royal courts were deeply enmeshed in local administration, issuing decrees and settling disputes about matters which, in other cities, would be left to the city council. Sometimes the council members accepted the judges as fellow-magistrates and tacitly accepted a virtual division of labor. In other cities the councils bitterly resented the courts as rival centers of power. But wherever such a court existed, it served to diminish the council’s authority. So who governed the European city? Everywhere city councils stood at the center of the urban political process. Their members were immensely proud of their rank and sure that they were doing God’s work in bringing stability and order to the cities over which they presided. But they were also, for the most part, realistic men who knew the limits of their power. At any time a disturbing communication might arrive from the city’s overlord or, more alarmingly, the overlord himself might announce an impending visit to the city. Unerring decisions would have to be made about how to deal with what, in most cases, were bound to be unwelcome demands. But even more constant tests lay closer to home. Day in and day out, the councilors had to confront the concerns and expectations of the city’s own inhabitants. There were demanding beggars, unreliable servants, undernourished families, rowdy apprentices and resentful journeymen. But

24

Who governed?

above all there were the city’s own citizens, with their long memories, their powerful sense of entitlements – and their deep engagement with the issues that for centuries animated urban politics. What were these issues, and how were they dealt with? These are the questions that must concern us next.

3 Interests and issues

The classic pluralist interpretation of urban politics emphasizes the interplay between groups and issues. Every community has groups, but often these groups remain politically inactive until particular issues emerge to energize them into action. In other cases, an issue itself can create a new group, a coalition of previously unconnected people whose common link is a shared concern with one particular cause or objective. Either way, in this view, issues lie at the heart of the urban political process. Another way to conceptualize the matter is by focusing on the relationship between issues and interests. As members of society, we all have interests – a set of conditions that protect what we already have and give us more of what we want. But not all of us are equally well positioned to pursue those interests. The same applied to the early modern city. Women, children, servants, apprentices, laborers, travelers, beggars – all of them could have identified some circumstances that would have made their lives more secure or comfortable. But people in these groups normally had no way to organize themselves into groups that could exploit the pressure of numbers to promote these interests. Women were supposed to look, at least in the first instance, to their husbands or fathers for the promotion or protection of their interests. Except for certain religious associations, there were no specifically female organizations through which women could articulate goals or objectives particular to their gender. For children or servants the situation was even worse. Children were expected to rely only on their parents, and servants or apprentices only on their masters. Beggars or casual laborers had some moral claims on society as a whole, since people who were better off were supposed to give them food or charity or opportunities to work. But by banding together to promote their interests beggars and laborers would generally have diminished rather than increased their capacity to achieve their aims, for suddenly they would

26

Interests and issues

have looked less like the salt of the earth and more like a threatening mob. This would not have been to their advantage. Adult males – especially if they were citizens or at least tax-paying householders – were in an entirely different position. To be a citizen was by definition to belong to a group with recognized rights – the citizenry itself. But citizens also belonged to other organizations which had clearly defined objectives and held regular meetings at which these objectives could be articulated. The most important of these organizations were, of course, the guilds. Virtually every trade or craft in every city had a guild, whose masters would gather periodically to consider their economic and social needs and regulate the procedures for admitting new members. Sometimes a number of guilds would be grouped together into a superguild that crossed occupational lines, typically for the purpose of structuring some form of political representation. At the same time, in many cities, members of the citizenry also belonged to militia companies. These companies would meet regularly for exercise and drill. Afterwards, no doubt, the members would adjourn to a tavern to drink – and talk. There were also organizations to which not only citizens but also other male householders might belong: parish vestries and committees, neighborhood associations, or religious confraternities. Sometimes women had a peripheral or auxiliary role in these associations, but their opportunities to gather were limited. Men, by contrast, participated in an abundant associational life. There were even groups for younger men – in particular, journeymen’s associations, which played a major role in helping their members to assert their identity, find work and deal effectively with their masters. In short, it was adult males who were always best positioned to convert interests into issues – and thus to play the central part in urban politics. All cities had problems, and some of those problems were not dissimilar to those confronted by cities in the modern world. But not every problem was an issue, for issues only arise when a problem gives rise to disagreement or dissent. To appreciate this more fully, it may be useful to remind ourselves of some of the issues that can animate urban politics today. People in modern cities may become passionately concerned about things like education, traffic, crime, urban development, the use of public space and the livability of neighborhoods. All of these were, to be sure, aspects of life in early modern cities, but none of them became major political issues.

Interests and issues

27

Take education, for example. Today the provision of public education is often a responsibility of governments or school boards on the municipal level – and education is typically one of the most contentious issues in urban politics. But this was not the case in early modern cities. Many towns had one or more Latin schools for sons of the social elite, plus a number of vernacular schools to which parents could send their boys and, increasingly, their girls. City governments laid down rules for the running of these schools, as they did for many other aspects of everyday life, but since education was not perceived as a public entitlement these decisions were rarely contentious. Traffic was rarely a problem in early modern cities. Most towns were small enough to traverse on foot or, in the case of canal-webbed cities, by boat. As cities like London and Paris grew into large metropolises, getting across town did become a problem – but not an issue, since it never occurred to anyone that municipal governments could do very much about it. Much the same could be said about crime. Crime was abundant and punishments – on the rare occasions when perpetrators were caught – were harsh. But the notion that municipal governments could formulate a systematic strategy for reducing crime lay far in the future. Cities grew, and governments tried desperately to control and channel growth. But often the greatest growth took place in the suburbs or faubourgs outside the city walls, over which the municipal governments had diminished control. The main public spaces were marketplaces, used for functions whose importance was recognized by all. There were many disputes between neighbors, but hardly any debates about the character or function of neighborhoods. Yet there were certain issues which became profoundly important in the urban politics of early modern Europe. Roughly speaking, these issues could be subsumed under four main headings, and we shall consider each in turn. Economic issues were among the most important causes of political tension in early modern cities. This reflected one of the most fundamental assumptions of urban life: that the authorities were morally responsible for maintaining the prosperity of the community and its inhabitants. All levels of government, in fact, were expected to assure the most basic of all economic needs: the provision of food. When city governments failed to insure the arrival of enough grain or the sale of enough bread at prices the people could afford, unrest was likely to follow. Inevitably, then, one of the

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Interests and issues

major jobs of any city government was to adjudicate skillfully among the conflicting claims of grain merchants, bakers and the bread-consuming public.1 But what was expected of city governments went far beyond this. To some extent, after all, the medieval commune had emerged as an instrument to promote the economic security of its members – the citizens – by protecting them from arbitrary interference by outside powers. Cities of the early modern era had little in common with the communes to which they could trace their origins. What lingered on, however, was the assumption that municipal governments had a moral obligation to protect and promote the citizens’ economic well-being. Yet the citizens themselves were divided into groups with highly divergent economic interests. Measures that promoted the economic wellbeing of some citizens might detract from the prosperity of others. Persistent tensions in economic life arose from the different needs of those who wanted the freedom to trade and invest in the most profitable way and those who wanted protection from excessive competition. In the late sixteenth century a committee appointed to supervise the cloth-producing industry of Lille in the southern Netherlands formulated the basic issue with classic directness. On the one hand, the committee noted, economic regulations laid down by the government inevitably “hindered freedom.” Yet, on the other hand, regulations were needed so that “everyone can have the means of earning a living without the least being crushed and oppressed by the advance of the most powerful.”2 Even if it was not always worded so clearly, the same issue arose in countless cities. Merchants and craftsmen were particularly often at odds. Usually – though by no means always – the merchants wanted economic freedom while the craftsmen pushed for regulation. Craft masters traditionally operated as small-scale entrepreneurs, buying the raw materials they needed and selling their products at standard prices set by the authorities. Sometimes, however, merchants gained control of the production process and tried to increase their profits by raising the price of raw materials or reducing the price of finished goods. In 1698 wool-weavers in the small German town of Nördlingen launched an anguished complaint against the community’s wealthiest merchants: by cornering the market and controlling prices, they said, the merchants were turning independent weaving masters into mere “slaves and serfs.”3 This was a typical grievance, yet sometimes the shoe was on the other foot. Just a few years later in the great city of Nuremberg it was the merchants who complained that they were being victimized. Some craftsmen had started to sell not

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29

only their own products but also goods made by others – and in doing so they impinged on the merchants’ traditional sphere of activity. “In the past,” a committee of merchants lamented, “people made sure that merchants and craftsmen lived peacefully side by side – but now everyone watches with complete indifference while the craftsmen drive the merchants out of business.”4 Tension between merchants and craftsmen was one of the most sustained causes of economic conflict in early modern cities, but there was no shortage of other potential fault-lines. Rentiers had needs that were fundamentally different from those of active merchants. Merchants in turn were often divided into groups which competed against one another. Craft guilds fought bitterly with each other over which guild had the right to make and sell which products. At the same time, there were conflicts within individual guilds – typically between richer and poorer masters, who might disagree about the appropriate size of shops or the number of journeymen each one should be allowed to hire. Journeymen banded together to demand decent wages and acceptable work conditions. Householders outside the guild system wanted an economic niche in which they too could earn a living. And all looked to the city council to grant their demands or adjudicate their disputes. For all expected municipal governments to guarantee the conditions which would make it possible for them to earn a decent living and meet their obligations. Here was an arena in which expectations always outstripped the capacity of city governments to deliver. As a result, economic issues were always a source of tension in city politics. Religious issues were even more contentious. Religious differences always had the capacity to divide a community. In the late Middle Ages municipal leaders normally enjoyed a comfortable working relationship with local church leaders, but occasionally some electrifying preacher or religious zealot would command his followers to abandon their negligent ways and adopt a more God-fearing course of life. When enough people in any particular city began to heed these calls, municipal leaders were faced with the recurrent dilemma posed by revivalist episodes: should they risk the wrath of religiously enthused inhabitants by banishing or punishing the preachers who destabilized the community, or should they accede to demands for change in the hope that the flush of religious fervor would follow the customary pattern and slowly abate? Such dilemmas were hardly unknown in the late Middle Ages – as, for example, in Florence in the 1490s, when the city fell under the influence of the charismatic

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preacher Girolamo Savonarola. But the problem was relentlessly magnified with the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. The movement led by Martin Luther had some features in common with the revivalist episodes of earlier times. But the theological premises of Protestantism were far more radical and its practical implications far more extreme than those of any previous movement. By calling on sinners to entrust their hopes for salvation to the inscrutable designs of God rather than the shop-worn routines of the existing church, Luther and his followers threatened the entire ecclesiastical structure of their day. Even municipal leaders who felt some sympathy for Luther’s teachings were bound to feel nervous about the institutional restructuring required by his program. Yet by the 1520s in towns all over Germany and Switzerland city councils were faced with uniquely intense demands for religious reform. At the same time, however, there were always some citizens who were determined to remain loyal to the old Catholic system. To respond to such conflicting forces within their communities would have been hard enough in any case – but the situation was further complicated by the fact that overlords also imposed pressure on the magistrates, either by commanding that the Reformation be adopted or by insisting that it be resisted. The Lutheran revolution unleashed a cycle of prolonged turmoil all over Europe, making religion into a political issue in countless cities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But there were regional variations. In Italy and the Iberian peninsula the Reformation was entirely blocked, though city leaders often had trouble enough with the revivalist movements that took place in an entirely Catholic framework. In parts of northern Europe the Reformation was adopted and imposed with startling alacrity by national or territorial rulers. But in most of Europe the religious issues became, if anything, ever more complicated. Protestantism itself soon splintered. The Calvinist or Reformed stream became the dominant form of Protestantism in many parts of Europe. But Calvinism, like Lutheranism, soon faced internal fissures. The Church of England, with its unusual mixture of Catholic and Calvinist elements, was riven with factions. Meanwhile the emergence of radical sects like the Anabaptists or the Quakers generated anxieties out of all proportion to their numbers. The impact of all this on urban politics was enormous. New religious groups emerged in cities, cutting across traditional economic or neighborhood lines. Some of these groups merely sought religious rights for themselves. Others tried to remake whole cities in their own image. In 1555 France was a Catholic country; ten years later, almost every French city had a Calvinist subcommunity whose members were determined to

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protect their identity and extend their influence. But the Catholics fought back. France as a whole was riven by civil war from 1562 to 1598, so local issues were always affected by broader agendas – but the most bitter conflicts often took place on the municipal level. In many cities, the rights of each religious group to conduct worship, hold processions, teach their children, or bury their dead became the central issues of urban politics. Dutch cities also experienced decades of religious conflict. The Eighty Years’ War against Catholic Spain, during which the northern portion of the Netherlands became an independent nation, coincided with fierce struggles among Protestant factions in many communities. In seventeenthcentury England, the total rupture of the established church created religious factions in every town or city. None of the successive upheavals and reversals of English politics – the civil war of 1642–49, the Puritan regime of 1649–60, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 or the revolution of 1688 – ever really settled the local issues. At the end of the seventeenth century, Anglicans and non-conformists were still at odds in countless English towns. Religious issues could also divide town-dwellers who considered themselves to belong to exactly the same system of faith. Just because, say, all the inhabitants were Lutherans or Calvinists did not mean they would all take the same stand on religious issues. Often the clergy and a small cluster of their most zealous supporters would insist on higher standards of religious behavior or personal conduct than the majority was willing to display. Bitter disputes might break out over the appropriate treatment of religious minorities. Hamburg, for example, was a predominantly Lutheran city, but for most of the early modern era it also harbored small Catholic, Calvinist, Mennonite and Jewish communities. The city council generally saw some practical economic advantages to tolerating these minorities, while members of the clergy insisted that the presence of these groups was an affront to the city’s spiritual unity. For centuries this fundamental quarrel simmered on, since both sides in Hamburg commanded powerful resources: the magistrates controlled the government, but the pastors could shape public opinion from the pulpit.5 Among devout Christians, religious passion is always rooted in the hope of salvation – the soul’s longing to enter the city of God. But many Christians of the sixteenth or seventeenth century also wanted their earthly lives to take place in a godly city. It was this impulse that made religious issues so unavoidable and so intense in the urban politics of early modern Europe.

