cities

Europe during the Renaissance developed a thriving urban society. In this era, city life made a break with that of the countryside; the peasants and townspeople had less in common and were less dependent on each other for food, trade, and defense. Renaissance cities served as economic as well as cultural centers, where the new scholarship, art, and literature thrived. The most densely urbanized parts of the continent were northern Italy, the Low Countries (modern Belgium and the Netherlands), southern England, northern France, and southern Germany. The continent's largest urban centers were Venice, Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London. All of these cities had diverse social groups, including a merchant class, a wealthy aristocracy, skilled artisans, and the poor, a class that included migrants from the countryside.

The physical appearance and layout of cities varied greatly from one region to the next. Most had fortifications, such as towers and walls, and gates that were used to control the flow of traffic and closed at night. Within the walls, palaces, cathedrals, and town halls rose highest above the streets and squares. Cities were divided into neighborhoods, most of them identified with a particular economic activity. Some cities had a large population of farmers, who lived within the walls but worked in fields just outside, or else held plots of open, cultivable land at the city's edge.

Within the walls, a broad range of social classes met on the streets. Dress distinguished the rich from the poor, the working class from the men and women of leisure and those connected with the courts. The crowds included itinerant peddlers, foreign merchants and, in university towns, students from far and wide, who formed an often-unruly faction tending to disturbances and disorder. With chaotic, unplanned street systems, Renaissance cities were choked with foot and vehicle traffic, and many city-dwellers lived in crowded, unsafe, and unsanitary homes, built high above the street. In the Middle Ages, these conditions had forced many outside and into the street during the day, making the medieval town a scene of public spectacle and entertainment. In the Renaissance, public life and entertainment began moving indoors, and took the form of musical concerts, plays, dances, gambling houses, and other diversions.

While medieval nobles and princes had ruled feudal towns independently of monarchs, many Renaissance cities had elected assemblies and councils that governed their affairs. The larger city-states in Italy, such as Milan, Florence, and Venice, also had authority over a surrounding region, including smaller cities and towns. These cities established separate authorities to deal with public health, sanitation, fire prevention, public hospitals and charity wards, policing, tax collection, and defense. An important trend in the Renaissance was the loss of autonomy by provinces and their capitals—the old medieval patchwork of small principalities—as national monarchies consolidated their power in capital cities, such as Paris, Madrid, and London. The local princes who had held sway in their autonomous and fortified cities lost both power and importance, while the artisan and merchant classes gained prestige with the establishment of guilds, mutual protection societies, and increase in trade.

Religious, social, political, and professional clubs knit the urban population together. Confraternities were secular associations meant to carry out the works of the church. Political groups formed to contend for power; guilds worked for the interests of artisans, merchants, and artists. Academies brought together noble patrons, scholars, and students, for the exchange of ideas. All of these groups had their bylaws and elected leaders, and carried out a vital function for ordinary individuals, who were powerless to effect change or further their interests on their own.

The Protestant Reformation—the rebellion against the Catholic Church initiated by Martin Luther—had a drastic effect on Renaissance urban life. The Reformation divided many towns along religious lines. Protestants reduced the role of the church in civic life, ended any civic authority of the clergy, ended monastic life, and made worship more a private and personal affair. Catholic regions kept their sense of religious brotherhood, public festivals and holidays, and the regular assembly of Mass. To enforce Catholic orthodoxy, the church established inquisitions in many regions to root out heretics and apostates, enforcing a uniform religious faith with the use of prisons, torture, and public executions.

The cities were nodes of exchange, in a system of trade that was expanding rapidly with the improvement of communication and transportation. Certain cities had industrial specialties, such as textile making in the Low Countries, ironworking in the Rhine valley, and banking in northern Italy. Port cities were centers of maritime industries: shipbuilding, warehousing, sail making, rope making, and provisioning armaments. In some cities professions were performed within certain nationalities and ethnic groups; throughout Europe the Jews were limited in the professions they could follow, often herded into walled ghettoes, or prohibited from cities altogether.

Toward the end of the Renaissance, economic stagnation took hold in southern Europe as trade shifted to the north and costly wars drained treasuries and the cities of men and material. Although Spain drew an immense amount of money from its colonies in the Americas, its ambitious kings bankrupted their realm through costly wars in Italy and the Low Countries.

Heavily taxed and with their productive members levied into the royal armies, the cities of Spain saw their industries and commerce decline. The Thirty Years' War devastated cities in central Europe and Germany, while Venice and Genoa had to deal with the rising Ottoman Empire, whose corsairs and navies were closing the Mediterranean to European merchants altogether.

Nevertheless, the crowded, walled city had become a fixture in the landscape of Europe, and continued to draw immigrants from the countryside. Urban population would continue to increase after the Renaissance, and the city's role as a center of education, the arts, and an economic and cultural exchange between nations would remain.