Cityscapes

These are images of early modern cities, starting with two small German cities in around 1700. Note the walls around each, and how sharply they divided city from countryside; cities did not have the rings of suburbs that we're accustomed to today. As we discussed in class, city walls mattered. Europe usually had wars going throughout our period, and almost all cities (set as they were along key lines of transportation) had military as well as economic significance. After European armies started using artillery, a little before 1500, city walls had to be carefully engineered—they had be thick enough to resist bombardment, and they had to include angles allowing defenders to fire on attackers. The corollary to military effectiveness was population density: rebuilding city walls was very expensive, so cities grew inward rather than outward, filling in as many open spaces as possible. The walls had another function, as a mechanism of urban policing. The authorities could control movement in and out of their cities (usually the gates were closed at night), adding to contemporaries' belief that cities were safety zones in a frequently violent world.




Even much bigger cities were carefully fortified. The map shows Paris in 1615, when it was biggest city in Europe. Again, fields started right outside the city gates, but in this case population pressure did produce in suburbanization; notice the development shown in the upper right of the map. Notice also the prominence of the city's public buildings, true in any early modern city, but especially in great capitals like Paris. These included churches (note the cathedral complex on the island in the middle of the city); law courts (taking up the other end of the island); and the immense royal palace complex near the river, at the bottom of the map (the Louvre and Tuilleries palaces).


A great deal of money went into these public buildings; they were meant to display the grandeur of the city itself and of its governing institutions. Here's a nineteenth-century drawing of the main courthouse in Rouen, a French provincial city (the building was constructed early in the sixteenth century, in the "flamboyant gothic" style of the late Middle Ages).



Finally, three street scenes from the same city, conveying a sense of what most seventeenth-century city houses would have been like: three or four stories high, built of wood and plaster, with shops on the ground floor. Because space was at a premium and wheeled traffic infrequent, streets tended to be narrow; that would begin to change after 1600.