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Economic and religious issues often arose out of the demands and expectations of specific groups within the community: merchants, guildsmen, journeymen, Catholics, Protestants, sectarians or the like. By contrast, a third type of issue normally reflected the anger or disillusionment of people who claimed – rightly or wrongly – to be speaking for the citizenry as a whole. This issue had to do with accountability. The citizens or their spokesmen wanted to know how the magistrates had managed the city’s affairs, what they had done, and why they had done so. Even when – as they did only with great reluctance – the council members acknowledged that they derived some political authority from the citizens themselves, they never willingly conceded that they should have to explain their actions to the public. All over Europe, council meetings were held in secrecy and members were punished for marring the facade of unanimity by revealing what had happened during meetings. Only the final decisions were announced, not the discussions that had led up to them. Council minutes were confidential documents. Even tighter secrecy generally shrouded the financial records. What revenues the city had received from taxes and other sources, and how these monies had been expended, were matters that normally were known only to members of the council or perhaps only to members of a committee of councilmen specifically charged with financial administration. The public, it was felt, had a right to know who governed the city – but not to know why and how they governed as they did. Much the same thinking, of course, applied to the magistrates’ judicial functions. In some parts of continental Europe the city council was also the highest local court. Criminal trials might be carried out right in the city hall itself, with members of the council acting in rotation as judges. Exactly what happened during such trials – which sometimes took place partly in the city hall’s own torture chamber – was never disclosed and the final sentence might only be revealed when the criminal stood before the public on the scaffold to be executed. The demand for accountability was not an ongoing, consistent theme of urban political life. Most of the time, the citizens were simply too used to magisterial secrecy to give the matter much thought. But the issue would erupt, often with startling suddenness, when something happened that caused citizens to lose confidence in their rulers. It could be an unanticipated increase in taxes, a military crisis which the council had bungled, evidence of nepotism or rumors of corruption, the dismissal of an admired pastor or punishment of a popular neighborhood leader – whatever it was, something like this could always bring to the surface

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long-suppressed demands that the council explain and account for its actions. And once the issue was unleashed, the citizens would cast their net widely. Typically, they or their spokesmen would insist that they be permitted to inspect the city’s charters or council minutes or financial records – or that they be allowed to send representatives to sit in on proceedings that had traditionally been conducted in secret. Sometimes, of course, these demands may have been made just for effect. In 1650, for example, reform-minded citizens in the French city of Angers tried to have the city government hand over the municipal account books for a public audit to take place in the open air in front of the city’s cathedral. The council objected to this – partly for the sensible reason that it would hardly be safe to take such valuable records out of doors – and the matter seems to have been dropped.6 But mostly when citizens struggled to get access to charters or minutes or financial records, they were dead serious. And precisely because there was usually no existing mechanism for such oversight – or, if there was, it had fallen into abeyance – any means of putting such demands into effect could involve significant changes in the way the city was governed. In short, pressures for accountability quickly turned into demands for constitutional change. Inevitably, the council would try to refuse or resist or temporize. The struggle over whether the citizens could force magistrates to be held accountable for their actions thus emerged, in many cities, as a dangerous or even explosive issue. The issue of accountability always reflected the concerns of the citizens. The fourth type of issue more often – though not always – reflected the priorities of the council elite. Issues of this type had to do with autonomy, the capacity of cities to preserve and extend their freedom from outside interference. Of course there were situations in which virtually all of a city’s inhabitants might join in opposition to some outside threat. An armed force laying siege to the city could evoke a collective determination to save the community from attack or occupation. But autonomy issues were more often related to a perceived need to preserve the city’s rights, privileges and charters. As monarchs and territorial rulers strove to increase their administrative reach in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, they tried to chip away at the very privileges their predecessors had granted. Alarmed magistrates would depict such efforts as attacks on the well-being of the community as a whole. But there were always some citizens who suspected that the real threat was only to the magistrates’ own authority, for usually it was the magistrates, not the ordinary citizens, who had the most to fear from the extension of a ruler’s powers. Indeed, some

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citizens might look to the overlord as a positive counterweight to the magistrates. When dissatisfied with conditions in their community, a group of citizens might appeal right over the councilmen’s heads to the overlord or a court or some other external source of authority – even if, as often happened, the council insisted that the city’s prized autonomy forbade any such appeal. This was not, however, the only possible pattern. Sometimes urban elites calculated that collaborating with the ruler would yield material benefits that outweighed the drawbacks of diminished urban autonomy. Cooperative members of the local elite might be rewarded with economic rights or lucrative positions in the ruler’s bureaucracy. The citizens, in turn, might worry that this tendency toward more intimate cooperation between the municipal elite and the overlord could work against them: taxes might go up, say, or local protectionism might be dismantled. In such cases, it was the citizens who might agitate for the preservation of forms of autonomy to which the elites had become increasingly indifferent. In the city of Ghent, for example, in the early sixteenth century it was the citizens, not the magistrates, who took the initiative in trying to uphold the city’s privileges. In 1515, Ghent’s overlord had drawn up and deposited a grand decree limiting the city’s freedoms. The magistrates had accepted the restrictions, but in 1540 rebellious citizens seized the hated document, cut it up into hundreds of pieces, and paraded about the streets with scraps of the parchment stuck in their caps. For the citizens of Ghent, in the words of a contemporary observer, “loved and esteemed their privileges more than anything else.”7 In fact urban autonomy was never a universal good, like peace or fair weather or cheap bread. It was an instrument of power, and as such it was bound to be contested. It always could and often did become one of issues that pitted citizens against councils or councils against citizens in cities all across Europe. There were other issues, of course, which also energized urban politics, but these four areas – economics, religion, accountability and autonomy – produced by far the most frequent and contentious conflicts. The conflicts themselves, however, could assume many forms, and could be resolved in many different ways. Thus we must now turn from the roots of potential conflict to the actual forms of political action in the cities of early modern Europe.

4 Forms of political action

A phrase like “forms of political action” may have seemingly dry overtones – but in fact this concept takes us to the heart of urban politics in the early modern city. When the heads of a guild drafted a petition and submitted it respectfully to the city clerk to be presented at the next council meeting, they were engaged in a conventional form of political action. Yet when citizens rioted, sacked houses, occupied city halls or took mayors hostage, they were engaged in less stereotyped but scarcely less structured or significant forms of political action. Events rarely reached this stage, but the very fact that the repertory of available actions was so broad was in fact a major political instrument for both sides in any dispute. For any dispute to happen, however, there had to be two sides. The most characteristic pattern was a dispute between the city council on one side and some group of citizens on the other – for the division between council and citizenry was a universal structure of European towns. But this was by no means the only possible form of conflict. Many political conflicts, for example, took place along factional lines. Factional conflict was played out between clusters of families and their supporters. The essence of factions lay in the circumstance that leading families, roughly comparable in their social rank and political power, fell into a relationship of sustained, self-perpetuating hostility. The most famous of all factional quarrels in a European city was in fact an entirely fictional one: the enmity between “Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona” which created such wrenching obstacles for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. But factional conflict could be real enough. The most typical manifestation of political conflict between factions was the struggle to get the members of one side chosen for municipal offices and to make sure the other side was frozen out. Attempts to influence the outcome of elections, nominations and appointments thus became the most emblematic

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form of political action in faction-ridden communities. But these conflicts, like others, could spill over into open violence. In French and Italian cities, where factional leaders could often count on the obedience or loyalty of armed retainers, violent confrontations on city streets were by no means unknown. Yet what actually created such bitter enmity between clusters of families is often hard to determine. There might be some authentic differences in outlook, especially on religious grounds. Economic rivalries could also play a part. But often it was simply a matter of personal networks. In many cases, moreover, these connections extended beyond the city itself. The leading families in one faction might be clients or supporters of powerful members of the regional aristocracy, while their enemies might be linked in a similar way to a different set of nobles. Often aristocrats spent at least part of the year in town – and even when they were not counted among the citizens and would never have stooped to sitting on a city council, they might take a deep interest in municipal affairs. This was particularly the case where, as often happened in France, prominent nobles or their relatives or supporters lived in towns because they were serving as members of a royal judicial court. Italy was notorious for urban conflicts which, on closer inspection, turn out to have been little more than extensions of broader regional rivalries. In the 1480s, for example, the hostility between two factions in the north Italian city of Udine became so acute that sections of the town had to be chained off to members of the opposite side. Then, in 1511, there was a bloodbath in which supporters of one faction brutally slaughtered adherents of the other. Members of the municipal elite, as well as humble artisans, were deeply implicated in these conflicts – yet the parties in Udine were actually just offshoots of a much broader factional quarrel which had lasted for generations between two powerful groups of noblemen throughout the surrounding region.1 Yet the actual structure of factional allegiances in cities is often hard to trace. Factions did not play a formally recognized part in urban affairs, so even when there is clear evidence of a bitter conflict, modern historians may differ on who belonged to which factions – or whether the factions existed at all. Consider the case of Rye, a tiny town in south-eastern England, whose early modern history has been studied with remarkable thoroughness. There is no question that Rye experienced vigorously contested mayoral elections in the late sixteenth century or that one early seventeenth-century mayor, Thomas Hamon, was intensely disliked by

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many residents of the town. One historian links these facts to the existence of two political factions within the community, one led by butchers with increasingly strict religious views and the other led by brewers, including Hamon, with a much less devout outlook. Yet another historian, studying much the same evidence, concludes that there were no factions at all in Rye, and that if Hamon had enemies it was simply because of his illtempered personality and reputation for greed.2 In the seventeenth century, however, more and more towns in England showed clear signs of having factional divisions with a definite ideological basis. By the 1620s and 1630s, many towns were split between one faction whose leaders espoused Puritan religious views and another group whose members remained loyal to the established system of the Church of England. The English Revolution of the 1640s gave the Puritan factions control of the government in most towns, while the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 generally put the other side back in power. Even after the Restoration, however, factional rivalry continued in many towns, with those who favored the established church confronting dissenters who wanted to worship in their own way. By the end of the seventeenth century, many towns had permanent factional divisions, which echoed the split between Tories and Whigs on the national level. In the eighteenth century the intensity of religious conflict began at last to ebb, yet the division between the Tory and Whig factions – or, as they were now called, parties – persisted. In short, after a century during which the basis of factional identity in English towns had been strongly ideological, factions eventually reverted to being little more than groupings of individuals linked by personal networks and loyalties. But that scarcely diminished the intensity of factional allegiances or their capacity to inspire bitter conflicts.3 Though there is much evidence of factions in European towns, the exact role played by factional conflict in urban politics was often obscure. By contrast, the relationship between councils and citizens was one of the most transparent aspects of urban political life, for it was based on a constitutional reality that prevailed in every city. No doubt at times what appeared to be a conflict between the council members and the rest of the citizens was actually a factional conflict between one party which had gained control of the council and another that had not. Yet no matter how they came to power, once a group of men sat on the council their position was distinctly different from that of other citizens, and almost all political activity tended to involve some type of interaction between the council and the rest of the citizenry. This interaction could assume many forms, all of

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which were familiar to early modern town-dwellers – though not all of these forms were considered to be equally acceptable or legitimate. Actually only two forms of political action by the citizens were fully acceptable to the municipal elite. One was petitioning. The submission of petitions was, in fact, the most widespread and approved form of political activity in early modern Europe.4 Not all petitions were political, of course. Individual men and women were constantly commissioning private petitions to be submitted to the authorities on their behalf, asking for a tax remission, a city job, the right to establish residence, help in amassing a dowry or just about anything else that would make their lives more comfortable or bearable. Such petitions were a familiar part of the administrative routine with which all governments were perpetually occupied. But petitions were also submitted by or on behalf of groups or organizations – guilds, militia companies, religious communities, neighborhoods, or other assemblages of like-minded individuals in pursuit of some common goal. Sometimes there were specific occasions when it was customary for petitions to be drawn up. In Braunschweig, for example, the triennial election of “burgher captains” in each neighborhood was followed immediately by the drafting of a petition in which all of the residents’ grievances were listed for submission to the council. Anything could be mentioned in these petitions – there were complaints about poorly maintained streets or churches in need of repair, though the most important items invariably involved requests for lower municipal taxes and fees – and nobody could be punished for anything included in such a petition, no matter how outrageous.5 But this is not to say that town-dwellers normally had to wait for stated intervals to submit their petitions. Everywhere in Europe, the right enjoyed by individuals and groups to express their concerns in the form of a petition was recognized as a fundamental feature of urban politics. A group petition was by definition political, for the authorities always had to weigh the possible disadvantages of approving the request against the potential dangers of rejecting it. Anything worth asking for, after all, usually involved favoring one group to the detriment of another. Lower taxes for some people meant that others had to pay more. An economic monopoly for one trade diminished the earning potential for another. Higher wages for journeymen meant less income for masters. The recognition of a new religious community could undermine the confidence and financial stability of older ones. Of course, negatively affected groups were quick to submit counter-petitions with counter-arguments. In dealing

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with petitionary requests, then, the magistrates were never dipping into an ever-renewable well of benefits. They were deciding whether and how to reallocate available resources among various plausible contenders. Making such choices was never easy. Yet petitionary politics was the form of political action with which magistrates were most comfortable, for the petitions themselves reinforced the magistrates’ perception that they were the community’s ultimate arbiters and could deliberate and decide, at their own pace, on how to respond. A second form of political action was also acceptable to the magistrates. This was consultation with a significant body of citizens or even, if the town was small enough, with the entire male citizenry. Such consultations took place at times and under circumstances chosen by the magistrates themselves. In normal times most councilors were viscerally averse to any extension of political participation. But they were less averse to consulting the citizens at moments of high risk or danger to the community, when they hoped to diminish their own responsibility for what might turn out to be unfortunate choices by transferring part of the political liability to the citizens as a whole. Such consultation seems to have been particularly common in France, partly because many French cities already had a tradition of regular assemblies for electoral purposes. These electoral assemblies, of course, were expected to follow a firmly established script. But the whole male citizenry or some substantial group of citizens might also be convoked for other purposes if the need arose. We can observe how this worked, for example, in the northern French town of Châlons-sur-Marne during the tense epoch of the French Wars of Religion in the late sixteenth century. Châlons was a predominantly Catholic town with a substantial Protestant minority. Left to themselves, the councilors of Châlons would apparently have been willing to work out a policy of peaceful coexistence between the two religious communities, but they were constantly subjected to external pressure from powerful Protestant and Catholic armies. In 1577 the magistrates of Châlons were being pressed by Catholic leaders to have the city sign an oath of allegiance to the militant Catholic League. To stall for time, the council ordered each of the city’s twenty-four militia companies to send two or three representatives to a meeting to discuss the matter. The council refused to act without the deputies’ approval and the deputies refused to sign “unless the council signed first” – thus giving the magistrates an excuse to avoid taking action. In 1588, the same issue emerged anew, when

