City Republics Research Articles

Communal Liberties and Fragmented Sovereignty

The paper’s basic premise is that the fate of a medieval city commune was determined to a large extent by its status in a bigger political system. Moreover, most of European towns and cities had only, to use Charles Tilly’s term, “fragmented sovereignty” when the control over the city was divided between several authorities including the city magistrates and a prince or an emperor. It means that city republics should be studied in their political settings, i.e., through the lens of their relations with the other powers in the region. In the paper, such an “environmental” approach is applied to fifteenth-century Pskov, a typical “fragmented sovereignty”, which was dependent on the Novgorod archbishop and on Russian metropolitan in ecclesiastic affairs and belonged to the Grand Principality of Vladimir and Moscow in secular politics. Medieval Pskov had its own judicial system and legislation resembling that of some German cities and until the 1460s even enjoyed the right to invite and expel princes who had been turned into the city magistrates. But as the emerging Muscovite state tightened its control over North Western Russian lands in the second half of the fifteenth century, Pskov’s liberties were gradually reduced. The fate of Pskov finally absorbed by the Muscovite monarchy in 1510 was not unique: the Russian city followed the path of many other communes in different parts of Europe where emerging early modern sovereign states put an end to local autonomies and various “fragmented sovereignties”.

Hanseatic and Russian Data

The article is a study of the two collective political bodies of medieval Novgorod – the veche (popular assembly) and the so called “Council of Lords.” The basis of research is mostly the Hanseatic documents in Middle Low German and Latin which have been underestimated until now. However, they are often more trustworthy than narrative sources with their literary clichés and ideological biases. Both Russian and Hanseatic sources indicate that the veche was a real political institution which was open to all townsmen enjoying full rights regardless of social status. On the other hand, the sources give no grounds to suggest the rural population’s involvement in the Novgorodian veche. The author also argues that a governmental council did really exist in medieval Novgorod. There is some evidence of it in Hanseatic sources of the 14–15th centuries. However, no traces of its existence before the 14th century can be discovered. The council included the highest magistrates of the Novgorodian republic and was referred to in Hanseatic documents as de heren (gospodá). Finally the author comes to the conclusion that the Novgorodian medieval polity should be studied in the broader context of European medieval city republics.

La necrópolis musulmana de Valdeherrera (Calatayud, Zaragoza): nuevos datos cronológicos sobre la fundación de Calatayud

One of the news more importantly of recent research project in Valdeherrera site has been the discovery of a Muslim necropolis; this maqbara dated in emiral period is located between the remains of the Celtiberian-Roman Republican city existing in the place. Given the total absence of Islamic materials here, this discover has marked a key in the historical investigation of the Islamic occupation of Qal’at Ayyub’s territory and origin, confirming the Muslim written sources. In this work we not aim to provide an overview or a comprehensive study of the discovered maqbara; the archaeological work continues and has not yet been possible to determine its extent. The ultimate goal is to publicize this discovery and provide a chronological sequence to fill the information gap existing at the moment of the start of the Arab presence in the middle valley of Jalon, where Qal’at Ayyud city played an important role throughout the Middle Age.

Reintroducing the emperor and repositioning the city republics in the ‘republican’ thought of the rhetorician Boncompagno da Signa

This article reconsiders the political thought of Boncompagno da Signa in the light of his overlooked praise for the Holy Roman Emperor and his equally overlooked criticism of the city republics. It argues that, rather than just supporting the city republics, he addressed kingship, backing constitutional monarchy and the rule of law. This is contextualized in the aftermath of the peace of Constance, and similarities with the views of contemporary jurists are examined, underlining neglected contractual aspects in their theories of government and the use of the ius Italicum to justify the prerogatives of the Italian cities within the Empire. Finally, connections with the sixth canto of Dante's Purgatory are emphasized.

Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity

Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity

Is Access to Food a Public Good? Meat Provisioning in Early New York City, 1790–1820

Taking New York as a case study, this article examines how well Early Republican city dwellers were provisioned with meat. It asks how the availability of supplies, and their distribution through a tightly regulated network of municipal marketplaces, affected the living standards of urban residents. The discussion centers on quantity, distribution, and quality. First, new meat consumption estimates document that New Yorkers enjoyed abundant meat supplies by any historical comparison. Second, geographic information system (GIS) analysis shows that the municipal market system fulfilled its mandate to distribute the city’s plentiful meat and other fresh food supplies to residents of all neighborhoods. And third, this article argues that the public market system played a central role in enforcing quality while also promoting egalitarian principles in citizens’ access to food. Overall, New Yorkers were well provisioned with meat not only thanks to sufficiently expanding supplies but also because they relied on a well-run municipal infrastructure of provisioning.

Stadsvernieuwing en utopie in Brussel : van ideaal naar realiseerbaar ?

Urban projects are central to contemporary urban regeneration and urban visioning/imagining. However, the relationship between vision and the realisation of projects remains problematic. In most of the discipline of urban planning in Brussels -and thus part of the built environment- the vision remains largely invisible, opaque or contradictory. In this article we intend to clarify the relationship between the visionary aims and the actual design of urban spaces. A first focus lays on the imagining process through the development of an analytical framework to qualify and legitimize urban projects. Utopia and heterotopia will be used to coin the relationship between the abstract character of the impossible and more pragmatic elements of a good urban project and a powerful urban vision. The second objective of the article is an analysis of interfaces/connections between different concepts and their use in practices. These connections can be described by looking at three interfaces in the chain: utopia- heterotopia-vision-project. Three Brussels cases are evaluated on their qualitative characteristics of a good urban project as described in The century of the city. City republics and grid cities, the Flemish White Paper for Urban Policy (Boudry et al., 2003), the subject visioning process, heterotopian characteristics and underlying utopian potential. Mutual comparison of these cases showed that if an urban project responds to more qualitative criteria of a good urban project, the higher its utopian potential is. One of the most remarkable and challenging conclusions is that concepts like utopia and heterotopia comport strong elements to deploy a sustainable and powerful vision on urban (renewal) projects in Brussels. Further research includes fine tuning of these turning points and a more elaborate application on more cases from the international development zones-plan proposed by the Brussels Capital Region.

The Experience of Crusading: 1. Western Approaches ed. by Marcus Bull, Norman Housley (review)

REVIEWS 222 The Experience of Crusading: 1. Western Approaches, ed. Marcus Bull and Norman Housley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003) xvi + 307 pp. In the first of a two-volume Festschrift in honor of Jonathan Riley-Smith the editors, Marcus Bull and Norman Housley, unite seventeen essays under the subtitle Western Approaches. Part of the appeal of this volume lies in Bull and Housley’s broad interpretation of their theme: Alongside detailed analysis of, for example, an account of the Second Crusade by one of its participants, King Louis VII’s chaplain, Odo of Deuil, the reader also finds an exploration of approaches to the First Crusade amongst post-World War II European and American novelists. Like its sister volume, Defining the Crusader Kingdom,10 Western Approaches divides its content between four sections, in this case: The crusades and crusading, The Catholic Church and the crusade, The military orders, and Retrospective. The first of these sections is preceded by an informative , albeit brief, appreciation of its dedicatee’s substantial contribution to the study of crusading and the military orders, drawing particular attention to Riley -Smith’s extensive work concerned with the Hospitallers and the practice of sacred violence. The crusades and crusading begins with Marcus Bull’s own contribution to the volume. This forms a neat link with the introductory appreciation, focusing as it does upon a key area of Riley-Smith’s own work, the motivations of the first crusaders. The use of accounts of miracles to cast light on western perceptions of both Jerusalem and Muslims is certainly an interesting approach. It is, therefore, a pity that Bull chose to confine his actual analysis of these perceptions to the last few pages of an article that is rather weighed down by a lengthy theoretical introduction. The essay that follows is linked to Bull’s by its use of an account involving miracles, that of the translation of Saint Vincent’s relics. Giles Constable uses this material to suggest that contemporaries, at least those in twelfth-century Portugal, considered the conquest of Lisbon to be an integral part of the Second Crusade. Constable clearly touches upon an important topic, the Muslim presence in Spain and its relationship with the crusade movement, yet the brevity of his article, and the fact that this is the only contribution in the volume devoted to the Iberian peninsula, mean this topic is not explored in as much depth as might have been desirable. In the second editorial contribution to this volume, Norman Housley offers a fascinating explanation for the decline in large-scale crusading expeditions after the thirteenth century. He suggests that contemporary awareness of the cost of crusading played a key role in the decline in enthusiasm for the general passage and an increased preference for the passagium particulare. Housley suggests that contemporaries found a large-scale expedition something invariably difficult to price, and so frequently exhibited a preference for planning small-scale expeditions which could be priced with greater accuracy. Housley’s conclusion, “a strengthening of the argument that in this period, as earlier, few people contemplated crusading for the sake of their financial well-being” (59), 10 The Experience of Crusading: 2. Defining the Crusader Kingdom, ed. Peter Edbury and Jonathan Phillips (Cambridge 2003). REVIEWS 223 is also an apt introduction to Christopher Marshall’s exploration of the motivations that lay behind the involvement of the Italian city republics in the First Crusade and its immediate aftermath. Marshall offers a convincing refutation of the oft-repeated assumption that Italian involvement in this expedition was largely motivated by financial considerations. He shows clearly that while motives for participation were always mixed, both Italians and other participants on the First Crusade considered the former’s motivations to extend beyond the mercantile. Although Marshall is undoubtedly correct to point out that historians need to take account of genuine spiritual motivations and to avoid the assumption that Italian interest in the crusade stemmed entirely from a desire to establish a dominance over trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, one potential problem with his argument lies in his treatment of his sources: It is almost certainly worth exploring the motivations of Italian chroniclers before assuming that...

