Fragmented Cities in the Later Middle Ages: Italy and the Near East Compared

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates cities and their political cultures in Italy and the Near East in the later Middle Ages. Cities in these two regions have traditionally been viewed in diverging ways. European cities have been understood as unitary entities which stood out on account of their urban governments and the political order of which foreshadowed the rise of modern states. The absence of comparable institutions has meant that Near Eastern cities have often been seen as very unlike their European counterparts. Focusing on the political cultures of Damascus and Bologna in the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries, this article suggests that a different understanding of cities is necessary. Partly as a result of demographic growth and the breakdown of larger political structures in earlier centuries, these cities can be understood as polycentric arenas in which public life took place around multiple units of political organisation which ranged from neighbourhoods to parties. Conflicts, including civil war and revolt, were an ordinary part of their political cultures: they were expressive of fragmentation, but equally of a shared public arena in which contending groups were stake-holders.As arenas, cities on either side of the Mediterranean world gave rise to a distinctive form of political order. They did not foreshadow forms of order associated with the modern state and, particularly in the Mediterranean regions under analysis here, often remained among its greatest obstacles.