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the League again pressed the council of Châlons to declare its full allegiance to the Catholic cause. The council first called one meeting of vaguely identified “principal inhabitants,” then had the militia captains consult the members of their units, and finally summoned an assembly of 400 citizens. Officially, all of these meetings were held to ask whether the city should formally join the League – but the magistrates’ real purpose was to put off a final decision, and get some popular support for their delaying tactics.6 And it worked: eventually the national political situation shifted and the city was able to emerge from the critical months of 1588 without having allied itself irrevocably to a cause which it did not support. The normal form of consultation was to summon a gathering of male citizens, have some high official describe the issues to them, and call for a vocal decision or response. But occasionally the magistrates might fear the consequences of allowing too many citizens to gather physically in one place, or they might want to make sure that each citizen had been properly consulted. In such cases, the council might order a poll of all the citizens or householders. This was done, for example, in the German city of Ulm during the early stages of the Protestant Reformation. Public assemblies were a familiar event in Ulm, since all the citizens gathered once a year to swear a public oath to uphold the city’s laws. But the situation in 1530 was exceptionally grave. The magistrates wanted to adopt Protestantism and so did many citizens – but the city’s overlord, the Holy Roman Emperor, was adamantly opposed to this. To determine whether they could count on support for their intentions, the council conducted a formal poll of every guild member and all other male citizens. Almost all of the voting lists have survived, and they show that 1,865 men favored the Reformation, 243 opposed it and only one flatly refused to take a stand. Assured of broadbased approval, the council proceeded to abolish the Catholic mass in Ulm and introduce Protestant forms of worship.7 The poll in Ulm is particularly famous, but only because such complete results were preserved there. The event itself was by no means unique. The same technique was followed, for example – although for the opposite reason – in the French city of Troyes in 1563. Here the city council was eager to discourage any Protestant worship, despite a recent royal edict that would have permitted it to take place at least outside the city walls. Accordingly the magistrates ordered a house-by-house survey to ask inhabitants if they would support a petition to the king, opposing any Protestant worship in or near the city. It was a leading question, with predictable results – but some residents, including a few Catholics, spoke

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out in favor of the Protestants.8 Much as the authorities might hope to manipulate consultations for their own purposes, in Troyes, as elsewhere, citizens assumed that when they were consulted their authentic opinions were being solicited. Consultation of the citizens was about as much participation as the authorities readily conceded. But it by no means represented the limit of the citizens’ own repertory of political action. For there were many forms of political action that they undertook on their own initiative when their aims were being thwarted. Ultimately, of course, they might even turn to violence. But this rarely happened until they had exhausted or attempted other available strategies. One strategy was to pressure or force the elite to enter into a process of negotiation. When petitions and consultations had failed to satisfy their concerns, the citizens might appoint a committee or delegation of spokesmen to present their demands to the magistrates and negotiate on their behalf. Of course, in looking for spokesmen they often turned to the men who already held recognized positions in the community as intermediaries between ordinary citizens and councils: guild leaders, militia captains, or members of the large council. Such men often enjoyed particular credibility with the magistrates and thus might be particularly effective in negotiations. But on the other hand they might be regarded as being too compromised to really speak for the citizens. After all, members of the large council were sometimes little more than magistrates-inwaiting, patiently hoping to be chosen to fill some future vacancy on the small council. The heads of the guilds were often the richest members of their trade, who might be insensitive to the needs of poorer masters. Militia captains may have gained too much of a taste for command. So in many cases the aggrieved citizens would instead appoint an ad hoc deputation or committee of previously obscure men to speak on their behalf. As ever, the magistrates then faced two choices. They could reject the legitimacy of these delegations, hoping to intimidate the citizens but running the risk of heightening tensions. Or they could agree to negotiate. This process was particularly common in Germany, where the formation of ad hoc burgher committees was a familiar part of the urban political repertory.9 To strengthen the committee’s hand and to prevent backsliding among nervous supporters, citizens might be asked to sign a document authorizing the delegates to negotiate on their behalf. Usually the committee was disbanded either when its objectives were achieved or when the negotiations collapsed. In some cases, however, the

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entrenchment of the committee itself as a new, permanent part of the system of municipal government would emerge as one of the citizens’ demands. This is because often the specific issues that had triggered the unrest were superseded by more fundamental constitutional issues as citizens insisted on permanent means to hold the magistrates more accountable. Events in the great north German port city of Lübeck in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century illustrate this pattern – though of course the sequence of events there, like all political events, had some unique twists.10 The trouble started in the late 1590s, when the city’s normally robust Baltic trade had been crippled by a maritime war between two claimants for the throne of Sweden. In 1598, led by angry merchants, a group of citizens complained that the council had mismanaged its relations with the belligerents, and, by doing so, had only worsened the city’s economic woes. So they asked the council to summon the entire citizenry for a grand consultation. The council instead offered to meet with a deputation of citizens. But this, it turned out, was a tactical error – for, by making this suggestion, the council had instantly conferred political legitimacy on a group which otherwise would have struggled for recognition. The citizens quickly set up a committee of almost seventy members, and this committee in turn proceeded to draw up a grand list of all the citizens’ complaints. There were sixty-four items on the list, including some which in normal times would never have become significant issues: church officials were charging unreasonable fees, schools were poorly run, more watchmen were needed to patrol the streets. But most of the complaints were connected with economic problems and municipal finances. The response of the council members was far from diplomatic. Some were heard to say that by making such complaints, the citizens were violating their civic oath. This instantly raised the dispute to the constitutional level – for the citizens argued that they had sworn only an oath of loyalty to the city, not an oath of obedience to the council. The multiple disputes simmered on. Throughout 1600 and 1601, statements and counter-statements were drafted and exchanged. Eventually, the city’s overlord, the Holy Roman Emperor, got wind of the dispute and ordered that the citizens’ committee should be disbanded and all the issues referred to him. This alarmed citizens and councilmen alike, who decided that patching things up between themselves might be safer than letting the Emperor interfere. By 1605 a set of compromises had been worked out, the

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committee was disbanded, the citizens agreed to swear a new, slightly reworded oath, and the council promised, in writing, to treat the citizens forevermore with “good and fatherly affection.” And so they did – until new troubles flared up half a century later. The fact that the Holy Roman Emperor wanted to settle the conflicts in Lübeck was entirely typical: overlords routinely involved themselves in local affairs, issuing or denying charters, dismissing magistrates who displeased them, appointing more amenable ones in their place, and instructing councils and citizens alike about what to do. What made the case of Lübeck unusual was only that in this case both parties to the local dispute tried to avoid involving the Emperor. For it was entirely customary for at least one side in a conflict to turn to outside help in the hope of tipping the political balance in its favor. Such attempts, broadly speaking, fell into the category of appeals to external authority. These normally involved turning for assistance to the city’s overlord or some other outside power which had the moral or military authority to command obedience in the city. But it could also take the form of litigation, in which the issues in dispute were submitted to judicial resolution in some court whose authority was higher than that of the city council. Both parties to a dispute could appeal or litigate, and often both did. But there were always risks involved as well. Magistrates knew that the very act of requesting some outside intervention could have the effect of diminishing the city’s political autonomy. So when city councils looked for outside help, it was normally because they or their agents were confident that in this case the result would be some charter or privilege that reaffirmed or strengthened their control. Aggrieved citizens usually had less to lose. So they were often eager to go over the magistrates’ heads and seek outside help. But if the help was not forthcoming, they might face reprisals from the council for having attempted to circumvent its authority. In the 1660s a typical series of disputes broke out in the city of Tallinn in Estonia, which in those days was known as Reval and belonged to the kingdom of Sweden. The main lines of dispute were between craftsmen, whose interests were articulated by their guilds, and the city council, which was completely dominated by merchants. In 1659, the guilds became concerned that the city council was trying to make admission to new craft masterships too easy – exactly the kind of thing that craft masters always hated. When the council proved unresponsive to their concerns, the guilds submitted an appeal to the city’s overlord, the king of Sweden. At first this appeared to be a tactical error: the king’s officials only provided a vague

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promise to protect the craftsmen’s traditional rights, while the council harshly reprimanded the guilds for appealing over their heads and threatened to get revenge by making it even easier for new masters to join the crafts. But then the council overreached itself. In 1662 the magistrates ordered some soldiers to disperse an anti-council demonstration. They also sent the craftsmen’s chief spokesman, a shoemaker named Hans Kemmerer, into exile. But as soon as Kemmerer was banished he sailed to Stockholm to make a direct appeal to the royal council. Once again, the Crown’s response was equivocal. The magistrates’ right to make new admissions policies was upheld – but their right to banish Kemmerer was not, and the shoemaker triumphantly returned. In 1670 the civic elite itself fell into discord, as those merchants who did not belong to the city council accused those who did of financial mismanagement. Again the craftsmen leapt at this opportunity to pursue their own interests, and formulated a long list of economic and political aims. Once again they appealed to the king, and this time many of their demands were met.11 Appeals for intervention were by no means directed only to a city’s overlord. In fact both parties to a dispute would turn for help wherever they thought they could find it. Each side might commission lawyers to burrow through precedents and file briefs with any court that might issue a useful decision or injunction. Letters would be dispatched to royal councils, powerful grandees, regional magnates or other possible sympathizers. When the council and citizens of the German town of Wetzlar fell into discord in 1612–15, for example, the citizens turned for support both to the city’s formal overlord, the Holy Roman Emperor, and to the city’s “protective lord,” the landgrave of the nearby territory of Hessen–Darmstadt. Meanwhile the council submitted its case to one of the supreme courts of the Holy Roman Empire, while also trying to drum up support from the councils of other German cities.12 Nobody felt that their own side should be inhibited by respect for some formal chain of political authority – though everyone thought that the other side should be. Great Yarmouth was typical of countless English towns in the 1620s and 1630s, in which the central issue that divided the community was religious – the split between those regarded as Puritans on the one side and conformist members of the Church of England on the other. By the late 1620s the Puritans were clearly dominant in the town’s assembly, the 72member city council. The Puritans’ predominance had been reinforced by the partial disgrace of the leading anti-Puritan politician, the herring merchant Benjamin Cooper, an alderman and former Member of

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Parliament, who was found to have pocketed funds entrusted to him for repair of the city’s harbor facilities. But Cooper also had some powerful resources, since he was known and liked at the royal court – and King Charles I was always sympathetic to any foe of the Puritans. When the assembly tried to dismiss some of Cooper’s friends from their positions as aldermen, they immediately petitioned the king to order their reinstatement – which he did. In 1629, Cooper’s group went even further, petitioning the king to revise the city’s charter and restructure the city government in a way that would give them more power. But the Yarmouth Puritans fought back: when it appeared that the king was about to issue a new charter, they took advantage of their own connections at court to submit a successful counter-petition. The new charter was blocked. But the Puritans then overplayed their hand by dismissing Cooper outright from his position as alderman. Now it was Cooper’s turn to petition the king again – and the king did indeed order his reinstatement.13 Maneuvering of this sort was a constant feature of urban politics all over Europe. Parties to a dispute repeatedly tried to secure intervention from overlords and other powerful outsiders. Rulers and their advisers, in turn, were deeply interested in the internal politics of cities. In 1683 the king of Sweden personally chaired seven meetings, at which misconduct by the mayor of Tallinn was on the agenda.14 Rulers were well aware of who led which factions, and they showed little hesitation in revoking or rewriting the charters that they or their ancestors had granted in order to restructure governments and put more amenable people into power. However, the local leaders might actually support the rulers in this. Princely courts thrived on information and bribes, and municipal politicians gladly supplied both. Concerns about preserving the city’s longterm autonomy were forgotten in the scramble for short-term gains. But there was a price for the cities – each time the prince issued a new charter or reshuffled the magistracy, he reasserted his authority as the ultimate arbiter of the city’s political life. It was considerations like these that caused both sides in early seventeenth-century Lübeck to try to avoid intervention by their overlord. Often, however, participants in urban conflicts made other choices. There was, of course, yet another cluster of resources available to those engaged in urban politics: demonstrations, public protest and violence. These three forms of behavior, of course, had a way of shading into each other. A demonstration might remain only that – a gathering of angry inhabitants who would sullenly disperse when commanded to do so by the

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mayor or forced to do so by a hastily summoned troop of soldiers. But the mayor’s voice was not always heeded and soldiers were not always at hand. What started as a protest always had the potential to turn violent – and often it did. Decades of research on patterns of collective violence in early modern Europe have shown that even when public protest did get rough the violence was rarely indiscriminate. Urban protesters chose their targets carefully, venting their resentment specifically against those whom they held accountable for some specific misdeed or misfortune. Some of this violence was retributive: its purpose was to kill, harm or humiliate the person or small group of people held responsible for some outrage.15 In other cases the use of force was meant to extract specific concessions: people in positions of power would be held hostage or threatened with violence until they agreed to resign or reduce taxes or otherwise satisfy the demands of their opponents. Of course things sometimes got out of hand. European cities were not immune to episodes of large-scale violence. But real massacres could only be carried out by large groups of armed men, acting at the instigation of powerful people who ordered or sanctioned mass murder. The laws of war permitted soldiers to plunder a city which refused to surrender and thus had to be taken by force, and this could easily turn into a massacre of the inhabitants. But such episodes were rare, precisely because city fathers almost always agreed to surrender rather than fight to the bitter end. There were also cases in which local leaders orchestrated a massacre of their fellow-inhabitants. In the French city of Romans, for example, after months of popular protest both in the city and in the surrounding countryside, the local elite took advantage of the frenzied disorder that prevailed during the Mardi Gras festivities of 1580 to instigate a bloodthirsty repression of their opponents.16 Ordinary town-dwellers rarely commanded the resources to do likewise and often wouldn’t have wanted to. But they did protest with gusto. Sometimes the forms of protest were surreptitious. In Rome it was traditional for unsigned satirical broadsides to be affixed to an ancient statue known as Pasquino, and the term “pasquinade” or “pasquil” soon came to be used for similar placards in cities all over Europe.17 Naturally the authorities would try to track down and punish the authors of unsigned broadsides, graffiti or hostile notes tacked on to door-posts. But they were far more unsettled by any type of public demonstration.