Philemon Holland's Livy: Peritexts and Contexts

Philemon Holland’s Livy of 1600 was the first in a series of unabridged translations of canonical Latin works that made him, in Thomas Fuller’s famous phrase, ‘the translator general in his age’. It is slightly surprising how little critical attention his work has received, considering his voluminous output and the frequency with which he is cited as bringing Latin and Greek texts to a wider audience. This paper will explore the significance of Holland’s first published translation, Livy’s Roman History. What did it mean to translate Livy’s History of Rome at this time? Livy was a complex writer who evoked a multi-faceted response in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, a response I examine through the peritexts and contexts of the translation. By peritexts, I mean dedicatory epistles, the index of speeches, the table of consuls, and Holland’s presentations of the chronology and the topography of Rome. By contexts, I mean both other works published in England at around the same time, and the political circumstances in late Elizabethan England. Through these we can see that Holland’s translation was part of a nexus of controversies over the interpretation of Livy. Livy’s History of Rome, generally known as Ab Urbe Condita, had originally consisted of 142 Books. Of these, it seems only the first and third ‘decades’ were known by the early second millennium. As with so much else in the Renaissance, the revival began with Petrarch, whose enthusiasm for Livy drove him to hunt for new manuscripts. He was able to take a copy of the third decade from a manuscript at Chartres Cathedral; he also sought out and compared two versions of the first decade from the most divergent traditions.1 Livy was popular in the Italian city republics, as he depicted the rise of the most successful city

Dos modelos de implantación urbana romanorrepublicana en el valle medio del Ebro: las ciudades de La Cabañeta y La Corona

This paper faces the study of two Roman republican cities, and also comments their functions. These cities are both established by the Ebro river and they are separated only from a few km. Also, they were founded in second century B.C., and destroyed during the Sertorian Wars; but their functions seem to have been different: La Corona could have been destined for being inhabited by Iberians and La Cabaneta, maybe ancient Castra Aelia, to receive an important amount of Italic people. So, we find two different models of Roman urban setting in the middle Ebro's Valley during republican period. Though, this policy of territorial control keeps clipped in Sertorian Wars.

La pensée de Spinoza et la naissance de l'intellectuel démocratique dans la France du tournant du siècle

The creation of La Revue de métaphysique et de morale (The Review of Metaphysics and Ethics) in 1893 indicated a turning-point of philosophy in France. The critical abilities of this philosophical trend got confirmation during the « affaire Dreyfus », since the main leaders of the publication committed themselves as philosophers in the republican city. By demonstrating that scientific knowledge could give rise to a criticism of the political power, Léon Brunschvicg, Élie Halévy ou Xavier Léon contributed to make the commitment for Dreyfus the main part of the progress of democracy. On this occasion, the question of their Jewish identity was quickly overtaken. The philosophical option of the RMM allowed to teach civic freedom following intellectual freedom. This encounter of the purest thinking and the most political commitment is enlightened by the figure of Spinoza as important for the training of young philosophers as for the commitment for Dreyfus. The life and the philosophy of Spinoza help explaining the birth of the democratic thinking man.

