The Holy Roman Empire

Abstract

Abstract By the later Middle Ages, the German-speaking core of the Holy Roman Empire contained an extremely complex set of urban landscapes, which confront the urban historian as products of varieties of city building, from the Celtic and Roman foundations of ancient times to the early medieval coastal trading entrepôts— Henri Pirenne’s world—along the northern seas to the sites established by the great city-founding dynasties of the high Middle Ages, such as the Zähringen, who founded Berne and Freiburg im Breisgau. The great wave of urban foundations in this part of Europe culminated in the second half of the thirteenth century, when three times as many cities were founded as in the entire era before 1250. The wave then broke off abruptly around 1300, although many new very small towns (Minderstädte) appeared during the following 150 years. Then came the ‘urban trough [Städtetal]’—Heinz Stoob’s term—which coincides with the entire early modern era (1450–1800), and during which very few new cities were founded.The urban landscapes of the German-speaking world in 1800, therefore, had been created by 1300; the later Middle Ages witnessed their internal consolidation and the intensification of urban networks; and the early modern era formed an era of relative stasis with respect to the cities and urban life. This broad pattern is responsible for some of the great peculiarities of urban life in the German-speaking world: the lack, as contrasted with the states of Europe’s western tier, of a centre or several centres; the intense development of small urban centres; and a wide variety of urban social complexions.