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A demonstration could be an extension or by-product of entirely legitimate forms of political discourse. Instead of merely entrusting a petition to some clerk or secretary, the signatories might appear en masse to present it. Or the authorities who wanted to consult the inhabitants might summon an assembly over which they then lost control. But usually a public protest erupted spontaneously when some event or announcement triggered a burst of anger among the people, who decided on the spot to take some action that would express their outrage. This is what happened, for example, in the English town of Nottingham in 1682. For two years the community had been riven by tensions between the local Tories, who held most of the seats on the city council, and the Whigs, who were struggling to gain control of the government. Fearing that the existing electoral system eventually might allow the Whigs to triumph, the Tory majority on the council voted to “surrender” the city’s existing charter and asked the king to issue a new one that would name only Tories as members of the council. This in turn would stack the decks in their favor in any new elections. The king was cooperative, and on the day that the new charter arrived the mayor announced that elections would be held under the new system. Immediately, however, a huge crowd of the mayor’s opponents marched to the city hall; chanting “no new charter, no new charter,” they seized the town records, forced the mayor to leave the premises and held an election under the old rules – leading, not surprisingly, to a Whig victory. But the mayor promptly held counterelections, which his side won. For a while Nottingham actually had two rival councils, each of which claimed to be the true government – until royal officials intervened by arresting the Whig leaders and confirming the Tory victory.18 But protests were not always directed against mayors, council members or other members of the civic elite. The two situations which most frequently triggered protest demonstrations were food shortages and new taxes, and local magistrates were not necessarily held responsible for these circumstances – though they might be. If merchants, for example, sold grain outside the city while bread prices were soaring at home, they or their homes might be the targets of attack – but if people thought the city’s magistrates could have taken timely action to prevent the grain from being exported, the anger might be directed against them instead. Old, familiar taxes were paid with scarcely a murmur, but new taxes were a constant irritant, especially if, as often seemed to happen, they were imposed in times of economic distress. Yet here, too, the public could be

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highly selective in attaching blame. A recurrent scenario in French towns of the seventeenth century involved attacks on specific individuals who were associated with the introduction of some new form of taxation. The root cause of all this was the way that the Crown financed the seemingly endless cycle of wars in which France was engaged. Typically the king would secure funds from a financier, who was then granted the “farm” on a particular tax, which his agents would have to collect. As soon as the details of this new imposition became known, the tax-farmer or his agents might face an outburst of public wrath: a crowd might gather to sack their houses, kill the inhabitants, and even mutilate their corpses. The local magistrates would normally not be attacked, but their position was agonizing nonetheless. If they called up the city militia or took other measures to suppress the disorder, the crowd might shift its focus and start attacking them. But if, on the other hand, they let the riot run its course, they would later have to account to the king for their failure to maintain order. Not only the rioters but the magistrates themselves might be punished, and royal officials would have a welcome opportunity to intervene once again in the community’s affairs.19 Of course this pattern was not confined to France. The same type of events, for example, unfolded in 1632 in the town of Bilbao in northern Spain. The introduction of a new tax on salt by the Spanish Crown in 1631 created unrest throughout the Basque province of Vizcaya, whose traditional privileges seemed to forbid any such imposition. But the explosion of unrest in Bilbao itself only occurred when, after some hesitation, royal officials in the city announced that the price of salt was about to be lowered – something the inhabitants correctly interpreted as an attempt to sweeten the pill for the actual introduction of the hated tax. This triggered a massive riot in the city. The royal proclamation was burnt in the central square, the salt depots were plundered, and for three days a mob hunted down royal officials and holders of government contracts, looting their houses and destroying their furniture and records. Eventually, municipal notables came to be attacked as well, and they and their wives were showered with insults and abuse. The disorder simmered on for almost two years before the royal authorities finally organized troops to arrest the ringleaders and suppress the revolt.20 Even when they were not in fact the intended targets, municipal leaders could hardly side with the rioters – so eventually, as in Bilbao, they too might come to be seen as the enemy. But there were also situations in which the council was identified as the target from the very beginning.

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This was the norm, of course, when it was the council’s own policies which had stimulated public outrage. It was rare, however, that a direct attack on the magistrates would be the first manifestation of public anger. More often this would come as the culmination of a cycle of political interaction, in which petitions had been ignored, negotiations had failed, or attempts to secure help from outside had been unavailing. At that point an attack on the city hall might seem to be in order. The council members might be driven out – or, as happened repeatedly in seventeenth-century Germany, they might be locked into their meeting chamber or taken hostage until either they resigned or they gave way to popular demands.21 All such actions, of course, raised the stakes for the participants. In the short term the protesters would almost always succeed: civic authorities rarely commanded the force necessary to crush a popular uprising on the spot. In most cities the main armed force was the civic militia – whose members, after all, were ordinary citizens who might be highly sympathetic to the rioters’ demands. A short riot or a single act of violence might lead within hours to concessions that reams of petitions or months of negotiations had failed to achieve. Sometimes the gains were consolidated and a new way of doing things was entrenched: a hated tax was permanently revoked or a committee to inspect the council’s activities became a permanent fixture. But the risk was high, for concessions achieved by force were always suspect. The victims of coercion might call for help from outside – or the help might be provided unbidden. Within days or weeks an armed force might appear at the city gates, sent by the city’s own overlord or by some regional prince or magnate in order to punish the ringleaders and restore the status quo – or not even that, for such actions routinely provided princes with the perfect opportunity to impose their own will on a community. New princely officials might be appointed, permanent garrisons installed, citadels erected. Violent protest, in short, could be the most effective form of political action in the early modern city – but it could also be the most counter-productive.

5 Escalation and intervention

The various forms of political action were the means by which various groups in cities tried to settle issues or resolve problems. But when problems were not quickly and effectively resolved, a city might be plunged into a prolonged political crisis. The political situation would undergo a cycle of escalation, in which the issues kept expanding and the parties kept resorting to more and more extreme forms of political action. Generally, in such cases, only intervention by some higher political authority could successfully resolve thae crisis. Of course each situation unfolded in its own distinct way, yet the pattern of crisis politics in early modern cities had some strikingly uniform elements. The most useful way to appreciate this may be to begin by looking at a small number of well-studied cases in some detail. The four examples we will explore all took place during precisely the same period: the opening decades of the seventeenth century. The inhabitants of each of these towns had scant knowledge of or interest in what was happening in other cities. Yet because of the structural similarities among European towns, the actual experience of urban politics in these cases, and many others, really had much in common. The basic issues in early seventeenth-century Marseille were economic.1 These issues emerged in the aftermath of the Wars of Religion which had thrown all of France into upheaval between the 1560s and the 1590s. By 1600, the wars were over and the religious issues had, at least temporarily, been resolved, but cities all over France confronted problems that had been generated by decades of warfare. In Marseille these problems had to do with the huge debts that the city government had contracted in the early 1590s, when it was controlled by the militant Catholic League. The League was gone, but the debts were not.

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There were people in Marseille who wanted the debts repaid. Not surprisingly, this group included local merchants who had been pressured to advance loans to the city government during the League’s ascendancy. In 1598, the city council carefully worked out a plan to pay off the debts. This could only be done, however, by imposing new taxes. There would be a property tax on the landed estates owned by inhabitants of Marseille outside the city. There would also be a flat tax on the assets held by merchants within the city. And there would be a new indirect tax on flour, which all consumers would have to pay. Of course people objected. Why should the city even have to honor debts that were contracted when it was under the control of a tyrannical and now discredited regime? Soon a spokesman for this point of view emerged: Louis de Cabre, sieur de Roquevaire. Like many political leaders in Marseille, he was of high social status – but his support came largely from ordinary citizens who resented the idea of a tax on an indispensable consumer product like flour just to repay prosperous merchants who had made unwise loans. Every fall, members of the council of Marseille elected the four main municipal officials, the consuls, for the following year. In 1602, recognizing the extent of popular support that Roquevaire enjoyed, the council decided to give him a taste of responsibility by electing him as first consul. No sooner was he installed than reports began to circulate that he would use his new power to cancel the flour tax. This infuriated the merchants. But their protests in turn stimulated a huge counter-movement: in January 1603 a crowd estimated at 5,000 people gathered at the city hall to show their support for canceling the tax. The measure was carried. But consuls served for only a year. The next year Roquevaire was out of office and his successor tried to work out a compromise. By now, however, politics in Marseille was turning into a factional struggle between Roquevaire’s supporters and his enemies. Membership in each faction was based partly on networks of family, friendship and personal obligation. But, as René Pillorget’s research has shown, some of the factional allegiances were also rooted in economic differences. Roquevaire drew support not only from ordinary citizens who resented the proposed flour tax, but also from prosperous rentiers whose wealth was based largely on land ownership rather than commerce. By contrast, his enemies – referred to awkwardly but revealingly as “the party opposed to that of sieur de Roquevaire” – included most of the local merchants who, having made loans to the city in the 1590s, were still determined to get their debts repaid.2

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In November 1604 the Roquevaire party created disturbances that made it impossible for new municipal elections to be held. But by now, the quarrels had attracted the attention of the king’s representative in the region, the governor of Provence. This mighty official, the duke of Guise, intervened by appointing new consuls. These men turned out to be partisans of Roquevaire, and they paved the way for more men of their party to succeed them as consuls when elections were finally held again in 1606. Though their party had come to power by opposing taxes, these men promptly started to impose a new, entirely different, tax to cover the cost of dredging the silted port of Marseille. Rumors spread that Roquevaire himself had obtained a contract to farm the tax, meaning that he would skim off some tidy profits for himself. New tumults ensued, and once again royal officials intervened: a new edict ordered that the elections scheduled for 1607 should be postponed until the duke of Guise could come to Marseille in person to preside over them. To the Roquevaire faction, this was an obvious ploy to get them out of power. So now a crowd invaded the city hall to demand that the elections be held on schedule. Bowing to this classic form of pressure, the council promptly elected four Roquevairians as consuls and sent Roquevaire himself to Paris to explain things to the king’s officials. But the ploy failed. Arriving in the city a few weeks later, the duke of Guise immediately reshuffled the consulate and put men of the other faction into office. Of course the old issue of the debts from the 1590s still had not been resolved. The new consuls again tried to work out a compromise, but the Roquevaire faction continued to oppose any concessions. By now Roquevaire himself was fading from the scene: at one point he was banished from Marseille, and by the time he came back his role as leader had been usurped by another ambitious politician, Barthélemy de Valbelle. Apparently more diplomatic than his predecessor, Valbelle seems to have persuaded the duke of Guise and other royal officials that he could work harmoniously with them. Accordingly, they created no obstacles when members of this faction regained control of the key municipal offices in 1610. Now at last a compromise was worked out and even confirmed by a royal decree: most of the old debts would be paid, the land tax and merchant tax would be levied, but the hated flour tax would be dropped. After a decade of bitter conflict, tensions abated and political life in Marseille went back to normal. Valbelle remained the most influential man in the city, working smoothly with the royal officials until his death – after which his nephew stepped into the role.

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Our next example concerns the Dutch city of Utrecht. 3 The crisis there began with dramatic suddenness. One day in January 1610 the city’s eight militia companies staged a coup d’état. Thousands of armed militiamen demonstrated in the streets of the city, demanding that members of the city council resign. Faced with overwhelming force, the councilors quickly did so. The militia captains chose a new council. But such events always have a prehistory. In Utrecht it was long. In the late Middle Ages, the guilds in Utrecht had played a major part in choosing members of the city council. But in 1528 the city’s overlord, the Emperor Charles V, had restructured the city’s constitution, reducing the guilds to mere trade associations, and insisting that he or his representative would name the city councilors. This was a standard policy of Charles V – one he would later repeat in dozens of south German cities over which he was the immediate overlord.4 His intention was to strengthen the role of patrician elements in urban government. But in the case of Utrecht, this was only a partial success. The civic militia companies quickly filled the political vacuum and their captains came to play a recognized role as spokesmen for the ordinary citizens. By the early seventeenth century, as Benjamin Kaplan shows in his careful study of these events, much had changed in Utrecht. In the long war of independence against Charles’ son Philip II of Spain, the northern Netherlands had broken away from allegiance to the Habsburg monarchy. Like other Dutch cities, Utrecht no longer had an overlord of the old stripe. But it was still deeply influenced by external authorities. Three separate political structures – the provincial body known as the States of Utrecht, the States General of the northern Netherlands, and the princely family of Orange which had led the fight against Spain – all claimed some degree of authority over the city. Utrecht’s own municipal government was highly patrician in its structure. Members of the provincial gentry, who divided their time between Utrecht and their country estates, held many seats on the city council. But the militia captains still strove to represent the voices of the craftsmen and other humbler citizens. By 1610 Utrecht had also experienced a long cycle of religious tension. Like most cities in the northern Netherlands, Utrecht had become predominantly Calvinist during the struggle against the Catholic king of Spain. For decades the city had experienced conflicts between highly disciplined orthodox Calvinists and a more tolerant “libertine” group. By the early seventeenth century, however, the orthodox group was clearly predominant. The issues at stake in 1610 were primarily economic and

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political. Ordinary craftsmen resented the divided loyalties shown by members of the gentry who sat on the city council, yet encouraged rural craftsmen to operate in the countryside as competitors to the city’s own artisans. They objected to the tax exemptions which the members of the gentry enjoyed and the fact that gentry councilmen also sat in the provincial States. All these problems, they thought, could be solved if representatives of the ordinary citizens once again chose the magistrates, as they had before 1528. They knew that it would be hard to return to the guild-based constitution of the late Middle Ages, but at least the militia captains should henceforth choose the magistrates. This they now did. After forcing the old councilmen to resign, the militia captains selected replacements. But it was unrealistic to think that the higher authorities would accept this state of affairs. The States of Utrecht refused to recognize the new regime. The States General sent a commission to investigate. There was even some talk of mediation and compromise – but not for long. Prince Frederick Henry of Orange soon appeared with forty companies of soldiers. The troops were quartered in the town, and within weeks the garrison commander had disbanded the new council and restored the old one. The former procedures for choosing magistrates were restored and the militia companies were placed firmly under the council’s control. Only the economic grievances of the citizens received any consideration. In the area surrounding Utrecht, most rural industries were outlawed. But the prohibition was not universal: breweries in the countryside could continue to function. The citizens had lost. But resentments bubbled on. A new target was found in the city’s ministers, who had all condemned the coup d’état. Large numbers of citizens now expressed their anger by boycotting the ministers’ services and worshipping on their own. In December 1610, seventeen men attempted another coup. But this one was rapidly crushed, and the ringleaders were banished. The gentry-dominated city council, supported by powerful sources of authority outside the community, remained firmly in charge. The political upheaval that shook the city of La Rochelle in 1613 and 1614 remained almost unknown to historians until recently, when the details were reconstructed by an American historian.5 La Rochelle is famous as a bastion of French Protestantism, but what was at stake in this revolt was not religion. Kevin Robbins’ research makes clear that the central issue was accountability.