Unscrambling Allende's "Dos palabras": The Self, the Immigrant/Writer, and Social Justice

I lost the world where I belonged. Now I don't belong anywhere.--Isabel Allende (Cheever) This paper rose out of a request. In 1996, for five and a half months, I worked as a resource person and teacher at Fayetteville-Manlius High School, a prestigious public school on the outskirts of Syracuse, New York. One of our Spanish teachers found out that Isabel Allende was coming to town to give a lecture. Concerned about the students' provincialism in not knowing who Isabel Allende was, she proposed that all advanced Spanish, English, Social Studies, and History classes at the school read one of Allende's short stories from Eva Luna, Dos palabras, in its English translation, and that the students be encouraged to attend the lecture by Allende in a plush conference hall in downtown Syracuse at $18 a ticket. Mind you, even in this plush neighborhood where the school is located, not too many students were eager to pay the fee to hear a woman they had never heard of. So the teacher had another brilliant idea: I would give a lecture to the whole school on Isabel Allende as a sort of pep rally to get them motivated to attend the lecture. To make a long story short, the school bureaucracy intervened to explain how it was impossible for me to give a single lecture on Allende. So a scheme was set up by which I would scramble myself, or as we say at home, become a revoltillo. I was to give the same lecture for seven out of the eight periods that comprised the school day. As it turned out, I saw over 450 students on that day, and in having to repeat myself, my jokes, my questions, over and over again, I came to realize that the story of Dos palabras was like one of those programs on TV for which the signal is scrambled so we cannot watch it without subscribing to that particular channel or paying our cable TV bill. Yes, I'll answer your question. Most of my papers in academia are weird and shocking, but the idea of Allende playing the part of a cable TV company is one that was clear to me in this reading. It was probably because of my reading being weird that quite a number of students decided to dish out the $18 and go see Allende in person in a hall packed with over 2,000 people from a staunch conservative, Republican city in upstate New York. I began my lecture/reading by explaining that in order to understand the historical underpinnings of the stories of Allende from Eva Luna, one has to understand the plight of the poor and indigenous people in Chile. To exemplify this, I explained that the main character in Dos palabras was born into a family so miserable that until she was twelve years old, all she could do was to try to survive hunger and fatigue. I explained that there is a high mortality rate among infants in Chile (I explained that that is so in the US, too). At one time, Belisa, the main character, had to bury four of her brothers. It is precisely her fear of dying that drives her to get away and run to the coastal lands, away from her place of birth. It is there that Belisa learns that there is something called words--reading, writing--in the world. Belisa learns to read because, as she explains, words are not owned by any one person, as is the case with land. I explained to my young audience that if you are not a landowner in Latin America, the next best thing, if you are an upwardly mobile privileged person, is to embark on a quest for wealth, to engage in commerce. Belisa, although not privileged, finds a second reality in learning about words: she can trade and do commerce with them. I explained to the students that in many Latin American countries, people who can read establish themselves in public places, even on the streets, ready to write a letter, a document, a love poem, for a fee. This trade has been vividly portrayed in the film Central Station. (1) Belisa had a tent with which she established herself at fairs to offer her services just like the main female character in the film. …

