656 ANNUAL REPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



city and are an indirect proof of the village origin of the dwellers 

 there.^ 



Among ancient peoples war was often a chronic condition and 

 strifes occurred even within the cities. In Kome rivalries between 

 the several quarters led Mommsen to say that the city was an assem- 

 blage of small urban communities rather than a city aggregated in a 

 single body. Each part of the city was fortified as much against 

 other parts as agamst the common enemy. In Babylon temples and 

 palaces each formed a fortress within the city. At Kheinfelden 

 strifes were frequent between the city and the chateau.^ 



II. CITIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 



Medieval Europe never had cities as great as those of antiquity. 

 The population was more widely scattered and the causes of concen- 

 tration which prevailed in the nineteenth century did not yet exist. 

 Up to the year 1400, Cologne and Lubeck, in Germany, alone exceeded 

 about 30,000 inhabitants. Burckliardt gives 90,000 citizens to 

 Florence in 1338 and 190,000 to Venice in 1422, although M. de Foville 

 thinks those figures are too great. Schmoller estimates 50,000 to 

 60,000 inhabitants in Bruges and Gand toward the end of the Middle 

 Ages, and Antwerp, in the sixteenth century, had about 200,000 

 population. England for a long period had few cities. In 1377 

 London numbered 30,000 to 40,000, York 11,000, Bristol, 9,500, 

 Coventry 7,000, and at the end of the seventeenth century only two 

 provincial cities, Norwich and Bristol, approached 30,000 inhabitants, 

 the others remaining below 10,000. 



As to-day in certain new countries, such as Australia and Argentina, 

 so the cities of antiquity were formed of ' 'heads disproportioned to the 

 bodies," and the rural element was not necessarily important. But 

 this lack of equilibrium in the "social body" did not exist in the Mid- 

 dle Ages, the land commenced to be colonized and improved; slavery 

 no longer existed, and serfdom attached to the land. The difficulty 

 of communication checked the currents of immigration, formerly 

 rendered easy by the sea. The market, during the greater part of 

 that period, was the nucleus of the city, except when it had its origin 

 in some towns of the Gauls, or from some Roman communities. In 

 many cases the urban right was one of the forms of royal or seignioral 

 concessions for markets and it served to keep the population in a 

 place granted. Bruges, Gand, Tournai, Valenciennes, etc., are 

 purely economic creations from market centers.^ 



1 Reii6 Maunier. L'origine et la fonction 6conomique des villes. ifctude de morphologic sociale. Paris, 

 Girard et Bri&re, 1910, p. 73-80. 



» Ren6 Maunier. Op. cit., p. 123. 



s Of. J. Flach, Les origines de I'ancienne France, vol. 2, p. 301-350. Georges Bourgin, Les origines 

 urbaines du moyen &ge. Revue de synthase historique, December, 1903. 