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La Rochelle was, like Marseille, a major French port, but the events there actually had more in common with the contemporaneous disturbances in Utrecht. In both cities, the militia companies played a central role in overthrowing the established council. Yet in La Rochelle the new system of government lasted longer – for fourteen years – before being overthrown by external forces. La Rochelle’s political leaders were proud of the city’s accumulated political privileges, which had been granted not only by generations of French kings but also by the English kings who had ruled western France during part of the later Middle Ages. A dramatic ritual gave expression to the importance of these privileges: whenever a king of France visited La Rochelle, he found a silk ribbon stretched across the city gate and only after he promised to reaffirm the city’s charters would the ribbon be cut so that he could enter. But silk ribbons hardly daunted French kings in the sixteenth century. In 1535, after arguing for years with the city about tardy tax payments, Francis I simply dissolved the 100-man city council and replaced it with twenty hand-picked échevins. Only after years of negotiation was the old council restored. When Charles IX visited La Rochelle in 1563, his constable contemptuously cut the silk ribbon with his sword. The king then entered the city and once again dismissed the council – though this time the royal officials agreed to restore the old system just a few months later. The old struggle to assert the city’s autonomy eventually became tangled up in the French Wars of Religion. La Rochelle rapidly became a hotbed of Calvinism, and barely survived a siege by Catholic forces in 1573. But when the wars ended in the 1590s, the city found itself embroiled in internal tensions. For years, the council elite had striven to consolidate its already great powers. In most cities at least a trickle of newcomers could expect to be named to seats on the city council, but in La Rochelle this was circumvented by the practice of having council members resign their seats in favor of younger relatives. As elsewhere, citizens in La Rochelle looked to their militia companies for ersatz leadership – but in 1598 the council dismissed the captains of the city’s eight militia companies and replaced them with members of the council itself. A few months later, council members literally slammed the door on a delegation which the citizens had appointed to present their views. By 1613 the citizens had had enough. That April they appointed a committee of eight representatives to formulate and present their views. The committee articulated a series of classic accountability demands. The

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system by which councilmen chose their own successors should be ended and the militia companies should nominate candidates to fill any new vacancies on the council. Representatives of the citizens should be allowed to sit in on council meetings. Council minutes should be made public. So should all letters sent or received by the council. The council’s initial response to these demands was inept. The mayor attempted to arrest a citizen leader, but an angry crowd forced the mayor to release him. The citizens had already appealed to Paris, asking the royal council for support. Now the city council did likewise. But meanwhile events in La Rochelle had escalated. In February 1614, armed citizens, backed by the militia companies, seized control of the two crucial towers in the city’s network of fortifications and changed the locks. Reluctantly the council agreed to enter into negotiations. In March an edict finally arrived from Paris, ordering the citizens to give up control of the towers and obey their magistrates. But when the mayor sent a sergeant out to proclaim the edict, the militia companies seized control of all the key streets of the city. The council now conceded some of the citizens’ demands. But the concessions were insincere. In August the mayor and his friends on the council commandeered the few soldiers still loyal to them and made one last attempt to crack down on the rebel citizens. A few hours of street fighting ensued. Backed up by the militia companies, the citizens won a total victory. Within days they had arrested sixty of their main opponents and dumped them into dungeons, where they were kept for almost a year. The city government was restructured. As usual in such cases, this was done not by abolishing old institutions but by adding new ones. The city council continued to exist, but vacancies were filled by the citizens’ nominees – and before the council could act, it had to consult five procureurs representing the five parishes as well as a new citizens’ council with forty-eight members. On certain occasions, ninety-six representatives of the militia companies also had to be consulted. The system was unwieldy, but the citizens had some recognized leaders who called the shots. Most of these leaders were prosperous merchants – the kind of men who, in cities with a more open form of government, could have expected in due course to get appointed to the city council. In La Rochelle, with its tight, unresponsive council, they had to fight for power. They achieved it, and for fourteen years they ran the city. But the citizens’ regime was doomed. La Rochelle’s status as a Protestant city was protected by the Edict of Nantes which had brought the

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French Wars of Religion to a definitive end in 1598. But by the 1620s the French king and his advisers were looking for ways to diminish Protestant power. La Rochelle, with its highly suspect form of local government, was an inviting target. The traditional elites of La Rochelle, for all their obsessive concern with civic autonomy, had always known exactly when it was politic to bend to the royal will. The new leaders lacked such sophisticated judgment. They resisted any intrusions by royal officials and threw themselves unreservedly into the forefront of the Protestant cause. In 1627 a royal army commanded by the king’s own chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, laid siege to La Rochelle. Sixteen months later the city had to surrender. La Rochelle’s cherished autonomy was completely destroyed: the city council was abolished along with the new bodies set up in 1614, the city walls were razed, and the militia companies were disbanded. New municipal institutions were established and, though La Rochelle’s population was still largely Protestant, positions in the city government were now packed with Catholics. The siege of La Rochelle is among the most famous events in seventeenth-century French history, but the city’s political evolution before and after the siege is not. We can see, however, that La Rochelle fits squarely into the pattern of cities where citizens resorted to force to secure greater accountability from the city government. Even where citizens achieved this goal, however, the new regimes they introduced rarely became permanent. What made the case of La Rochelle remarkable is not that the new system eventually ended, but that it lasted for as long as it did. In the great German city of Frankfurt am Main, the end came much more quickly. The upheavals in Frankfurt lasted for little over two years, from 1612 to 1614. But, during this period, events in Frankfurt attracted attention all over Europe – and they have continued to fascinate historians ever since.6 One of the main issues in Frankfurt was accountability. Frankfurt was ruled, like Nuremberg, by a city council on which most of the seats were reserved for members of an established group of patrician families. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were years of high prices and economic distress in Frankfurt. Many citizens felt that the council was completely indifferent to their plight, and a number of council members were also suspected of financial dishonesty. Yet there was also a second issue in Frankfurt. Of the city’s 20,000 inhabitants, about 2,000 were Jews, all of them confined to living in one ghetto neighborhood. As was typically the case in early modern Europe, the Christian inhabitants of Frankfurt

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harbored a deep-seated prejudice against the members of this religious minority. The patricians had granted residential rights to the Jews, many of whom provided useful financial services to the city government. The Jews’ right to live in Frankfurt was also endorsed by the city’s overlord, the Holy Roman Emperor. But ordinary citizens, many of whom knew the Jews only in their capacity as moneylenders, were increasingly hostile to the Jewish presence. The political crisis in Frankfurt was triggered by what should have been a festive occasion: the ceremonies surrounding the election of a new Holy Roman Emperor by seven great German princes in 1612. Before the princes arrived, the council issued a routine decree warning the citizens not to disturb or interfere with the ceremonies, lest the city and its inhabitants lose their traditional rights and privileges. This familiar announcement had an unexpected result: a group of citizens began to ask what exactly their privileges were. The petition that the citizens drafted reflected both their anger at the secretive practices of the patricians and their scornful hostility toward the Jews: No citizen knows or can find out just where these oft-mentioned age-old privileges are located or what, in particular, they encompass .... Even the Jews themselves here in Frankfurt not only have their alleged privileges but know how to exploit them by day and night against the citizens and then boast of it. Only the poor citizenry – who year after year support and preserve the Jews (who with their wives and children and servants number in the thousands) amidst the groans of the Christian citizenry and to the irremediable disadvantage of the citizens and their wives and children – only they are not supposed to know what their civic freedoms and privileges are.7 The citizens proceeded to make specific demands. The number of Jews in Frankfurt should be reduced and those who remained should lend money at much lower interest rates. A public grain market should be established. Also the patricians should make public the contents of all of the city’s charters and privileges. The usual scenario prevailed. The council refused to meet the demands. The citizens held mass meetings and formed a committee to represent their interests. Longer petitions were drafted, with more demands. Finally, the council came up with a strategy. Members of the citizens’ committee were summoned to the city hall and shown a huge bunch of keys – the keys to the church tower in which the charters were kept. The citizens were invited

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to take the keys – but they were warned that as soon as they did so, the council would resign en masse and the citizens’ committee would have to take full responsibility for running the city. This theatrical offer had exactly the intended effect, at least in the short term: the citizens nervously declined the offer. But they continued to submit petitions and broaden their demands. In addition to the charters, they wanted to see the financial records. They also wanted the city council opened up to new members. The citizens’ movement enjoyed wide support, from craftsmen and merchants alike. The acknowledged leader was Vincenz Fettmilch, a forceful pastry-baker who hated both Jews and patricians with equal fervor. The city’s overlord, the newly elected Holy Roman Emperor, soon intervened by appointing two great princes as commissioners with a mandate to investigate conditions in Frankfurt and propose a solution. In December 1612, the commissioners announced a settlement that appeared, at first glance, to concede many of the citizens’ demands. Eighteen new members were added to the council. Committees were named to study the charters and financial books. Unpopular taxes and tolls were reduced. But despite its seventy-one clauses, the settlement failed to resolve a number of key issues, including the future status of the Jews. Loopholes in the wording of the settlement encouraged the council to ignore its terms. A year of wrangling culminated in yet another settlement which again resolved nothing. But, by early 1614, the citizens had come across what they considered clear evidence of the council’s financial misconduct. In May a group of outraged citizens finally seized the city hall and locked the old members of the council into their meeting chamber for three days until they resigned and left the city. The eighteen new councilmen, together with the committee headed by Fettmilch, now governed Frankfurt. The city’s overlord, the Emperor, saw the forced resignation and expulsion of the council members as a challenge to his own authority. An imperial decree commanded citizens of Frankfurt to renounce allegiance to the citizens’ movement and submit to proper authority. At this point, the citizens directed their anger toward another target: the Jews. The Jewish ghetto was attacked and plundered and the inhabitants were forced to leave the city. Looting the ghetto lined some citizens’ pockets but hardly solved their political problems. Since the residential rights of the Jews had been endorsed by the Emperor, expelling them constituted yet another offense against the city’s overlord. Soon a new imperial mandate was issued, in effect declaring Fettmilch and his closest associates to be outlaws. There

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were well-founded reports that an armed force might be sent to suppress the uprising. Fearing a military subjugation of their city, some former supporters of the citizens’ movement arrested Fettmilch and handed him over to the imperial authorities. The citizens’ movement collapsed, and the old council quickly returned. In 1616, Fettmilch and six comrades were executed in Frankfurt’s main square. On the very same day, the Jews were allowed to return to their ghetto. Each of these contemporaneous cases of urban unrest had its own distinct characteristics. Yet some elements were common to all of these cases, and indeed to many others. Above all, it was normal that, when conflicts were not swiftly resolved, outside powers routinely became involved. It never mattered how many charters or privileges a city had carefully locked up in its stoutest tower or securest strongroom. When the overlord or some other authority saw an opening, intervention was swift. Of course intervention could take many forms. It was easy to send a decree or issue an injunction or dispatch a trusted agent to try to smooth things over in the troubled city. But an intervention that required more resources would, not surprisingly, be undertaken more reluctantly. Royal officials certainly did not like what had happened in La Rochelle in 1614, but it was years before they could muster the will, the money and the troops to do anything about it. By contrast, Prince Frederick Henry of Orange already had a large army at his disposal when the disturbances began in Utrecht, so it was easy for him to take control of the situation by putting in a garrison. Sometimes political developments within a city were so alarming to conventional ideas of good order that everything else was dropped so as to deal with the problem. The paradigmatic case of this involved the north German city of Münster in the 1530s.8 At first, developments in Münster followed a pattern that was normal enough in the early decades of the Reformation: spurred on by the citizens’ enthusiasm for Martin Luther’s ideas, the magistrates adopted Protestantism and loosened the town’s allegiance to its overlord, the bishop of Münster. But then some city leaders began to go further and espoused Anabaptist concepts, such as the notion that the baptism of infants was invalid and people should repeat the process voluntarily as adults. Traditionalist inhabitants began to leave the city, while enthusiastic Anabaptists from elsewhere arrived to participate in creating a new type of community. Some of the newcomers were apocalyptic visionaries, convinced that humanity stood at the brink of a messianic age that would be ushered in by the “New Jerusalem” of

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Münster. But many citizens, including influential council members, fully shared in the excitement. At first the magistrates retained control of the situation, but eventually they had to share power with charismatic prophets from outside – the last of whom declared Münster to be a kingdom and himself to be its king. Citizens were required to surrender private property to the community and polygamy was introduced so that unmarried women could have husbands. Deeply alarmed by all these developments, the city’s overlord finally gathered an army and laid siege to Münster. Numerous German princes – Catholics and Protestants alike – abandoned their other concerns to support the bishop’s efforts, for many rulers considered their own authority to be threatened by this unique urban regime. In 1535 the city was forced to surrender and the “kingdom of Münster” was brutally suppressed. Modern historians emphasize that part of what happened in Münster, especially in the early stages, was consistent with events in other German cities, and some of the more surprising later developments occurred only when the city was desperately coping with a relentless siege.9 But most contemporaries did not see things that way. They regarded the events in Münster with deep alarm and continued to worry for decades that similar things might happen elsewhere. Yet, as it turned out, Münster was unique. Expecting the imminent end of days, those who ruled the “kingdom of Münster” eventually lost touch with the rest of society. By contrast, most urban uprisings remained firmly embedded in the social order. In many cases urban rebels simply wanted to restore old traditions which the magistrates had neglected or forgotten. Moreover, often when the leaders tried to separate themselves from allegiance to one overlord it was only because they hoped or expected to find protection or support from another. This was even the case in what most historians regard as the most visionary urban uprising of the seventeenth century, the Ormée of Bordeaux.10 This movement (named for the stand of elms, or ormière, where the citizens held their meetings) took place during the Fronde, the complicated cycle of civil wars that plagued France between 1648 and 1653. The local upheaval began when the judges of the Parlement of Bordeaux, like those of other major French cities, declared their opposition to the policies of the Crown. Later on, leadership of the anti-royal forces shifted to mighty aristocrats like the Prince of Condé, who found Bordeaux to be a useful base of operations. But the national turmoil inspired citizens of Bordeaux to start demanding a greater voice in the administration of their own city. Much of what these citizens said and did conformed to the