Tracheostomy and the Spanish Civil War

As a Catalan and having a special interest in the subject, I agree with Dr Coni (March 2002 JRSM1) that most of the medical advances were made by the Republicans rather than the Nationalists. As he says, this was partly because of the more liberal atmosphere of the big Republican cities. Also the looser organization of their Medical Corps may have been more conducive to the development of new ideas. One topic not specifically mentioned by Dr Coni is management of the compromised airway and the performance of emergency tracheostomies. Last summer, I got hold of an excellent book entitled Memories d'un Cirurgia (Memoirs of a Surgeon)2, written by the retired Catalan surgeon Moises Broggi who served in the International Brigades in one of the mobile hospitals. Before the Civil War he was one of the most promising young surgeons in Catalunya; afterwards he decided to stay in Spain but was denied all privileges in one of the university hospitals in Barcelona and could only practise privately for the rest of his professional career. His book, written in a very plain and simple style, became one of the best-sellers in the Catalan language in 2001. In it he describes his experience as a surgeon from 1936 to 1939 with the International Brigades from Brunete to Guadarrama, Belchite, Teruel and finally to the Battle of the Ebro. During the Battle of Belchite they noticed that casualties with severe facial injuries and fractures were dying shortly after triage, whilst waiting on the stretcher for definitive treatment. The deaths were usually due to aspiration of blood into the airway, so they decided to change their practice and perform emergency tracheostomies as initial action. This gave them the opportunity to suction the airway contents and rapidly restore respiration. After that, they stopped the haemorrhage and stabilized the patient, who could then wait to have his fractures reduced and debridement performed. This simple management sequence, resembling current methods of resuscitation, saved many lives during the subsequent battles of the Civil War and was adopted by Allied surgeons during the Second World War. It is said that, for various reasons, we had to wait more than 60 years before the medical heroes in Spain received proper recognition.

Moneta and the Monuments: Coinage and Politics in Republican Rome

The mint of Republican Rome was located on the Capitol somewhere in the vicinity of the temple of Juno Moneta. This is one of the best known but perhaps worst attested pieces of topographical information concerning the Republican city of Rome. The evidence that the coins of the Roman Republic were made there is exiguous to say the least. Indeed, there are only two literary sources that explicitly site the mint at Juno Moneta's temple. The first is Livy's account of the condemnation and execution of M. Manlius Capitolinus, the hero who had previously saved the Capitol from assault by the Gauls. Livy mentions that the people passed a law to the effect that no patrician would thereafter be permitted to live on the Capitol or the Arx, for Manlius' house had stood on the site where, Livy says, now stands the aedes atque officina Monetae, the temple and the workshop of Moneta. The second is contained in the Suda (s.v. Μονήτα), in a passage to be discussed below. These are the sole threads of evidence on which the location of the mint of Republican Rome hangs. Nevertheless, despite an attempt to impugn Livy's reputation for topographical accuracy, they should suffice.

Reappraising Republican China. Edited by Frederic WakemanJr. and Richard Louis Edmonds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. $24.95.

The State of Studies on Republican China State and Society in Early Republican Politics, 191218 Reflections on China's Late 19th and Early 20th-Century Economy Civil Society and Urban Change in Republican China The Evolution of Republican Government The Military in the Republic Shanghai Modernity: Commerce and Culture in a Republican City A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism The Internationalization of China: Foreign Relations at Home and Abroad in the Republican Era

Urban Government and the Rise of the French City: Five Municipalities in the Nineteenth Century

Acknowledgements Preface Introduction From City Republic to Republican Cities: the Struggle for Municipal Democracy City Financing: the Octrois From Patronage to Civil Service: the City Employees Police and Fire Services Public Schools The Primary Schools of Enlightened Men: the Municipal Theaters Public Health Municipal Welfare Urban Utilities and Municipalization Reorganizing Urban Space Conclusion Index

Shanghai Modernity: Commerce and Culture in a Republican City

One of the most active areas of research in recent years concerns the urban history of Shanghai in the Republican period. Beginning in the 1980s, scholars have gone beyond an overview of Shanghai's rise as China's leading metropolis in the hundred years after the Opium War (1839–42), and produced richly contextualized analyses on the various aspects of the city's history and society.

The intellectual basis of right‐wing anti‐partyism

AbstractThis paper shows the long and prestigious intellectual tradition of anti‐party arguments. Even before political parties emerged as unitary political actors, there were already well‐developed arguments with which to express hostility towards them. The emphasis on unity and harmony in Western civilization moulded political thought. While this cultural framework was broken in the brief but extraordinarily powerful experience of the Medieval Italian Republican Cities, the acceptance of organized dissent failed to emerge. Instead, this experience left the vivid memory of the danger of factionalism. In eighteenth century France, both revolutionaries and counter‐revolutionaries viewed parties as political maladies, and nineteenth century liberalism produced only a diffident defence of parties. At the end of the nineteenth century, hostility towards parties was nurtured in both Germany and France by elevating the ideals of the State and of the Nation. Italian and German fascists drew on and developed these philosophical anti‐party traditions in the 1920s and 1930s. Since 1945, however, few anti‐party parties have developed their own detailed or comprehensive philosophical critiques of parties; the Italian MSI is a notable exception.

