Abstract
Medieval European urbanization presents a line of continuity between earlier cities and modern European urban systems. Yet, many of the spatial, political and economic features of medieval European cities were particular to the Middle Ages, and subsequently changed over the Early Modern Period and Industrial Revolution. There is a long tradition of demographic studies estimating the population sizes of medieval European cities, and comparative analyses of these data have shed much light on the long-term evolution of urban systems. However, the next step—to systematically relate the population size of these cities to their spatial and socioeconomic characteristics—has seldom been taken. This raises a series of interesting questions, as both modern and ancient cities have been observed to obey area-population relationships predicted by settlement scaling theory. To address these questions, we analyze a new dataset for the settled area and population of 173 European cities from the early fourteenth century to determine the relationship between population and settled area. To interpret this data, we develop two related models that lead to differing predictions regarding the quantitative form of the population-area relationship, depending on the level of social mixing present in these cities. Our empirical estimates of model parameters show a strong densification of cities with city population size, consistent with patterns in contemporary cities. Although social life in medieval Europe was orchestrated by hierarchical institutions (e.g., guilds, church, municipal organizations), our results show no statistically significant influence of these institutions on agglomeration effects. The similarities between the empirical patterns of settlement relating area to population observed here support the hypothesis that cities throughout history share common principles of organization that self-consistently relate their socioeconomic networks to structured urban spaces.
Highlights
Scholars have long debated the role of the medieval city in the long-term economic development of Europe
The predictions and confidence intervals of the two models overlap, so we can only exclude the structured interactions model in the limit of strong segregation. This inhibits statistical hypothesis testing, if hierarchical institutions have a dampening impact on social interaction, we would expect the scaling exponent of the urban system to be systematically closer to 1
We suggest that scaling exponents ≳ 5/6 should be considered candidates for hierarchical institutional dampening effects, and scaling exponents >> 5/6 strong candidates
Summary
Crown, and guilds had a far greater influence on the regulation of social and economic life than in both more recent and contemporary urban systems [4,5,6,7,9,10,14,48,49,50,51,52,53,54] Cast in this light, medieval cities appear structured, corporate societies where social groupings limited social and economic opportunities for individuals and households to a much greater extent than today. Medieval cities appear structured, corporate societies where social groupings limited social and economic opportunities for individuals and households to a much greater extent than today These two contrasting perspectives leave us with an empirical question: Were medieval European cities fundamentally different from industrial and modern cities? These two contrasting perspectives leave us with an empirical question: Were medieval European cities fundamentally different from industrial and modern cities? Or were they part of a general continuum of urban form and function?
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