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classic patterns of escalating civic protest, beginning with declarations and demonstrations and moving on to the appointment of a Committee of Thirty, which insisted on meeting with the city council and monitoring its activities. Like other urban rebels, the members of the Ormée demanded accountability from the council and tried to get access to the financial records, but they also voiced an unusually idealistic vision of a city that was to be governed in accordance with principles of mutual help and charity to those in distress. Yet they were never so visionary as to imagine that their city could function without external aid. Some of the citizen leaders suggested that Bordeaux should place itself under the protection of England – whose rulers, after all, had governed the city for most of the later Middle Ages. Long before any such notion could come to fruition, however, a royal army arrived to crush the movement and re-establish the city’s traditional structures of government. In the late seventeenth century, Germany experienced numerous urban upheavals, in which issues of accountability and representation by the citizens became hopelessly intertwined with disputes about relations with the city’s overlord. This was particularly common in cities where the overlordship itself was ambiguous or disputed. The true overlord of Erfurt, for example, was the archbishop of Mainz, but both the Holy Roman Emperor and the dukes of Saxony could plausibly claim certain rights over the city. The troubles in Erfurt began in 1648 with a dispute over whether the citizens had the right to appoint four members of the city council. Once the dispute was referred to various outside authorities for settlement, parties to the internal conflict began to forge links to these external powers. In 1663, the long-time leader of the citizens’ movement was accused of betraying the cause by collaborating with the archbishop. Angry citizens forced the city council to arrest and execute their former leader. But this in turn gave the archbishop an opening to punish the city by military conquest and fully establish his own authority.11 In Hamburg the situation was equally tangled, for it was unclear whether the king of Denmark or the Holy Roman Emperor was the city’s true overlord. For decades, beginning in 1650, there were disputes between the city council and elected representatives of the citizenry over the citizens’ involvement in municipal government. The king, the Emperor and the nearby dukes of Brunswick all welcomed the opportunity to mix in. Matters reached a climax in 1684 when the citizens forced the hated Mayor Hinrich Meurer to resign and flee to safety. The city council now had to heed the wishes of a thirty-member citizens’ committee. But when

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the leaders of the citizens’ movement appealed to the king of Denmark for assistance in preserving their regime, the king responded by marching on Hamburg, with the obvious intention of reclaiming his rights as overlord. The king was prevented from doing so, but the citizen leaders who had invited him were now denounced as traitorous intriguers and were swiftly arrested and executed. Compared with this, the hated Mayor Meurer now looked relatively lenient – and soon he and the system of government over which he had presided were fully restored.12 Being the leader of a citizens’ movement in late seventeenth-century Germany was a risky business. The leaders in Erfurt and Hamburg were executed at the insistence of their fellow-citizens. In Cologne, it was the external authorities that executed the leading rebels. The troubles that beset Cologne during the 1680s – the last in a long series of uprisings that erupted in that city once or twice every century – were sharply focused on issues of accountability. In 1680, under the leadership of a ribbon-seller named Nikolaus Gülich, the citizens began to protest about nepotism, corruption and financial mismanagement by the city’s mayors. Their agitation followed a classic cycle of petitions, demonstrations, half-hearted concessions and thwarted negotiations, until, in 1683, the citizens seized the city hall, deposed the existing council and executed the most hated city official. For two years the revolutionaries ruled the city, but they achieved few reforms and eventually Gülich – like Vincenz Fettmilch in Frankfurt seventy years earlier – was placed under the imperial ban and arrested. The council members who had been in office on the day that the city hall had been invaded were now restored to power; Gülich and his most ardent colleague died on the scaffold in 1686.13 Events like these made a huge impression on contemporaries. They were described in popular pamphlets and analyzed in learned treatises. But perhaps an even greater impression was made by the Naples uprising of 1647, when for ten days a fisherman named Masaniello virtually ruled his home town before being assassinated. Masaniello’s brief ascendancy did not really fit into the pattern of urban politics; it was actually the opening phase of a broad-based revolt throughout the kingdom of Naples against Spanish rule. But the image of an illiterate youth before whom urban notables had cowered was yet another reminder that the solidity of urban institutions could never be taken for granted.14 Yet, in actual fact, episodes like these were striking not because of their frequency but because of their rarity. It was deeply disturbing for urban elites to know that Naples had been ruled by a fisherman or Frankfurt by a

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pastry-cook or Cologne by a ribbon-seller – but precisely because they knew that such things had happened in the past and could, conceivably, happen again, the authorities were careful to avoid situations that might cause an escalation of political tension. To govern cities was a process of constant calculation. When guild masters or militia captains or journeymen or hungry consumers or a committee claiming to speak for the whole body of citizens presented their demands or asked to negotiate, the magistrates had to weigh the relative risks and advantages of standing firm or making concessions. When demonstrations turned into riots, the magistrates had to decide whether they should let the disturbances run their course or arrest a few leaders or call in the municipal militia – some of whose members, of course, might have relatives among the rioters. If they were unable to cope on their own, the magistrates would have to decide whether to turn to some higher authority – and if so, which one. The citizens, too, had to make constant calculations, deciding just how aggressively to push their demands. It was exhilarating to try to pry open the account books or force your way into council meetings – but nobody really wanted to end up on the scaffold. You had to know when to stop. Mistakes were made on both sides. This was normally what caused political tensions to escalate. But things rarely reached the point where council members were forced to resign en masse – and if they were, they were normally allowed to slip out of town rather than being dumped into dungeons as in La Rochelle. Magistrates and citizens alike knew that pushing urban politics to extremes was a dangerous game. Precisely because they knew what could happen, they generally worked hard to make sure it would not.

6 Urban politics and the state

This book has been concerned chiefly with the nature of urban politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the heart of the early modern era. But it is important to realize that many aspects of urban politics remained remarkably unchanged throughout the eighteenth century, right down to the end of the ancien régime. Until the French Revolution began to cause upheavals over Europe, the governmental structure of most cities remained remarkably intact. City councils continued to meet two or three times a week as they always had, their deliberations still a secret to all but the legal advisers who counseled them and the scribes who recorded their decisions. The procedures for choosing mayors and council members were scrupulously observed year after year. The traditional calendar of municipal processions and ceremonies and assemblies continued to be followed faithfully. Consider Strasbourg. Once a free city of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1681 it had been forcibly annexed to France. But the municipal institutions which had been established in the city’s medieval past remained quite intact. Throughout the eighteenth century, the notoriously complicated structure of Strasbourg’s government, with its Senate-and-Twenty-One and Council of Thirteen and Council of Fifteen, underwent no change. The leading municipal officials were still known by their old German titles of Ammeister and Stettmeister. And as late as January 1789, just a few months before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the old familiar ritual of the Schwörtag – the annual oath-day when council members swore to uphold the city’s constitution – was held as usual in front of the cathedral, exactly as it had been ever since the Middle Ages.1 Yet in some ways, in Strasbourg and elsewhere, all of this was an illusion. For by the end of the ancien régime the political system of European cities had undergone significant changes. These changes did not

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result specifically from anything that happened in the eighteenth century. Instead they were the consequence of forces that had begun to affect cities throughout the early modern era and simply accumulated more rapidly and systematically as time went on. Many transforming changes affected European society in the early modern era, but not all of them had an equally important impact on urban politics. Take, for example, the changes in European economic life. One of the most important themes of early modern history was the steady expansion of capitalist forms of economic activity. Yet it is far from obvious that the spread of capitalism had a major impact on urban politics. In the first place, many historians would now argue that the most significant forms of capitalist expansion took place not in cities but in the countryside, as more and more agricultural production came to be driven by market forces and as expanding rural manufacture came to rival the importance of urban industry. Of course, some forms of capitalist enterprise were exclusive to cities. It was only in cities, after all, that one found the merchants who engaged in long-distance trade and organized the companies involved in overseas investment. Though generally merchants turned to higher levels of government to secure the exclusive monopoly rights which helped to found their fortunes, they also wanted municipal governments to implement policies favorable to their activities. Obviously merchants were an exceptionally powerful interest group in any city. But the steady growth of commerce and the related increase of mercantile wealth did not actually transform the nature of urban politics. Merchants did not universally increase their domination of city governments. There were many cities, to be sure, in which guild-based craftsmen lost power as merchants gained more and more seats on the city councils. But there were also cities in which the merchants themselves lost power as more and more positions came to be held by economically inactive rentiers. In short, the growth of capitalism did not, as such, stimulate any universal patterns of change in urban political life. It is quite a different matter, however, when we look at another central theme of early modern European history: the growing power of the state. To those of us who live in modern societies in which the national level of government shapes and regulates every conceivable aspect of everyday life, the extent to which state power increased between 1500 and 1789 might not seem very spectacular. But in fact, the persistent growth of the administrative reach of central governments was probably the single most important development in the history of early modern Europe. The states themselves differed enormously in size, from France with its population of

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twenty million to the tiny principalities of central Europe. In some states the process of administrative centralization began much more quickly than in others. But sooner or later, every state in western and central Europe tended to follow the same basic trajectory. Cities were profoundly affected by this process. The traditional medieval relationship between cities and their overlords had been contractual. Princes always wanted money from cities, but in an age when rulers’ military resources were limited and unstable they normally had to resort to negotiations to get it: for example, in return for what a city could offer, the overlord would have to guarantee the city specific privileges of autonomy and self-administration. Gradually, however, the balance of power between cities and overlords shifted. Armies grew in size throughout the early modern era and changed from seasonal to permanent appendages of princely power. This had two effects. On the one hand, the need to sustain larger permanent armies vastly increased the rulers’ financial needs. On the other hand, the very growth of their military resources also increased the rulers’ capacity to satisfy their needs by compulsion rather than negotiation. Cities could not fail to feel the difference. The entire process took place in irregular steps, and both sides sometimes miscalculated. Occasionally an overlord tried to overawe a city with a grand show of force, only to retreat in disgrace as his forces dwindled away due to disease or desertion. On other occasions, however, it was the city magistrates who miscalculated. One of the most spectacular cases was that of Ghent in the southern Netherlands. For almost three years, beginning in 1537, the city was in turmoil. Facing a major rebellion by the citizens, the magistrates of Ghent agreed to defy the fiscal demands of their overlord, the Emperor Charles V, and allowed a citizens’ committee to share in ruling the city. In the short term this enabled the magistrates to retain control – but in 1540 Charles appeared with an army, occupied the city, revoked a whole series of traditional rights and erected a new fortress to house his troops.2 Comparable events continued to take place in Europe for well over a century. In late seventeenth-century Germany, a number of overlords still had to use military force to reduce their own cities to obedience: Münster in 1661, Erfurt in 1664 and Braunschweig in 1671. After 1700, however, such episodes virtually disappeared. One reason was the continuing growth of princely armies. The possibility that a city could successfully resist a siege by its own overlord had almost vanished. But there was another factor as well. In one city after another, the old

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desperate commitment by municipal elites to preserve urban autonomy had steadily diminished. The main reason, after all, for promoting urban autonomy had been to protect the economic interests of urban elites: rapacious rulers had to be prevented from confiscating the hard-earned wealth of city merchants. But as states increasingly expanded both the scope of their activities and the size of their bureaucracies, the urban elites began to see the possible advantages of collaboration. The more often that urban magistrates or members of their families received state appointments and the more frequently that they were called upon to enforce state policies, the less important the old ideal of urban autonomy might seem to be. The lines that had once separated municipal and princely networks of service and allegiance became increasingly blurred. City-trained administrators moved smoothly over into positions in the expanding state bureaucracies. Much of this was related to the spectacular growth in the size and influence of the legal profession in early modern Europe. Decision-makers whose predecessors had acted confidently on their own judgment now felt that they could not proceed without legal guidance. City councils relied increasingly on advice from lawyers. And so, at times, did their opponents: often the first thing that a committee or deputation of angry citizens would do was to hire an attorney to help them formulate and present their demands. Trained jurists, of course, also staffed princely bureaucracies. Increasingly, lawyers came to form a self-sustaining caste, whose members thought alike even when they served different masters. Obviously, their values and their assumptions began to affect the thinking of the people whose interests they represented. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many European rulers were attempting to formulate broad social policies designed to make the inhabitants of their states more disciplined, hard-working and productive. These were goals that city magistrates often shared, and they were increasingly willing to act as agents of the rulers in promulgating and enforcing these programs. More and more people in cities came to believe that there was no inherent conflict between being good citizens of the town and implementing policy goals of the Crown. We can get a hint of this process at work by taking a look at the conflict that erupted in the city of Colmar in the early eighteenth century. Colmar was, like Strasbourg, a German city that had been absorbed into the French kingdom in the seventeenth century. In 1711, a group of Colmar citizens launched an attack on the city’s leaders. The instigator of this conflict, Johann Jacob Sonntag, was himself a member of the council, but he shared

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the hostility that many Colmarians felt toward the more powerful members of the municipal elite, whom they accused of violating electoral rules and mismanaging municipal funds. The citizens submitted a petition to the royal intendant, asking him to make the council follow the election rules and order a public accounting of the municipal revenues. In past generations, a royal official might have leapt at such an opportunity to involve himself in the city’s affairs and thus clip the magistrates’ wings. But this intendant simply upheld the council. Sonntag was jailed for six months and other leaders of the citizens’ movement were harshly reprimanded.3 In many ways this episode had the hallmarks of a classic conflict between citizens and council. The issues and the forms of political action were familiar enough. But there was a new element at work, for both sides in the dispute tried to outdo each other in their professions of loyalty to the king. According to Sonntag, “the magistrates preferred their own interests to the will of the king and the public’s welfare and utility.” The magistrates, in turn, condemned Sonntag for “grumbling much of the time when it is a question of contributing the least thing to the King’s service ...”4 The old lines of tension between council and citizens were still there, but both parties identified the public good with doing one’s duty to the king. Because the institutional structure of most municipal governments remained almost intact until the end of the ancien régime, the potential was always there for a clash of interests between the oligarchical groups who dominated the city councils and citizens who resented their exclusion from power. This was particularly the case in Germany, where conflicts between councils and citizens persisted right down to the end of the eighteenth century. But the dramatic uprisings of earlier centuries were not repeated. The wrangles between magistrates and citizens became mired in litigation, grinding their way endlessly through the courts. There were no dramatic denouements on the scaffold. All over Europe, in fact, the capacity of citizens to offer armed resistance to the municipal authorities had collapsed. Militia companies, once the most powerful expression of citizens’ power, dwindled in significance in the age of standing armies and permanent garrisons. This is not to say, of course, that there was no longer any violence in cities. Quite the contrary. Food riots continued to break out wherever grain supplies were unacceptably low or bread prices unreasonably high. Journeymen and other wage workers organized work stoppages and demonstrations, which sometimes turned violent. Even political riots were