The main directions of health care reform in the Republic of Mari El

In 1989-1992 in accordance with the recommendations of the Ministry of Health of the USSR, medical institutions of the Republic of Mari El made the transition to new business conditions. During the implementation of the Regulations on the new economic mechanism, the principles of pricing and recommendations for calculating tariffs for medical services, the conditions for budget financing of healthcare institutions in cities and districts according to differentiated gender and age standards, the system of payment by central district hospitals for consultative and diagnostic care to patients in republican and Yoshkar-Ola city hospitals and dispensaries.

The Road from Athens

The Road from Athens Clifford Orwin (bio) Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993 edited by John Dunn. Cambridge University Press, 1992. 290 pp. This collection of essays commemorates the 2500th anniversary of Kleisthenes' democratic reforms at Athens. The typical chapter surveys the career of democracy in this or that period or region. The authors write in the brisk style appropriate to those who must cover much ground in few words. Mindful of the needs of the general reader, they try to provide all essential facts as well as an interpretation of them. The challenge is to avoid foundering under the sheer weight of data. (The prize in this regard belongs to Charles S. Maier for his "Democracy Since the French Revolution," an elegant sweep through 20 tumultuous decades.) In addition to treatments of past epochs, the book offers compelling analyses by Neil Harding of "The Marxist-Leninist Detour," by Neal Ascherson of its East European aftermath, and by Sunil Khilnani of democracy in India. Each of the essays calls out to be treated on its own terms: sadly, no reviewer is likely to command either the space or the competence to do justice to all of them. Of three chapters on Greek democracy, the most challenging is that of Cynthia Farrar, "Ancient Greek Political Theory as a Response to Democracy." Tracing the whole course of "political theory" from the tragedians onward, she offers an implicit defense of democracy against its ancient critics, notably Plato and Aristotle. Her rich argument, which defies brief summary, powerfully conveys the uniquely engaging and exhilarating character of Greek democracy, and offers a lucid account of the distinctiveness of the political. Yet she never rebuts the insight [End Page 140] that while this democracy claimed to achieve the good of all, it in fact resembled all other regimes in entrenching the rule of some over others. She emphasizes that Athenian democracy purported to reconcile the good of the city as a whole with the whole good of each citizen, a proud and ambitious claim exposed to many difficulties. The question is whether Plato and Aristotle's critiques of democracy did not arise from more profound reflection on these difficulties than any offered by democracy's advocates. There is also the question of whether Plato and Aristotle, whatever their reservations about democracy, were as opposed to it in practice as Farrar takes them to have been. She follows most scholars in overlooking the conscious utopianism or irony of their alleged solutions to the political problem ("solutions" that she perceptively describes as demanding the abolition of politics). Because she ignores the philosophers' indications that this is neither possible nor desirable, she pays less attention than she might have to their analyses of actual political life (including actual democracy). She fails to convey their Churchillian acceptance of moderate democracy as the worst practical alternative save for all the others. She is almost silent about Aristotle's advocacy of "polity," a version of majority rule that he presents as the best generally practicable regime. Lastly, while she rightly stresses the skepticism of these philosophers concerning the claims of democracy to define the best regime, she fails to note that they recognized it to be the regime most tolerant of philosophy itself. If, however, there is much in Farrar's chapter that I find contestable, it deserves praise (and, even better, study) for its provocative treatments of a wide range of thinkers, its subtle defense of ancient democracy, and its sophisticated reflections on the gap which separates that regime from its modern counterpart. The early modern period is treated by Quentin Skinner ("The Italian City Republics") and David Wootton ("The Levellers"), who pave the way for Gordon Wood and Bianca Maria Fontana on the American and French revolutions, respectively. Skinner argues that the greatest contribution of the Italian communes was to the dissemination of a lofty notion of the ends of communal life. He fails to note that the semblance of a return to Roman models held a highly specific appeal for men emerging from the Middle Ages—that of the bracing this-worldliness of pagan Rome. By the same token, Skinner abstracts from what is most significant...