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common – but they were increasingly likely to reflect concern with national rather than municipal issues. In London, riots linked to national conflicts had been common since the seventeenth century, and they continued unabated through the next. The greatest outbreak of violence in eighteenth-century London, the Gordon Riots of 1780, began as a protest against parliamentary legislation designed to improve the condition of Roman Catholics throughout the kingdom. Such events, of course, posed grave law-and-order challenges to municipal officials. They rarely hoped or expected, however, to solve them on their own. On 26 June 1740, a large crowd invaded the city hall of Newcastleupon-Tyne in northern England, breaking windows, damaging walls and ransacking the city archives.5 This might look like a classic manifestation of urban political conflict, but in fact it was not. The participants in the Newcastle disturbances comprised not only inhabitants of the city but also outsiders, including a large contingent of unemployed coal-miners from the surrounding districts. The original grievances were economic: food prices were high, yet Newcastle merchants were still exporting grain. A month earlier a group of local women had demonstrated and tried to block horses from carrying grain to the port. But the June riots began when hungry coal-miners left their pits and marched into Newcastle. Once they arrived, others joined them in agitating for cheaper food. The magistrates met with a deputation of demonstrators and ordered a reduction in the price of grain. But the day after that it became apparent that many merchants, rather than selling grain at the lower prices, were keeping their stores closed. The miners led an attack on the granaries, and hundreds joined in. The next day the city’s most powerful coal merchant appeared with hundreds of lightly armed men to disperse the protesters. Yet the grain shortages persisted. On 26 June some 3,000 demonstrators gathered; when shots were fired to disperse them, a full-scale riot broke out and the city hall was plundered. The magistrates were desperate – but help was on the way. That very evening three companies of royal troops arrived in Newcastle, followed soon after by an entire regiment. Order was easily restored. Though the concerns that lay behind this riot were economic, the specific issue was accountability: the magistrates of Newcastle had promised to do something about grain prices, but were unable to deliver on their commitment. Yet the protest was by no means confined to inhabitants of the city; in fact, people from the entire district were caught up in the riots. Neither did the magistrates have to play for time while waiting anxiously for outside help. In the eighteenth century, soldiers were always

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near at hand, and they arrived within hours. The issues were still there, but the environment had changed. The changes were subtle. The integration of cities into systems of national power was a drawn-out process that had begun in the Middle Ages and was still far from complete on the eve of the French Revolution. This process did not apply, of course, to the rare city republics like Venice or Geneva. The imperial cities of Germany – which had to balance their allegiance to a distant overlord, the Emperor, with the need to cooperate with the princely states which surrounded them – remained largely detached from this process as well. But in most European cities, urban leaders increasingly saw themselves as part of a larger national community. They still put on their robes of office and went to the city hall to patiently hear the citizens’ complaints, but their minds were likely to be on the next batch of letters from London or Paris or Berlin. In 1789, when the magistrates of Strasbourg stood before their fellow-citizens to take their oaths of office, nobody could have guessed that this was going to be the last Schwörtag in the city’s history. But the political framework which had given rise to this ritual, and made it meaningful for generations of citizens, was already a thing of the past.

Epilogue

Secrecy lay at the heart of the decision-making process in the early modern city. When city councils met, only their decisions were made known; the deliberations and votes that preceded the final outcome were never made public, and strict penalties were normally imposed to enforce the code of silence. By contrast, decision-making in most cities in the Western world today is supposed to be highly transparent. The collective bodies which govern contemporary cities normally hold their meetings in open sessions which members of the public and representatives of the press are encouraged to attend; newspapers and broadcasts rapidly disseminate information about exactly what transpired. Candidates run for office on their records of past performance or promises of future achievement. All this is predicated on the notion that the voting public both knows and cares about how the community is being governed. Yet while the mechanics of decision-making may be more visible in the modern city, the actual way in which power is exercised is far more obscure today than it was in the early modern era. For actually the elected mayors, councils and school boards in the modern city have a surprisingly limited control over the way that things are done in their own communities. This is not only because so many aspects of everyday life are dominated by higher levels of government which mandate everything from the curriculum of schools to the level of welfare payments which municipal authorities must administer. It is also because there are so many organizations – some public, some private, some elected, some appointed, some highly visible, some quite obscure, some even illegal – which shape and structure the distribution of resources and provision of services to people in modern cities. Today, moreover, every large city is embedded in an even larger urban region. Some services are provided by bodies with a mandate covering the whole metropolitan area; other services – even those

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that could be handled more effectively on a regional basis – are still run by individual municipalities. Suburban governments are often bitterly at odds with the central city. All of this makes it difficult for people today to grasp how their communities are actually run, let alone to bring about any significant change. Early modern cities were different. To be sure, they were often subject to interference from higher authorities. But ordinary decision-making was normally concentrated in the hands of a small group of men who knew their communities well and concerned themselves with every aspect of local life. Even if their deliberations were secret, their power was visible to all. Often magistrates wore robes and chains of office as visible emblems of authority – and even when they did not, everyone knew who they were. They expected their fellow-inhabitants to treat them with deference and they tolerated no disrespect. These men held office in the first place because they belonged to the group of people who were considered fit to rule over their fellow-citizens – and holding office in turn further enhanced their standing. Yet, as we have seen, the ordinary citizens also commanded resources that gave them power in the community. They enjoyed the recognized right to petition their magistrates and they expected to be consulted on matters of particular importance. Often they went beyond this, to litigate or demonstrate or agitate. Sometimes they turned to violence – and when they did, their actions were difficult to suppress. The citizens also had power – and they too knew how to deploy it in highly effective ways. To be sure, the political community in the early modern city was small. Women, children, servants and the poor were excluded from any meaningful participation in political life. But almost every male adult who headed his own household was included in the political system. Despite the secrecy of the decision-making process, such men grasped more clearly than many modern city-dwellers exactly how the political system of their community worked and how they could manipulate it to achieve their aims. They were accomplished actors in a drama whose script they helped to write. Or to put it even more simply: they were citizens. To know something about urban politics in early Europe can certainly deepen our understanding of how the pre-modern world functioned. But it can do more as well. For it can also serve to remind us that even in a setting very different from the one with which we are familiar, people can find ways to deploy the resources at their command to make cities into communities.

Notes

1 Urban politics 1 Manfred Huiskes and Manfred Groten (eds.), Beschlüsse des Rats der Stadt Köln, 1320–1550, 5 vols. (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1990). See Vol.1, pp. xxv–xxvii (for the general practices of the Cologne council), and Vol. 5, p. 340 (for the minutes of the meeting of 2 October 1545). 2 Kevin C. Robbins, City on the Ocean Sea: La Rochelle, 1530–1650: Urban Society, Religion and Politics on the French Atlantic Frontier (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), pp. 253–73. 3 Tilo Schabert, “Wie werden Städte regiert?,” in Tilo Schabert (ed.), Die Welt der Stadt (Munich: Piper, 1991), pp. 167–98 (the quotation is on p. 175). 4 Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). 5 Cf. David Judge, “Pluralism,” in David Judge, Gerry Stoker and Harold Wolman (eds.), Theories of Urban Politics (London: Sage Publications, 1995), pp. 13–34, especially p. 14. 6 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 183, 198. 2 Who governed? 1 The best attempt is probably that of Frederic C. Lane, Venice: a Maritime Republic (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 429. But this chart omits some councils and officials, such as the Collegio of the Senate and the influential Procurators. 2 Guy Saupin, “Les élections municipales à Nantes sous l’ancien régime, 1565– 1789,” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’ouest, 3 (1983), 429–50. 3 Mack P. Holt, “Popular political culture and mayoral elections in sixteenthcentury Dijon,” in Mack P. Holt (ed.), Society and Institutions in Early Modern France (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991), pp. 98–116. 4 Werner Spiess, Geschichte der Stadt Braunschweig im Nachmittelalter, vom Ausgang des Mittelalters bis zum Ende der Stadtfreiheit (1491–1671), 2 vols. (Braunschweig: Waisenhaus Verlag, 1966), Vol. 2, pp. 523–29; see also Jörg

Notes to pp. 15–28

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Walter, Rat und Bürgerhauptleute in Braunschweig, 1576–1604 (Braunschweig: Waisenhaus Verlag, 1971), pp. 11–26. After the political turbulence of the early seventeenth century the overall size of the council was reduced, but the electoral system remained in force until 1671. 5 For a useful translation of a sixteenth-century description of the process, see Gerald Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century (New York: John Wiley, 1966), pp. 58–67. Strictly speaking, the nominating committee was responsible for filling only 26 of the 34 patrician seats on the council; the 26 elected members then named the remaining eight patricians. The eight non-patrician seats were assigned to representatives of the craft guilds. 6 Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), pp. 89–92. 7 Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 206, 279–80. 8 Finlay, Politics, pp. 201–203. 9 Perry Gauci, Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth, 1660–1722 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 24–25. 10 Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625–1643 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 45–68; Gary S. De Krey, A Fractured Society: the Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688–1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 39–44. 11 See Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie: Studienausgabe, Johannes Winckelmann (ed.), 2 vols. (Cologne and Berlin: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1964), Vol. 1, pp. 215–16; Vol. 2, pp. 1052–54. For an influential discussion of Weber’s concept, see Erich Maschke, “Verfassung und soziale Kräfte in der deutschen Stadt des späten Mittelalters, vornehmlich in Oberdeutschland: 1. Teil,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 46 (1959), 289–349, especially 329–5. 12 James S. Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490–1714 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 57–58. 13 James C. Davis, The Decline of the Venetian Nobility as a Ruling Class (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), pp. 54–105. 14 Christopher R. Friedrichs, Urban Society in an Age of War: Nördlingen, 1580– 1720 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 185–87. 15 A useful overview is provided by Marvin Lunenfeld, “Governing the cities of Isabella the Catholic: the corregidores, governors and assistants of Castile (1476–1504),” Journal of Urban Studies, 9 (1982), 31–55; see also Lunenfeld’s Keepers of the City: the Corregidores of Isabella I of Castile (1474–1504) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 3 Interests and issues 1 An important treatment of this subject is provided by Bernd Roeck, Bäcker, Brot und Getreide in Augsburg: Zur Geschichte des Bäckerhandwerks und zur

76

2

3 4

5

6 7

Notes to pp. 28–41 Versorgung der Reichsstadt im Zeitalter des Dreissigjährigen Krieges (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1987). Robert S. DuPlessis, Lille and the Dutch Revolt: Urban Stability in an Age of Revolution, 1500–1582 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 108, 113. Christopher R. Friedrichs, Urban Society in an Age of War: Nördlingen, 1580– 1720 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 277. Ingomar Bog, “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Nürnbergs im Zeitalter des Merkantilismus (1648–1806): Eine methodologische Fallstudie,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 57 (1970), 289–322; quotation on 311–12. Cf. Joachim Whaley, Religion, Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–1819 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). On the treatment of Mennonites in Hamburg, the one group overlooked by Whaley, see Michael D. Driedger, Mennonites? Heretics? Obedient Citizens? Categorizing People in Hamburg and Altona, 1648–1713 (Queen’s University Ph.D. thesis, 1996). William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: the Culture of Retribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 213. Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 203–206.

4 Forms of political action 1 Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Faction in Friuli During the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); see especially p. 92 (for Udine in 1483) and pp. 153–69 (for the massacre of 1511). 2 Annabel Gregory, “Witchcraft, politics and ‘good neighbourhood’ in early seventeenth-century Rye,” Past and Present, 133 (November 1991), 31–66; Stephen Hipkin, “Closing ranks: oligarchy and government at Rye, 1570– 1640,” Urban History, 22 (1995), 319–40. 3 For a full treatment of this theme, see the important study by Paul D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650– 1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 4 Cf. Henk van Nierop, “Popular participation in politics in the Dutch republic,” in Peter Blickle (ed.), Resistance, Representation and Community (Oxford: European Science Foundation/Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 272–90, especially pp. 284–88. 5 Jörg Walter, Rat und Bürgerhauptleute in Braunschweig, 1576–1604 (Braunschweig: Waisenhaus Verlag, 1971), pp. 15–17. 6 Mark W. Konnert, Civic Agendas and Religious Passion: Châlons-surMarne during the French Wars of Religion, 1560–1594 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1997), pp. 43–44, 129, 140–44. 7 Hans Eugen Specker, Ulm: Stadtgeschichte (Ulm: Süddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1977), pp. 115–18. 8 Penny Roberts, A City in Conflict: Troyes During the French Wars of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), chapter 6.

Notes to pp. 42–53

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9 See the examples listed, with full references, in Christopher R. Friedrichs, “German town revolts and the seventeenth-century crisis,” Renaissance and Modern Studies, 27 (1982), 27–51. 10 Jürgen Asch, Rat und Bürgerschaft in Lübeck, 1598–1669 (Lübeck: Verlag Max Schmidt–Römhild, 1961), pp. 56–93. 11 Arnold Soom, Die Zunfthandwerker in Reval im siebzehnten Jahrhundert (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1971), pp. 149–67; Johann Dietrich von Pezold, Reval, 1670–1687: Rat, Gilden und schwedische Staatsherrschaft (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1975), pp. 110–35. 12 Christopher R. Friedrichs, “Urban conflicts and the imperial constitution in seventeenth-century Germany,” Journal of Modern History, 58, Supplement (December 1986), 98–123, especially 103–19. 13 Richard Cust, “Anti-Puritanism and urban politics: Charles I and Great Yarmouth,” Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 1–26. 14 von Pezold, Reval, p. 287. 15 Cf. William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: the Culture of Retribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 49–51. Beik also lists some of the standard literature on popular violence in early modern Europe, beginning with the classic essay by Natalie Zemon Davis, “The rites of violence,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 152–87. 16 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York: George Braziller, 1979), especially pp. 175–263; for a shorter, more sharply focused treatment of the same events, see Liewain Scott Van Doren, “Revolt and reaction in the city of Romans, Dauphiné, 1579– 1580,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 5 (1974), 71–100. 17 Laurie Nussdorfer, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 8–10. 18 Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic, pp. 224–26. 19 Cf. Beik, Urban Protest, especially chapters 3–7. 20 Renato Barahona Arevalo, “A seventeenth century Vizcayan sociopolitical movement: the salt-tax revolt (1631–1624),” in Ekonomia, Gizartea eta Kultura Antzinako Erregimenean/Economia, Sociedad y Cultura durante el Antiguo Regimen (II. Euskal Mundu-Biltzarra: Euskal Herriaren Historiari Buruzko Biltzarra/II Congreso Mundial Vasco: Congreso de Historia de Euskal Herria, Vol. 3; San Sebastian: Editorial Txertoa, 1988), pp. 319–27. 21 For some German examples, see Friedrichs, “German town revolts.” 5 Escalation and intervention 1 The following account is based on René Pillorget, “Luttes de factions et intérêts économiques à Marseille de 1598 à 1618,” Annales E.S.C., 27 (1972), 705–30; see also Wolfgang Kaiser, Marseille im Bürgerkrieg: Sozialgefüge, Religionskonflikt und Faktionskämpfe von 1559–1596 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1991), pp. 345–52. 2 Pillorget, “Luttes de factions,” pp. 713–14, 720–30.

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Notes to pp. 54–67

3 The following account is based on Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), see especially chapter 6. 4 See Eberhard Naujoks (ed.), Kaiser Karl V. und die Zunftverfassung: Ausgewählte Aktenstücke zu den Verfassungsveränderungen in den ober deutschen Reichsstädten, 1547–1556 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1985). 5 The following account is based on Kevin C. Robbins, City on the Ocean Sea: La Rochelle, 1530–1650: Urban Society, Religion, and Politics on the French Atlantic Frontier (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997). 6 The vast literature pertaining to this event is analyzed in Christopher R. Friedrichs, “Politics or pogrom? The Fettmilch Uprising in German and Jewish history,” Central European History, 19 (1986), 186–228; the following account is based on the major sources listed there. 7 Friedrich Bothe, Frankfurts wirtschaftlich-soziale Entwicklung vor dem dreissigjährigen Kriege und der Fettmilchaufstand (1612–1616), Vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Joseph Baer & Co., 1920), pp. 325–28. 8 For a useful general overview of the events, see R. Po-chia Hsia, “Münster and the Anabaptists,” in R. Po-chia Hsia (ed.), The German People and the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 51–69. 9 See for example Heinz Schilling, “Aufstandsbewegungen in der stadtbürgerlichen Gesellschaft des Alten Reiches: die Vorgeschichte des Münsteraner Täuferreichs, 1525 bis 1534,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.), Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg, 1524–1526 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1975), pp. 193–238; James M. Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods (Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, Ontario, 1991), pp. 123–38; Ralf Klötzer, Die Täuferherrschaft von Münster: Stadtreformation und Welterneuerung (Münster: Aschendorff, 1992), especially pp. 199–207. 10 For the latest overview of this well-studied event, see William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: the Politics of Retribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 219–49. 11 Carl Beyer and Johannes Biereye, Geschichte der Stadt Erfurt von der ältesten bis auf die neueste Zeit, Vol. 1 (Erfurt: Verlag der Keyser’sche Buchhandlung, 1935), pp. 575–629. 12 For a useful summary of these events, see Hans-Dieter Loose, “Die Jastram– Snitgerschen Wirren in der zeitgenössischen Geschichts–schreibung,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte, 69 (1983), 1–20. 13 Bernd Dreher, Vor 300 Jahren – Nikolaus Gülich (Cologne: Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, 1986). 14 Rosario Villari, “Masaniello: Contemporary and recent interpretations,” Past and Present, 108 (August 1985), 117–32. 6 Urban politics and the state 1 Franklin L. Ford, Strasbourg in Transition, 1648–1789 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958), especially pp. 235–37.

Notes to pp. 69–70

79

2 For recent overviews of these events, see Johan Decavele and Paul van Peteghem, “Ghent ‘absolutely’ broken: 1500–1700,” in Johan Decavele (ed.), Ghent: in Defense of a Rebellious City: History, Art, Culture (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1989), pp. 107–33, especially pp. 107–15, and Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 196–209. 3 Peter G. Wallace, Communities and Conflict in Early Modern Colmar, 1575– 1730 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1995), pp. 215– 23. 4 Ibid., pp. 216, 219. 5 Joyce Ellis, “Urban conflict and popular violence: the Guildhall riots of 1740 in Newcastle upon Tyne,” International Review of Social History, 25 (1980), 332– 49.

Suggestions for further reading

The literature on the history of cities in early modern Europe is vast. Ever since the Renaissance, educated town-dwellers have enjoyed writing about the history of their own cities, and as a result there is a huge body of literature about every urban community in Europe. Much of this material pertains, naturally, to the sequence of political happenings in the cities concerned. The titles listed here cannot even begin to hint at the scope and variety of the literature in various languages on the political history of European cities. These suggestions are intended only to draw attention to a number of works available in English that may help the beginner to start exploring the history of urban politics in the early modern era. In many cases, however, the bibliographies and references provided by these works will help to direct the reader toward ever more detailed treatments of the subject. The greatest of all English cities is, not surprisingly, the one whose political history in early modern times is most fully covered in English. Among the many books which deal with various aspects of London politics and government, note in particular Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625–1643 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Gary S. DeKrey, A Fractured Society: the Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688–1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Suggestions for further reading

81

Pearl’s article “Change and stability in seventeenth-century London,” The London Journal, 5 (1979), 3–34, has been particularly influential. An important interpretation of the way that politics evolved in provincial towns following the English Revolution is provided by Paul D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Among the countless works that treat various aspects of the politics in specific provincial English cities, note in particular Roger Howell, Newcastleupon-Tyne and the Puritan Revolution: a Study of the Civil War in the North of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and Perry Gauci, Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth, 1660–1722 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Exeter: the Growth of an English County Town (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958), one of the first modern local studies, is still worth reading in this context. For Scottish cities, a useful starting-point is the collection edited by Michael Lynch, The Early Modern Town in Scotland (London: Croom Helm, 1987). For Paris in the sixteenth century, see two works by Barbara Diefendorf: Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Paris City Councillors in the Sixteenth Century: the Politics of Patrimony (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). For the seventeenth century, two older works are still useful: Leon Bernard, The Emerging City: Paris in the Age of Louis XIV (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970) and Orest Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism (New York: John Wiley, 1968). For provincial cities, a major overview of one form of political behavior is provided by William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: the Politics of Retribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The most outstanding recent treatment in English of a single French town in this era is Kevin C. Robbins, City on the Ocean Sea: La Rochelle, 1530–1650: Urban Society, Religion, and Politics on the French Atlantic Frontier (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997). Other useful studies of politics in particular towns include Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. by Mary Feeney (New York: George Braziller, 1979); Mark W. Konnert, Civic Agendas and Religious Passion: Châlons-sur-Marne during the French Wars of Religion, 1560–1594 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1997); Penny Roberts, A City in Conflict: Troyes during the French Wars of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

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Suggestions for further reading

1996); Philip Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Sharon Kettering, Judicial Politics and Urban Revolt in Seventeenth-Century France: the Parlement of Aix, 1629–1659 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). For the Ormée of Bordeaux, the best English treatment is still that of Sal Alexander Westrich, The Ormée of Bordeaux: a Revolution During the Fronde (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), though this can be supplemented by the discussion in Beik, Urban Protest, cited above. Some specific aspects of urban politics are treated by Robert A. Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse, 1463–1789: from Municipal Republic to Cosmopolitan City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) and James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and Their World in Dijon, 1550– 1650 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), as well as some of the essays in Philip Benedict (ed.), Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). For Germany, the starting-point for understanding the politics of smaller towns is the outstanding work by Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971). The religiously focused politics of German towns during and after the Reformation era has been extensively studied in English; various aspects are covered by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Ruling Class, Regime and Reformation at Strasbourg, 1520–1555 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978); Lorna Jane Abray, The People’s Reformation: Magistrates, Clergy, and Commons in Strasbourg, 1500–1598 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Gerald Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966); Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (revised edn.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Kaspar von Greyerz, The Late City Reformation in Germany: the Case of Colmar, 1522–1628 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1980), and Joachim Whaley, Religion, Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–1819 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For a classic analysis of a slightly later urban conflict, see Gerald Lyman Soliday, A Community in Conflict: Frankfurt Society in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1974). For some details of major urban conflicts, see Christopher R. Friedrichs, “German town revolts and the seventeenth-century crisis,” Renaissance and Modern Studies, 27 (1982), 27–51; “Urban conflicts and the imperial constitution in seventeenth-century Germany,” Journal of Modern History, 58, Suppl. (December 1986), 98–123; and “Anti-Jewish politics in early modern

Suggestions for further reading

83

Germany: the uprising in Worms, 1613–1617,” Central European History, 23 (1990), 91–152. The special case of a German town whose political system was transformed as it came under French rule is treated in Peter G. Wallace, Communities and Conflict in Early Modern Colmar, 1600–1730 (Atlantic Highlands, N J: Humanities Press International, 1995). For translations of some influential articles by Heinz Schilling on urban politics in early modern Germany and the Netherlands, see two collections of his essays: Civic Calvinism in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1991) and Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). For some other treatments of the vigorous urban politics of the Netherlands, see Robert S. DuPlessis, Lille and the Dutch Revolt: Urban Stability in an Era of Revolution, 1500–1582 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); C. C. Hibben, Gouda in Revolt: Particularism and Pacifism in the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1572–1588 (Utrecht: HES Publishers, 1983), and Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). In the vast English-language literature on Italian cities, two works that focus specifically on urban politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980) and Laurie Nussdorfer, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Much light is shed on the Venetian political system by Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Alexander Francis Cowan, The Urban Patriciate: Lübeck and Venice, 1580–1700 (Cologne and Vienna, 1986), and James Cushman Davis, The Decline of the Venetian Nobility as a Ruling Class (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962). For the relationship between factional conflict in town and country, see Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Faction in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). For Spain there are excellent treatments of urban social and economic history in English, but there is less on urban politics; the best entrée to the subject is James S. Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). For the relationship between cities and states, see Richard Mackenney, The City-State, 1500–1700: Republican Liberty in an Age of Princely

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Suggestions for further reading

Power (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press Interna tional, 1989), and the essays in Charles Tilly and Wim P. Blockmans (eds.), Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994). For general overviews of the early modern city, see Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450–1750 (London and New York: Longman, 1995) and Alexander Cowan, Urban Europe, 1500–1700 (London: Edward Arnold, 1998). These works also have useful bibliographies and notes which will guide the reader deeper into the literature – both in English and in other languages – on urban politics during the early modern era.

Index

Abkömmlichkeit 18 accountability 32–3 Anabaptists 60 Angers 33 appeals to external authority 43–5 armies 67 autonomy 33–4, 67–8 ballotini 16 Barcelona 18 Bilbao 48 bishops 22–3 Bordeaux 61–2 Braunschweig 14–15, 38, 67 Brunswick, dukes of 62 Calvinism 30–1, 53–4, 55 capitalism 66 Catherine de Medici 5 Catholic League 39–40, 50–1 Châlons-sur-Marne 39–40 Charles I (England) 45 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor) 53, 67 Charles IX (France) 55 citizens 4, 6–7, 26 city councils 1–3, 12–13; composition

of, 17–20; election of 13–17; powers of 20–2 Colmar 68–9 Cologne 1–2, 3, 63 communes 20–1 Condé, prince of 61

constitutions 11–12 consultation 39–41 Cooper, Benjamin 44 corregidores 22 crime 27 Dahl, Robert 7–8 Delft 2 demonstrations 45–7 Denmark, king of 62–3 Dijon 14 Doge 16 economic issues 27–9 education 27 Eighty Years’ War (Netherlands) 31 elections 13–17 elitist interpretation 7, 8–9 Elizabeth I (England) 5 England 31, 37 English Revolution 31, 37 Erfurt 62, 67 factions 35–8, 51–2 Fettmilch, Vincenz 59–60, 63 Florence 29 food, provision of 27–8, 47 France 23, 30–1, 36, 39–40, 48, 66;

kings of 14, 55, 56–7, 69 Francis I (France) 55 Frankfurt am Main 57–60 Frederick Henry, prince of Orange 54, 60

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Index

freemen (London) 17 French Revolution 65, 71 Frickinger family, 20 Geneva 71 Germany 41–2, 49, 62–3, 67, 69, 71 Ghent 34, 67 Gordon Riots 70 Great Yarmouth 16, 44–5 guilds 26, 29, 43–4 Guise, duke of 52 Gülich, Nikolaus 63 Hamburg 31, 62–3 Hamon, Thomas 36 hereditary principle 5–6, 13 Holy Roman Emperor 42, 58–9, 62 infrapolitics 9 Isabella of Castile 5, 22 Italy 36 Jews 57–60 journeymen 5, 26, 29 judges 23 Kaplan, Benjamin 53 Kemmerer, Hans 44 La Rochelle 2–3, 54–7, 60 lawyers 68 Lille 28 London xiii, 12, 16–17, 18, 27, 70 Lübeck 42–3 Luther, Martin 30, 60 Mainz, archbishop of 62 Marseille 50–2 Masaniello 63 mayors 13 merchants 28–9, 66 Meurer, Hinrich 62 militia companies 26, 53–4, 55–6, 69 Münster 60–1, 67; bishop of 60–1;

‘kingdom’ of 61 Nantes 14; Edict of 56

Naples 63 negotiation 41–3 Netherlands 31,53–4 New Haven 7–8 Newcastle-upon-Tyne 70 Nördlingen 20, 28 Nottingham 47 Nuremberg 15, 19, 28–9 oligarchy 19–20 Orange, house of 53 Ormée, the 61–2 overlords 11–12, 21–2, 67 Paris xiii, 27 pasquils and pasquinades 46 petitions 38–9 Philip II (Spain) 53 Pillorget, René 51 pluralist interpretation 7–9, 25 political resources 8–9, 73 power structure 7–9 protest 46–9 Protestantism 30–1 Puritans 37, 44–5 Reformation, the 23, 29–31, 40 religion 29–31 Reval see Tallinn Richelieu, Cardinal 57 riots 48–9, 69–71 Robbins, Kevin 54 Romans (France) 46 Rome 11, 46 Roquevaire, sieur de 51–2 Rye 36 Savonarola, Girolamo 29 Saxony, dukes of 62 Schwörtag 65, 71 Scott, James 9 secrecy 32, 72 Shakespeare, William 35 Sonntag, Johann Jacob 68 Spain 22 state power 66–7

Index States General (Netherlands) 53–4 Strasbourg 65, 71 Sweden, king of 43–4, 45 Tallinn 43–4, 45 taxes 47–8 Tories 37, 47 traffic 27 Troyes 40–1 Udine 36 Ulm 40

Utrecht 53–4, 60 Valbelle, Barthélmey de 52 villages 4 Venice 11, 12, 15–16, 19, 71 violence 46–9, 69–70 Wars of Religion (France) 39–40, 50, 55, 56 Weber, Max 18 Wetzlar 44 Whigs 37, 47 women 5–6, 25, 26

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